Works
His works were very numerous. In some of them he took a strong critical line with mythological and counterfeit material current as fact in the early modern period. This brought him the admiration of major Enlightenment intellectuals. Jonathan Israel writes:
...the real work of discrediting and disposing of the Oracula Sibyllina, Chaldean chronicles, and Orphic hymns, ... seemingly only began, as Diderot noted in 1751, in the 1650s when the Huguenot scholar David Blondel ... published his treatise on the Oracula in Amsterdam.
In his dissertation on Pope Joan (1647), he came to the conclusion, now generally accepted, that the story is a myth. Edward Gibbon wrote this in The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire:
She was annihilated by two learned protestants, Blondel and Bayle
Indignation against him on account of this book came from Protestant polemicists.
His 1628 book against Francisco Torres conclusively demonstrated that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were a very learned forgery. This work was praised by Voltaire, writing in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. Blondel tracked down sources actually used by the Pseudo-Isidore. Later scholarship has sustained his conclusions.
In a work written as he was going blind, he struck back against Jean-Jacques Chifflet, who had written in favour of the Spanish royal family's genealogical claims, over those of the French kings. In 1655 he produced an anthology of extracts arguing for Protestant eirenicism
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The discovery of Pennsylvania’s coal and iron was the deathblow to Allaire. The works were moved to Pennsylvania so hurriedly that for years pianos and the larger pieces of furniture stood in the deserted houses.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;Mis then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.”
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“I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)