Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2d ago
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But there's at least one good thing that one can say about this development.
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It does have a long pedigree.
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The first great example of the genre already came at the turn of the eighteenth century, Pierre Bert's historical and critical dictionary.
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He was, of course, put up to it by his publisher.
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The idea was to cash in on the popularity of another historical dictionary by Louis Moreri, by putting out a tone that would correct its mistakes.
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Bale circulated a prepublication version to colleagues, including Leibniz, who complained about all the complaining.
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Rather than itemizing errors, Bale should focus on conveying truths.
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Taking the point, Bell expanded the project into something far more ambitious.
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A first edition in two volumes would appear in sixteen ninety six, followed by further editions in seventeen oh two and seventeen twenty.
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That final version was posthumous.
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Bale already died in seventeen oh six.
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But it's the most complete expression of his vision, containing no fewer than two thousand thirty five entries, spread across four volumes.
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That's a big number, but it probably doesn't convey the full scope of this monumental piece of scholarship.
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When I say entry, you're probably imagining something along the lines of a short paragraph, which isn't entirely misleading, because each entry does indeed include a brief main text that supplies the reader with basic information about the topic, which is usually a historical person.
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But that's only the beginning.
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Each main entry has below it remarks printed in smaller typeface, and there are further brief bits of information in the margins.
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You'll perhaps know Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that the history of philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato.
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Well, Bale's dictionary is history and philosophy in the form of footnotes, with much of the intellectual action happening in the various remarks.
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To make things yet more complex, Bale made free use of cross-references between articles, sending sufficiently determined readers through a maze-like process of comparisons and contextualizations, which often raise questions about his intent as an author.
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As Bael expert Mara van der Loot puts it, the resulting work is easy to browse, challenging to read, and difficult to study.
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Showing 741–760 of 1,322 · page 38 of 67
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