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Adrien Baillet, an erudite priest who was librarian and preceptor in the house of the distinguished magistrate Chrétien-Fran¸ois de Lamoignon from 1680 till the time of his death in 1706, was one of the most prolific writers of his time. A Cartesian and a Jansenist, the author of substantial biographies and histories, voluminous critical compendiums on both secular and theological subjects, and provocative religious treatises, and the center of some of the stormiest quarrels of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he is today unknown to nearly everyone except specialists in his period. Many of the latter, moreover, are acquainted only with his massive biography of Descartes (1691) and his nine volume compendium Jugemens des scavans (1684–1686), an incomplete composition calculated to evaluate the principal works composed in all fields of human endeavor since earliest times as well as the judgments of their critics. The present study concerns one of the most obscure and at the same time most explosive of Baillet's works, his treatise on the cult of the Virgin Mary. |
