Theatrum criticum. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, Pierre Bayle and the encyclopaedic genealogies of Enlightened scepticism

In this essay, I turn to the metaphor of the theatre that not only appears in the title of Feijoo's Teatro critico universal, but which was also adduced by Pierre Bayle in the Projet et fragments d'un dictionnaire historique. As I will show, the metaphor of the theatre itself needs to be subjected to critical reflection as it involves other and more semantic dimensions than we usually associate today. Granted, in the early modern period, the metaphor of the theatre could be and was employed in a host of various contexts and to a myriad of ends. Yet the combination of theatre and error, as it occurs in both Bayle and Feijoo, warrants closer inspection. I show how Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum vitae humanae, which is the text that Bayle claims to model his Dictionary on, introduces a notion of the theatre that is not focused on the stage but on the auditorium. This is significant for both Bayle's and Feijoo's writing strategies as it points to the management of vast bodies of knowledge, and ultimately, the citationality of both projects. At the same time, it positions the reader opposite traditional wisdom and thus prepares a space for the emerging mode of critique - by some characterised as scepticism - that informs both authors' projects.