Introduction: Europe as a Religious Melting Pot

Ethnographic knowledge is not merely used rhetorically or eruditely in the work of Pierre Bayle. Travel narratives describing non-Christian religions and cultures are the touchstone required for any claim that presents itself as genuinely universal in the seventeenth century. At the same time, they serve to demonstrate the particularity and relativity of many doctrines held to be universal. Many of Bayle’s doctrines arise from the intellectual encounter between Christian doctrines and traditions foreign to Christianity. The knowledge of the other, the strange, the different is the conditio sine qua non that allows one to distance oneself from one's own traditions and values, a distance that is at the very origin of the philosophical thought that the Greeks already showcased.