Resumen de Jean Hardouin: the antiquary as pariah
The writer discusses antiquarian Jean Hardouin's role as pariah within the larger European intellectual society of the late 16th to early 18th centuries—the “Republic of Letters.” Hardouin was a critic and scholar who concluded, for numerous reasons, that most of the ancient texts were forgeries. He attacked the entire written record, Western and non-Western alike. He took his argument so far that he reduced it to absurdity, and hence seemed to call the whole antiquarian enterprise into question. The defeat of Hardouin's extreme historical and literary Pyrrhonism exemplifies the high quality and sophistication of the conflict resolution techniques that the Republic of Letters had developed. The citizens of the Republic of Letters could combine to condemn individuals for invented or real violations of imagined and real traditions, and even send them into a kind of exile, as they did with Hardouin.
