How does the use of others' words in the mode of quotation relate to thought and the form of skeptical discourse in late Renaissance and early Enlightenment France?

Montaigne's emprunts of humanist scholarship are central to the poetics of his Essais; his characteristic peinture de passage orchestrates a change of voices within his great humanist self-portrait. Quotation - avant la lettre, since Montaigne does not yet have the term or the convention - becomes the formal device of a skeptical writing that seeks to keep things in abeyance. Bayle takes up this technique in his "Armory of Enlightenment" in order to reshape it with the means of bibliographical meticulousness; once conceptualized, quotation becomes the critical modus operandi of a skeptical disruption of the historical stock of the philosophical tradition (Translation of the cover text).

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