Antoine Banier

[3] In his Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l'histoire (1711, recast in dialogue form in 1715, enthusiastically received[4] and often reprinted)[5] he offered a frankly Euhemerist reading of the origins of Greek mythology, seen as the gradually deified accounts of actual personages (see Euhemerism).

[12] In the ambitious Histoire générale des cérémonies, moeurs, et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, in seven volumes (Paris, 1741), for which the engravings had been supplied by the late Bernard Picart, Banier and his collaborator, the abbé Jean-Baptiste Le Mascrier, aimed to describe all religions of the known world, their origins and doctrines and especially their rites: "It reflects in content and tone the learning, urbanity and self-confidence of the Catholic Church of the Ancien Régime," the producers of a lavish modern facsimile have termed it.

[13] In the work, Banier and Le Mascrier were in fact revising and enlarging an earlier Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, which had been compiled by the satirical Huguenot writer and printer, Jean-Frédéric Bernard (died 1752) and printed from the safety of Amsterdam, in 1723-24.

Étienne de Jouy (born in 1764) recalled in 1815 I remember that, in my earliest youth, the book I loved the most, after Robinson Crusoe, was that of the abbé Banier, where he displays, where he explains these ingenious emblems[16] by means of which the Ancients gave, so to speak, a soul to all beings, a body to all thoughts.

[17]In 1820 his work (as abridged by Abbe Tressan) was translated into English by Frances Arabella Rowden, an educator who, according to Mary Russell Mitford, was not only a poet, but "had a knack of making poetesses of her pupils".