The story
In 1580 Michel de Montaigne, a French nobleman, published two books of Essais in Bordeaux. The word essai means a trial or attempt, and that is what the pieces are: short, wandering meditations on subjects such as friendship, idleness, cannibals, thumbs, fear, books and death. Montaigne kept revising and adding to them, and a third book and a heavily expanded edition followed in 1588.
Montaigne had retired from his post as a magistrate in Bordeaux in 1571 and withdrew to the tower library of his estate, where Latin sayings were painted on the beams. France was tearing itself apart in the Wars of Religion, and Montaigne, a Catholic who stayed loyal to the crown, wrote from a skeptical distance. His motto was 'Que sais-je?' (What do I know?). He drew on the classics rescued and printed in the Renaissance, but his real subject was himself, because, as he says, he is the matter of his book.
The Essays were widely read and were translated into English by John Florio in 1603. Shakespeare appears to have used Florio's version, most clearly in The Tempest. Francis Bacon borrowed the name for his own more formal essays, and later writers from Pascal to Emerson and Nietzsche took up Montaigne's frank, self-questioning voice. He died in 1592 with the work still unfinished, and a posthumous edition of 1595 gathered his last additions.
Why it mattered
- Montaigne created the essay, a flexible form that journalism, criticism and personal writing still use.
- His skeptical, tolerant view of other customs, notably in 'Of Cannibals', fed into the questioning of European assumptions that marked the early modern period.
- Shakespeare's Tempest echoes his essay on cannibals, so the Essays reached the stage as well as the study.
Sources
- Michel de Montaigne Britannica
- Michel de Montaigne Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- First English Edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1603) The Public Domain Review
- Montaigne and The Tempest Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Community notes
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