Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking

Why read Montaigne today? Not only was Montaigne the writer who influenced figures as diverse as Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf, but he is also the originator of modern thought - a man who made the then radical leap from relying on received wisdom to testing out the limits of your own judgement. Montaigne's books of Essais, first published between 1580 and 1595, position him as a forgotten - and unlikely - hero of anti-conformist thinking. Born into an aristocratic family, he was initially sent to live with peasants; from birth he was brought up to learn Latin as his mother tongue. This unconventional upbringing may have helped free Montaigne from the shackles of conformism and to develop his thought and writing in a new way. Whether examining colonialism in the New World, the relationship between children and their parents, or the power of poetry to encapsulate the workings of desire, Montaigne takes a discursive and highly personal approach to his essays, as if thinking aloud. This new study includes extensive quotations from Montaigne's writings, in both French and English, to allow readers who have not read his writings before to familiarise themselves with his work.

Richard Scholar is Fellow and Tutor in French, Oriel College, University of Oxford. He is the author of The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford University Press, 2005) and the co-editor (with William Poole) of Thinking with Shakespeare (Legenda, 2007).