- Length
- 1344 pagesScreech, The Complete Essays, Penguin, 1991
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Essays
The book that invented the essay, by a man who retired to a tower at thirty-eight to see what he thought and kept revising the answer for twenty years. Its scepticism is not a doctrine but a description of what he found when he looked, and it is the channel through which ancient scepticism reached Descartes.
- Date
- 1580-1592
- Author
- Michel de Montaigne
- Region
- Perigord, France
- Language
- Middle French
- 1603 English, John Florio Public domain; read by Shakespeare and a work of literature in its own right Attested
- 1685 English, Charles Cotton Public domain Attested
- 1991 English, M. A. Screech The current complete standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 1380 years
Placed on the Index in 1676 and never out of print; the book that invented the essay as a form and remains the best example of it.
What the book says
A hundred and seven pieces of varying length on whatever their author happened to be thinking about, which turn out to have a subject after all. Montaigne says at the start that he is the matter of his book, and means it literally: the essays record what he believes, and then what he believed a decade earlier, without removing the earlier version. He writes on friendship, on cannibals, on the education of children, on thumbs, on smells, on the custom of wearing clothes, on cruelty, on repentance, on how we cry and laugh at the same thing. The longest by far is a defence of a Spanish theologian that spends most of its length demolishing human confidence instead - running through the ways the senses mislead, the disagreement of philosophers, the intelligence of animals, and the dependence of belief on where one was born, and returning throughout to a question he had struck on a medal: what do I know? The late essays are quieter and more particular, on his kidney stones, on his reading, on the pleasure of an ordinary day. The whole is held together by a method rather than a doctrine: try the thought, see where it gives way, write down what happened.
What it argues
That a person is not a stable thing and that honest description of one is therefore self-contradictory - and that the contradiction is the finding rather than a failure. Montaigne's method is to take a topic, gather what has been said, test it against his own experience, and record the result including where it fails to settle. What emerges is a sustained case against confidence: the senses are unreliable, reason reaches opposite conclusions in different hands, custom determines what seems natural, and animals do things we cannot explain by our own supposed superiority. He does not conclude that nothing can be known; he suspends, records the suspension, and moves on, which is why the book keeps its shape without a thesis.
What it answered
Sextus, and through him the whole Hellenistic sceptical apparatus, which had become available in Latin only eighteen years before the first edition. The other target is the confidence of his own century - religious certainty on both sides of a civil war he lived through, and the humanist assumption that ancient authority settles questions. His answer to both is the same: look at how much people who are certain disagree.
How it argues
By layering rather than revising. Montaigne added to his text continuously and rarely deleted, so a single essay can contain a judgement from 1572, a qualification from 1588 and a reversal from 1591 sitting side by side. Modern editions mark the layers, and reading them is the best available demonstration of what the book is doing - it is not a record of conclusions but of a mind changing, kept deliberately visible. The tone is conversational, digressive and full of quotation, and the digressions are usually the point.
The moment
France in the wars of religion, with massacres, plague and a collapsing state. Montaigne had been a magistrate, retired in 1571 to his library, was twice mayor of Bordeaux, and acted as an intermediary between Catholic and Protestant leaders because both sides trusted him - which in that decade was almost a description of a political position. The essays' refusal to be certain is written under conditions where certainty was killing people, and that context is not incidental to the argument.
How it travelled
Fast and everywhere. Florio's English of 1603 was read by Shakespeare, who lifted a passage from the essay on cannibals almost directly into The Tempest. Pascal wrote against Montaigne at length and could not leave him alone. Descartes's project of doubt is a response to exactly the position the Apology sets out. The book was placed on the Index in 1676 and continued to circulate. Its influence on the form of writing may exceed its influence on philosophy: every personal essay in any language descends from it.
The strongest objection
That the method protects itself. A book which records the author's changes of mind without withdrawing the earlier version can never be shown to be wrong about anything, since every position in it is offered as what one man thought on one day. Pascal put the charge sharply: Montaigne's scepticism is comfortable, and the comfort is the problem, because a man who has genuinely suspended judgement about everything that matters should not be this cheerful. The reply available is that the essays never claim more than they show. Whether that is intellectual honesty or a way of never being accountable is the question readers have divided on for four centuries.
Why read it
Anywhere, in any order, a few pages at a time - the form permits it and probably intends it. On friendship, on cannibals, on the education of children and on experience are the ones most often recommended, and the Apology is the philosophical centre if that is what you want. Use an edition that marks the layers of addition.
- First printed
- 1580
- First in English
- 1603
- Digitised
- Yes
Two rival texts. Montaigne left a 1588 copy annotated with about 1,300 corrections made up to his death, now at Bordeaux; his adoptive daughter Marie de Gournay edited the posthumous edition of 1595 from a second annotated copy, which was destroyed in the printing as was normal. The 1595 was the basis of every edition until the end of the nineteenth century, when Strowski and Villey replaced it with the Bordeaux copy.
Florio's 1603 and Cotton's 1685 English are public domain and are themselves works of literature. Frame, Screech and Bakewell's editions are in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in two ways. Philosophically it is read for the scepticism, for the treatment of custom and cultural difference, and for the account of the self as something assembled rather than found. As literature it has never been out of favour, and the twenty-first century has produced a good deal of popular writing on it.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Florio's English is too, but Florio is a free Elizabethan rendering that cannot be quoted as Montaigne, and the accurate versions are in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Which text is authoritative has been argued for over a century. The Bordeaux copy is Montaigne's own annotated 1588 edition and was preferred from Strowski and Villey onward; recent scholarship treats it as an unfinished working draft and argues that Gournay's 1595 edition, made from a second copy that no longer exists, is a complement rather than an inferior rival. About two hundred passages differ, and at least one passage praising Gournay appears in her edition and not in the Bordeaux copy, which has led some scholars to suspect she wrote it. How sceptical Montaigne finally was, and whether the late essays retreat from the Apology, are also unresolved.