Product Description

In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'essays', inspired by the ideas he found in books from his library and his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. Above all, Montaigne studied himself to find his own inner nature and that of humanity. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature. An insight into a wise Renaissance mind, they continue to engage, enlighten and entertain modern readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39849 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-25
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1344 pages

About the Author
Born in 1533, Montaigne studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection. He died in 1586. Dr M.A. Screech is regarded as the world's greatest authority on Montaigne.

Customer Reviews

An enlightened consciousness
Michel de Montaigne is considered by many to be the inventor of the literary form of the essay, so the collection from which these excerpts come is important in several ways. Montaigne was a humanist and a skeptic in his philosophical approach, and essentially looked at his own experience as the first topic for examination always.

The book of Essays was one he worked on periodically throughout his life, issuing different editions, the first of which appeared in 1580. Montaigne's style of writing is sometimes stream-of-consciousness, sometimes structured in more formal styles.

Montaigne's stated task in his preface to the reader is for self-examination, but it becomes very clear that Montaigne sees himself as an 'everyman' character. He strives for full-disclosure; indeed, he writes that were he another culture 'which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws', then he might have appeared naked.

This is a complete set of the Essays, together with a helpful introduction and notes for reading. As Montaigne added to his essays periodically, they are not necessarily in the order he wrote them, but this collection has preserved their order according to his standards.

Montaigne's essays show a pessimism and skepticism, perhaps based on the kinds of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants going on, in France and elsewhere, as well as the periodic flare of plague. He was a humanist who saw cultures as having value internal to themselves and preferred to not universalise morals, laws and other ideas.

Montaigne was sometimes conventional in thought (seeing marriage as necessary for children, and distrusting the idea of romantic love), but other times he was very much a free thinker (particularly when it came to religious dogma or absolutist kinds of philosophical paradigms). Montaigne had respect for those who followed religious codes and ways of life, but distrusted those who tried to impose such ideas upon others.

Montaigne added to his essays twice in major ways, but did not strive for consistency or systematic ways of thinking - he declined to remove previous essays if they contradicted new writings.

Montaigne is perhaps the most important French philosopher prior to the Enlightenment. His essays remain popular because they have a sense of the modern and the current about them.

The first esssayist
This book contains all the wisdom you will ever need. Buy it and read an essay a day, and your life will be enriched for the better. This book packs in so much erudition, wit, truth, love - even comedy that it will be the best friend you've ever had, and keep you company until you die.

Anecdote after anecdote, this book is relentless in information. You could study it for a lifetime and barely scratch the surface. But I propose that one should read it for leisure, whereby the selection of one essay a day, even a week, will unmeasurably enrich and empower the reader, making them more humane, fair and accepting in their wordly judgements and decisions.

Someting about everything.
The beauty of Montaigne and this edition of his "Complete Essays" is the sheer breadth of knowledge that the man shares with us.

This is a book about living.As relevant now as it was then , Montaigne takes us a journey inside his soul and by doing so lets us see how a great man attempts to accumulate knowledge so as to live better.

Read this book and be touched by the thoughts of a truly great man.Utilising the wisdom of figures such as Socrates, Seneca, Aristotle, Plato, he speaks to us conversationally .

It is like having an intellectual friend to ask the trickiest questions in this life.

Enjoy