It’s such a curious thing at times to witness Montaigne describing a soul. The first thought upon hearing it is Cartesian, that the soul is something separate from the body, perhaps immortal. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, Montaigne stubbornly opposed the idea of a soul that outlives the body. So when he speaks of it,…

This isn’t a terribly memorable essay, most of all its a defense of using exempla to display human virtue, but it does have this wonderful explanation of Montaigne’s point of view about people and life:

At the beginning of the essay, translator M.E. Screech notes something important about it: [In this chapter Montaigne makes a pun on the French taste for bigarures, which means, as Cotgrave explains it in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1632) both a medley of ‘sundry colours mingled together’ and a discourse ‘running…

This is a very short essay, but I want to point out a couple of things about it. First, the premise is that Montaigne’s father had some crazy ideas for civic administration, but I don’t find them offbeat. Here’s an example: My late father, a man of a decidedly clear judgement, based though it was…

Montaigne builds on his recent discussion of miracles with an examination of luck. Vatican censors were not pleased with this subject, and he’ll  have more to write about that in subsequent essays. While Montaigne and many Montaigne scholars agree that Rome had nothing to worry about, I’m not so sure. When taken in conjunctions with…

This essay from Montaigne seems like little more than an observation — that the stoic belief in extreme measures to deny earthly pleasures is like that of the Catholic church. In my original take on this essay, I thought Montaigne had advanced such an extreme proposition that he couldn’t possibly believe it. But I’m more…