'I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain'In 1572 Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and thinking. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'assays' inspired by ideas he found in the books of 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. But, above all, Montaigne studied himself as a way of drawing out his own inner nature and that of men and women generally. The Essays are among the most idiosyncratic and personal works in all literature, and an engaging insight into a wise Renaissance mind, which continue to give pleasure and enlightenment to modern readers.With its extensive introduction and notes, M. A. Screech's edition of Montaigne is widely regarded as the most distinguished of recent times.

The Complete Essays

1. Cicero, De divinatione, II, lvii, 117; De natura deorum, II, lxiv, 160–1; lxv, 162 f. The theme is prominent in Plutarch’s treatise on the cessation of oracles. There was a renewed interest in classical forms of prognostication during the Renaissance. (Cf. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, TLF, XXV.) Montaigne criticizes Plato’s belief in divination from entrails in II, 12.

2. Cf. Robert Garnier, Les Juifves, final line: Christ ‘Will come, to put an end to all prophecy’.

3. Lucan, Pharsalia, II, 4–6; 14–15.

4. Cicero, De nat. deorum, III, vi, 14.

5. The Du Bellay Mémoires relate this. For the context, cf. Rabelais, Pantagruéline Prognostication, TLF, Droz, 1974, pp. xviii-xxii.

6. Horace, Odes, III, xxix, 29–32; 41–44; then II, xvi, 25.

7. Cicero, De divinatione, I, vi, 10; then I, lvii, 131, citing Pacuvius.

8. Cicero, De divinatione, II, xxiii, 50–1.

9. A serious possibility, especially for students of Renaissance law; cf. Rabelais, Tiers Livre, TLF, XLIII-XLIIII.

11. Cicero, De divinatione, II, lix, 121.

12. Cicero, De natura deorum, III, xxxvii, 89; De divinatione, I, iii, 5.

13. ’88: wrong. I have seen…

14. Joachim of Flora died about 1202. His Prophecies were in print (there is an edition, Venice 1589), but legends had attached to his name. The Emperor Leo’s book is known only at second-hand.

15. ’88: The daemon of Socrates was, in my opinion, a certain thrust… (Socrates had a daemon, a good spirit, who enabled him to avoid error. Renaissance thinkers took this very seriously: Rabelais gives Pantagruel a similar daemon: Quart Livre, TLF, LXVI. Cf. Plato’s Apology for Socrates and Plutarch’s Du Demon de Socrate.)

16. ’88: albeit fortuitous were always good and worthy to be followed. Everyone has in himself some ghost of such agitations. I have had some by which…

17. For some Renaissance thinkers Socrates’ ecstasies made him into a forerunner of St Paul. Montaigne considered Socrates’ ecstasies to be natural in origin and so quite unlike St Paul’s privileged rapture. This became a standard opinion.

The Complete Essays

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