Montaigne: Selected Essays

With so many English translations of Michel de Montaigne’s essays already available, why do it yet again? Translator James B. Atkinson explains that he and co-translator David Sices have prepared a selection of the essays, not in British English, but one more understandable to the modern American ear.

Montaigne’s essays are undergoing a third revision in 1592 when he dies; scholars since then must decide which version of a given essay to translate. This gets complicated, and Atkinson uses extensive “textual endnotes” to list the version translated, along with alternate versions of the text, where appropriate. These can help interested readers get a better sense of how Montaigne’s thinking evolved.

Added to this book is the essay “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” by Étienne de la Boétie, whose ideas greatly influenced Montaigne. For the rest, the translators have made selections that they believe best represent Montaigne’s work as a thinker and essayist.

The Introduction is divided into eight sections.

The first section, “Two Thinkers for Our Time,” points out how modern Montaigne’s ideas are, in regard to their open-mindedness and humanism.

The second section, “Montaigne and His Time,” is a brief bio of Montaigne. He is born in 1533 at the chateau of a well-off Catholic family near Bordeaux in southwest France.