Essays

Summary

Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole. The earliest chapters, written in the 1570s, resemble Renaissance commonplace books: strings of classical anecdotes from Plutarch, Seneca and Livy about sieges, constancy, fear and the deaths of famous men. Gradually the anecdotes give way to the author. 'To the Reader' announces that he himself is the matter of the book, and later chapters examine his memory, digestion, sexual life, laziness, handwriting, tastes in wine and reluctance to correct his drafts. The 1588 edition added Book III, the most personal and freely digressive, and Montaigne went on annotating a copy until his death; his adopted 'daughter' Marie de Gournay published the expanded text in 1595. Several fixed concerns run through the shifting surface. Death is the first: Book I's 'That to study philosophy is to learn to die' recommends Stoic rehearsal of mortality, but by the final essay, 'Of Experience', Montaigne advises leaving death to nature and attending to life. The second is scepticism. In the 'Apology', a nominal defence of a Catalan theologian, Montaigne dismantles human pretensions to knowledge, compares people unfavourably with animals, and adopts the Pyrrhonist question 'What do I know?' along with the emblem of a balance. The third is custom: 'Of Cannibals' uses reports of the Tupinambá of Brazil to argue that Europeans, who torture the living in the name of religion, have no standing to call others barbarous. Friendship receives a single great essay, a memorial to La Boétie that describes a union of souls without seam. Medicine is everywhere. Montaigne inherited his father's kidney stones and his distrust of physicians; he records passing stones on horseback, compares spa waters across Europe, and in 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers' mocks the contradictory prescriptions of doctors while treating his own pain as a tutor in dying. 'Of the Force of Imagination' collects cases of suggestion, sympathetic illness and sexual impotence cured by a trick, a sixteenth-century catalogue of what is now called the placebo and nocebo effect. The book ends not with a doctrine but with a man accepting his body: kings and philosophers sit on their own behinds, and the finest lives are those that conform to the ordinary human pattern without miracle or extravagance.

Top Lessons

• An ordinary life contains the whole human condition

  Montaigne defends writing about one undistinguished man on the ground that each person bears the full form of humanity. The book shows that close attention to a single temperament can yield general wisdom without heroic subject matter.

• Doubt as a discipline against cruelty

  The 'Apology' and 'Of Cannibals' connect scepticism with tolerance: if no one can be certain, no one has warrant to burn, torture or conquer in the name of truth. Montaigne's uncertainty is moral as well as intellectual, written during massacres over doctrine.

• Rehearsing death versus trusting nature

  Early Montaigne echoes Seneca in urging constant meditation on death; late Montaigne, having seen peasants die calmly during plague, suggests nature teaches dying well enough. Tracing that change shows a mind revising itself in print.

• The patient as expert on his own case

  Living with kidney stones, Montaigne records symptoms, regimens and the effects of fear with the attention of a clinician, while refusing the authority of physicians who contradict one another. He models a patient who knows his body intimately and still treats his own judgement with doubt.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Montaigne is a primary witness to Renaissance medicine from the patient's side. His kidney stones (renal colic with haematuria and gravel, from roughly 1578) generate first-person records of pain, regimen, spa cures and the passage of stones, together with a sceptical polemic against physicians that echoes Pliny and anticipates later therapeutic nihilism. 'Of the Force of Imagination' gathers suggestion, sympathetic symptoms, sexual impotence relieved by a ritual trick, and the mimed clyster, cases that read today as placebo and nocebo phenomena, though Montaigne frames them through imagination and the humours rather than through any modern model. II.37 asks how a father's disease can be transmitted through seed, an early lay meditation on heredity. 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea' surveys ancient arguments for and against suicide without settling them. The plague of 1585–1586, which drove Montaigne from his home, appears in 'Of Physiognomy'. Any modern labelling of his temperament (for instance as depressive in the period after La Boétie's death) is speculative and should be presented as interpretation.

• Book I, Ch. XIX (Cotton), 'That to study philosophy is to learn to die'

  Stoic and Epicurean arguments for habitual meditation on death as a cure for fear of it.

• Book I, Ch. XX, 'Of the Force of Imagination'

  Sympathetic coughs and fevers, impotence induced and cured by belief, the merchant who responds to a mimed clyster, and other cases of suggestion acting on the body.

• Book I, Ch. XXVII, 'Of Friendship'

  Memorial to La Boétie, whose death leaves Montaigne describing himself as only half a person.

• Book II, Ch. III, 'A Custom of the Isle of Cea'

  Survey of classical and biblical cases of voluntary death and the arguments for and against it, including unbearable pain as a justification.

• Book II, Ch. XII, 'Apology for Raymond Sebond'

  Sceptical attack on the reliability of the senses and of reason, with frequent appeal to illness, fever and madness as states that alter perception.

• Book II, Ch. XXXVII, 'Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers'

  First-person account of kidney stone attacks, speculation on hereditary transmission from his father, and a long critique of physicians' contradictions and fees.

• Book III, Ch. V, 'Upon Some Verses of Virgil'

  Candid reflection on ageing, waning sexual vigour and the body's decline.

• Book III, Ch. XII, 'Of Physiognomy'

  Montaigne and his household flee plague and civil war; he admires how ordinary people meet death without philosophy.

• Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'

  Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.