Gibburt

Philosopher Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—his massive volume Essais (translated literally as “Attempts”) contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written.

Montaigne’s humanist traits evolved as a direct result of his early education (and in spite of having been born into wealth and privilege). Soon after his birth, he was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, “in order to,” according to his father, “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help.” Following these first spartan years, he was brought back to the family Château where he was taught Latin as his first language, accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation (he was apparently familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than books).

In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author—eventually, however, he would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?) and remains remarkably modern even to readers today.

Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, including Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Isaac Asimov, Eric Hoffer, and possibly even William Shakespeare. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.

Thank you Robert L. Peters for this interesting post. For some inspiring quotes please refer here.

Filed under: History, Published on external blogs by Robert Nijssen | Social tagging: French Renaissance > Michel de Montaigne