Coronavirus and Literature: What we can learn from Michel.
About the Author Born in 1533, Montaigne studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection. He died in 1586. Dr M.A. Screech is regarded as the world's greatest authority on Montaigne.
Montaigne was the first writer to create literature that deliberately worked in this way, and to do it using the plentiful material of his own life rather than either pure philosophy or pure invention. He was the most human of writers, and the most sociable.
Montaigne's Essays in Three Books. with Notes and Quotations. and an Account of the Author's Life.. Translated by Charles Cotton, Esq.. the Sixth Edition Corrected and Amended. with the Addition of a Complete Table to Each Volume.
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE. Translated by Charles Cotton Edited by William Carew Hazlitt. 1877. CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1. Preface The Life of Montaigne The Letters of Montaigne. PREFACE. The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in our literature a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great French writer.
Montaigne's Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, the Frenchman's literary importance largely results from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and subsequent.
Montaigne would probably agree with Aristotle that we are rational animals - rationality may even be our distinctive virtue or excellence - but that rationality is hedged in, limited, and sometimes defeated by our other qualities: presumption, changeableness, emotions and moods just below the surface of our lives, intractable ignorance, weakness of intellect, and others.
