Michel de Montaigne

Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne ; French: ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592, also asked as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the near significant philosophers of a French Renaissance. He is so-called for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His make is specified for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the nearly influential essays ever written.

During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes together with personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper variety rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ''Que sçay-je?" "What work I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in sophisticated French.

Related writers and influence

Thinkers exploring ideas similar to Montaigne include Erasmus, Thomas More, John Fisher, and Guillaume Budé, who any worked approximately fifty years previously Montaigne. numerous of Montaigne's Latin quotations are from Erasmus' Adagia, and most critically, all of his quotations from Socrates. Plutarch retains perhaps Montaigne's strongest influence, in terms of substance and style. Montaigne's quotations from Plutarch in the Essays number more than 500.

Ever since Edward Capell first made the suggestion in 1780, scholars have suggested Montaigne to be an influence on Shakespeare. The latter would have had access to John Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essais, published in English in 1603, and a scene in The Tempest "follows the wording of Florio [translating Of Cannibals] so closely that his indebtedness is unmistakable". Most parallels between the two may be explained, however, as commonplaces: as similarities with writers in other nations to the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare could be due simply to their own study of Latin moral and philosophical writers such as Seneca the Younger, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil.