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Short searches — one or two words — work better than long ones.
The search target option, located below the Search the Essays box, sets which edition to search. Contemporary English is the default option.
Search is case-insensitive .
Some articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs have been removed from our index and return no results on their own. They are included when searching for phrases.
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The Essays of Michel de Montaigne Online
HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne .
HyperEssays.net hosts four editions of the Essays :
- A 1598 edition, in middle French , edited by Marie de Gournay. This is a slightly revised version of Gournay’s original edition published in 1595 .
- A complete and searchable edition of John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays , in early modern English.
- A 1685 translation by Charles Cotton , also in early modern English. Only some chapters of this edition have been copyedited and posted.
- A complete and searchable modern edition of the Essays based on W. Carew Hazlitt’s 1877 update of Charles Cotton’s translation. I am slowly replacing the Cotton/Hazlitt translation with a contemporary one and adding new notes.
My goals with HyperEssays are to provide context and tools for first-time readers of the Essays and to design a lasting resource for all interested in Montaigne’s work.
To that end, I copyedit, update, and annotate the original text and its translations. I tag them for indexing and searching, and format them them for easy reading on smartphones, desktop computers, and tablets. In addition, I prepare and provide free chapter PDFs for offline reading.
You can help make HyperEssays a reliable online resource by supporting this project. With your contribution, this site can continue to grow and remain free and accessible to all.
What are the Essays about?
The Essays is not a single, cohesive book but a collection of short and long pieces on various subjects such as religion, horses, friendship, sleep, law, or suicide, which Montaigne wrote over more than twenty years . His goals for the book and the circumstances under which he worked on it changed over time .
The first edition, published in 1580, comprised two books. Eight years later, an updated edition included hundreds of revisions and a new, third book. By the time of his death, in 1592, Montaigne had planned many more changes, which were incorporated in the first posthumous edition of 1595.
So, while you can read the Essays from beginning to end, starting with Montaigne’s address To the Reader , you can also follow John Cage’s advice and “ begin anywhere. ”
Pick from a selection of some of the most well-known chapters:
- To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die ,
- On the Education of Children ,
- On Friendship ,
- On Cannibals ,
- Apology for Raymond Sebond ,
- On Some Verses of Virgil ,
- On Coaches ,
- On Experience .
Or look at the table of contents and let your curiosity guide you.
Who was Michel de Montaigne?
Michel de Montaigne, the author of the Essays, is often described as a sixteenth-century French philosopher. But was Montaigne actually a philosopher? And did he really retire from the world to write in solitude for years, as is commonly believed?
In On Montaigne , I address these questions and provide biographical context to better understand the Essays. The companion timeline provides a chronological overview of his life.
If you want to learn more about him, I recommend these four biographies of Montaigne (along with two modern translations of the Essays ). Each one is engaging but written with a different audience in mind.
Recent updates
Copy editing, translating, writing notes, updating metadata … the work never ends. This is HyperEssays’s work log, a list of the chapters I’ve been working on:
- Oct 27, 2024 · De la Solitude
- Oct 27, 2024 · Comme nous pleurons et rions d’une meme chose
- Oct 27, 2024 · Du jeune Caton
- Oct 27, 2024 · De l’usage de se vestir
- Oct 20, 2024 · D’un defaut de nos polices
- Oct 20, 2024 · La fortune se rencontre souvent au train de la raison
- Oct 20, 2024 · De fuir les voluptez au priz de la vie
- Oct 13, 2024 · On Sorrow
- Oct 12, 2024 · De la coustume, et de ne changer aisement une loy receüe
- Oct 10, 2024 · De mesnager sa volonté
- Oct 2, 2024 · De la Physionomie
- Sep 29, 2024 · On Democritus and Heraclitus
Work on HyperEssays started on January 17, 2020 and likely won’t be completed for many years.
IMAGES
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COMMENTS
Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic, hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars, and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne …
If you're reading him for the philosophy, he's a funny combination of Skepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christianity, and there are good essays for each of the various parts - …
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 deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land …
Probably not the best but his "Of the Power of the Imagination" is one of his funniest. Definitely not what I thought it would be about based on the title. 1. Award. I am going to sort of begin …
Montaigne's stated goal in his book is to describe himself with utter frankness and honesty ("bonne foi"). The insight into human nature provided by his essays, for which they are so widely read, is merely a by-product of his introspection. Though the implications of his essays were profound and far-reaching, he did not intend or suspect that his work would garner much attention outside of his inner circle, prefacing his essays with, "I am myself the matter of this book; you wo…
The question is not who will hit the ring, but who will make the best runs at it. Given the huge breadth of his readings, Montaigne could have been ranked among the most erudite humanists of the XVI th century. But in …
HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. HyperEssays.net hosts four editions of the Essays : A 1598 edition, in middle French , edited by Marie de Gournay.
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. This Penguin Classics edition of The …
Peppered throughout the “Essays” are quotes from the classics — from Virgil, Seneca, Livy, Ovid and countless others — which provide the base upon which Montaigne builds each of his essays.