Practising Reform in Montaigne’s Essais

This volume focuses on six topics of research that are particularly relevant not only for Montaigne’s writing but for the late-16th-century: the genre of the essay, its style, pedagogy, politics, religion and historiography. One historical reader and enthusiastic admirer of Montaigne’s texts, Friedrich Nietzsche, influences the critical approach of this study of innovative elements in the Essais . Nietzsche’s attitude towards his literary precursors corresponds to the humanists’ attitude toward their classical sources: it is the attitude of a double gesture - that of rejection, because it wants to separate itself from its immediate past in order to, then, search for ancient roots. Nietzsche was a great expert on the six topics discussed. With him as a mediator, Montaigne is portrayed as a modern in so far as he takes up thoughts that emerge with the Reformation.