The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe : Volume One: The Patron Author

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume One focuses on contexts from within Montaigne's own milieu and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume Two focuses on the reader/writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book's significance in literary and intellectual history. Montaigne's is now usually understood to be the school of late humanism or of Pyrrhonian scepticism. This study argues that the school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. For the Essais were shaped by a battle that had intensified since the Reformation and that would continue through to the pre-Enlightenment period. It was a battle to regulate the educated individual's judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era. The study draws on new ways of approaching literary history through the history of the book and of reading. The Essais are treated as a mobile, transnational work that travelled from Bordeaux to Paris and beyond to markets in other countries from England and Switzerland, to Italy and the Low Countries. Close analysis of editions, paratexts, translations, and annotated copies is informed by a distinct concept of the social context of a text. The concept is derived from anthropologist Alfred Gell's notion of the "art nexus": the specific types of actions and agency relations mediated by works of art understood as "indexes" that give rise to inferences of particular kinds. Throughout the two volumes the focus is on the particular nexus in which a copy, an edition, an extract, is embedded, and on the way that nexus might be described by early modern people. --! From publisher's description Cover 1 The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe: Volume 1: The Patron-Author 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents: Volumes 1 and 2 8 VOLUME 1 8 General Preface: Volumes 1 and 2 14 Acknowledgements 24 List of Illustrations: Volumes 1 and 2 30 VOLUME 1 30 Chapter 1 30 Chapter 3 31 Chapter 4 31 Chapter 5 31 Chapter 6 31 Chapter 7 32 VOLUME 2 32 Chapter 1 32 Chapter 2 33 Chapter 3 34 Chapter 4 34 Chapter 5 34 Abbreviations 36 Note on Texts, Terms, and Conventions 40 General Introduction: Volumes 1 and 2 46 VOLUME 1: THE PATRON-AUTHOR 80 Introduction: Volume 1 82 1.1: Prologue: Literature and Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe 86 1.1.1 THE FORCE OF THE IMAGINATION 86 1.1.2 MONTAIGNE’S MEDALLION AS INDEX 90 1.1.3 ART, AGENCY, AND THE OFFICES OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE 91 1.1.4 THE QUALITIES OF A FREEMAN 96 1.1.5 READING AND WRITING 101 1.1.6 LADY ANNE CLIFFORD 105 1.1.7 THE BOOK IN THE POST-REFORMATION AGE 109 1.1.8 ACTING AND CONVERSING THROUGH BOOKS 118 1.1.9 IMAGINES INGENIORUM 123 1.1.10 MONTAIGNE’S IMAGO 130 1.1.11 PIERRE EYQUEM’S SEBOND 134 1.1.12 PARATEXTS AND THE STORY OF A BOOK 139 1.1.13 MEDALLION AND BOOK 141 1.1.14 VAN RAVESTEYN’S PORTRAIT OF PIETER VAN VEEN 142 1.1.15 SETTINGS AND SITUATIONS 146 1.2: Villey and the Making of the Modern Critical Reader 148 1.2.1 THIS GREAT READER 151 1.2.2 VILLEY’S RECEPTION 156 1.2.3 RIVAL TRANSCRIPTIONS OF MONTAIGNE’S EVOLUTION 159 1.2.4 STROWSKI AND BRUNETIÈRE 160 1.2.5 THE DISTINCTIVE EVOLUTION OF VILLEY’S MONTAIGNE 162 1.2.6 CREATING AN OEUVRE 167 1.3: The Patron’s OEuvre 173 1.3.1 MONTAIGNE’S SELF-PORTRAIT: ESSAIS (1580) II 17 AND II 18 178 1.3.2 THE JOURNAL DE VOYAGE 186 1.3.3 URBINO 187 1.3.4 THE JOURNAL AND THE ESSAIS 189 1.3.5 FLORENCE’S PATRON 191 1.3.6 THE PLACE OF BOOKS IN THE PATRON’S OEUVRE 193 1.3.7 STATUES AND BOOKS IN ROME 197 1.3.8 TWO WORKS BY PATRON-AUTHORS 204 1.3.9 INAUTHENTIC PATRONS OF BOOKS 207 1.3.10 CODA: THE PATRON’S BOOK 211 1.4: Offices Without Names 214 1.4.1 LONDON 1603 214 1.4.2 THE DESIRE FOR KNOWLEDGE AND THE FALL OF MAN 222 1.4.3 APOLOGY 230 1.4.4 MADAME DE DURAS AND THE ART OF BALNEOLOGY 234 1.4.5 OFFICES WITHOUT NAMES IN THE JOURNAL DE VOYAGE 243 1.5: The Unpremeditated and Accidental Philosopher 248 1.5.1 VETTORI AND MONTAIGNE ON TACITUS 252 1.5.2 EXTRACTING AND APPLYING LITERARY CURIOSITIES 261 1.5.3 FROM ANCIENT EXTRACTS TO NEW PIECES OF MAN 267 1.5.4 PIERRE DE LANCRE 268 1.5.5 EXAMINING WITCHES 270 1.5.6 ON THE LAME (IN PIERRE DHEURE’S EYES) 277 1.5.7 THE MONTAIGNE EFFECT 279 1.6: Caring for Fortunes 282 1.6.1 ‘LA FRANCHISE DE MA CONVERSATION’ 285 1.6.2 BIENHEUREUSE FRANCHISE 289 1.6.3 THE FRENCH THALES 292 1.6.4 GOURNAY AND MONTAIGNE’S COLD RECEPTION 298 1.6.5 LIPSIUS 302 1.6.6 MONTAIGNE’S MISSING LETTERS 308 1.6.7 PIERRE DE BRACH’S LETTERS:MONTAIGNE AS ‘PATRON’ 311 1.6.8 CARING FOR FORTUNES 317 1.6.9 THE GENESIS OF THE ESSAIS 320 1.6.10 AMYOT’S PLUTARCH 322 1.6.11 THE I I I 12 ANECDOTES 325 1.6.12 ESSAIS I 23 ( IN 1580) 329 1.6.13 LA BOÉTIE 330 1.6.14 PIERRE’S SEBOND AND THE LIBERTY TO JUDGE 335 1.7: Montaigne at Rome, 1580–1: The Essais and the Papal Court 340 1.7.1 MONTAIGNE AT ROME 341 1.7.2 ‘LE SENEQUE DE ROME’ 348 1.7.3 CENSORING THE 1580 ESSAIS 363 1.7.4 ROMAN TOPICS IN THE ESSAIS AND THE JOURNAL 372 1.7.5 ROME’S LIBERTY 379 1.7.6 MONTAIGNE’S ROMAN CITIZENSHIP 387 1.7.7 ESSAIS I I I 9, ‘DE LA VANITÉ’ (1588) 393 Conclusion 396 Bibliography 404 A. MANUSCRIPT AND ARCHIVAL SOURCES (INCLUDING UNIQUE COPIES OF PRINTED BOOKS) 404 B. PRINTED AND OTHER SOURCES 406 Index 436