Montaigne's Essays

December 26, 2024 7:06 AM

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die is just one of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne available on hyperessays.net, a beautifully designed, ad-free website that includes a rich index, list of sources mentioned in the texts, as well as extensive footnotes, annotations, and translated latin within each essay. The individual works are also available as downloadable PDFs and text files. The site was created by designer and coder Sebastian Biot.
posted by gwint (6 comments total)

This is great to see--thanks! A few weeks ago, LitHub had a book extract that could serve as an introduction to Montaigne: Andrew Hui's "A Refuge for the Soul: How to Build a Library, According to Montaigne." The Public Domain Review had an extract from the same book but about Machiavelli. Also, it'll be a very long time before hyperessays can host them legally, but Salvador Dalí's illustrations to a 1947 edition of Montaigne are pretty neat.
posted by Wobbuffet at 8:11 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

The addition of the Florio is a big plus to what is already a terrific resource. English writers of the period, including, reportedly, Shakespeare, accessed Montaigne’s thinking via the Florio translation.
posted by the sobsister at 8:23 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

I studied Montaigne’s Essais as part of my French degree 30+ years ago. To be honest not much has stuck with me but I do remember my lecturer’s description of Montaigne as a wealthy man of leisure who would spend his time writing these attempts as a way of trying to get his thoughts down on paper. And this is from where we get the English word “essay”.

Thanks for the post, I’ll give him another go.
posted by jontyjago at 9:42 AM on December 26

I was just talking with someone recently about what a fascinating and charming read these essays are. It's fun to be able to draw a straight line from writings of hundreds of years ago to, like, blogs and Substack.

I kept Montaigne's collected essays (the Hazlitt translation) on the back of my toilet to read on the can when I was in college, which is probably the most stereotypically "humanities student" fact about me.
posted by potrzebie at 11:00 AM on December 26 [1 favorite]

Having the essays online is convenient, but the English translations used here, apart from the special case of Florio, are far inferior to the Donald Frame version.
posted by yinchiao at 10:24 PM on December 26 [1 favorite]

In what respects? (Style, fidelity to the source, ?)
posted by trig at 8:10 AM on December 27