We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) Shakespeare's near-contemporary and
fellow literary mastermind thinks. We know because he tells us on page after page of his
Essais which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to
this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising with this wealth of evidence at hand
that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves as volatile as he
is voluble. What we are left wondering does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be
understood? And what value might it have for us?Montaigne has too often seen his thinking
reduced to the expression of an '-ism'. Richard Scholar investigates the nature - and detail -
of Montaigne's evolving attempts to seek out that elusive thing called truth. Examining at
close quarters passages from across the Essais Scholar provides twenty-first-century readers
with a companion guide to a text that is rooted in the time and place of its composition and
yet continues to speak to the present to haunt its readers to ask them the questions that
matter.
