SOURCE: Losse, Deborah N. “Rewriting Culture: Montaigne Recounts New World Ethnography.” Neophilologus 83, no. 4 (October 1999): 517-28.

In the essay below, Losse compares Montaigne's essays on natives in the New World with the accounts provided by his source material, maintaining that the changes Montaigne made were motivated by the aesthetics of good storytelling as well as by the desire to illuminate his own society through the study of Native American culture.

Michel de Montaigne was a man caught between substantial domestic and local responsibilities requiring his attention in the South of France and serious national as well as international crises which took him to Paris and Rome. Amidst such heavy civic service, he must have found in the accounts of the New World by Francisco López de Gómara, André Thevet, and Jean de Léry not only an escape from the political and religious unrest of his time...