SOURCE: Russell, Nicolas Cogney. “Steps Toward a Rhetoric of Judgment in Montaigne's ‘De Democritus et Heraclitus’ (I, 50).” Neophilologus 85, no. 2 (April 2001): 177-92.

In the following essay, Russell examines the rhetorical structures used in “De Democritus et Heraclitus” and compares the author's critique of judgment in that essay with similar claims in his other writings.

Reading for Montaigne is not a simple process of retrieving a single message which the author has preserved in a book. Montaigne does not lose sight of the fact that different readers have different interpretations of texts and that sometimes readers interpret texts in ways that the authors themselves did not anticipate:

J'ay leu en Tite-Live cent choses que tel n'y [a] pas leu. Plutarque en y a leu cent, outre ce que j'y ay sceu lire, et, à l'adventure, outre ce que l'autheur y avoit mis.

(I,26 p. 156)

Un suffisant lecteur descouvre souvant és escrits...