Renaissance Quarterly, June 22nd, 1995
A biographical sketch included in early seventeenth-century editions of Montaigne's Essais announces that it is entirely drawn from his writings and "very much in conformity with the truth." It reorganizes in chronological order personal anecdotes Montaigne relates in his book and quotes almost verbatim from the Essais. In her preface to the 1617 edition of the Essais, Marie de Gournay pointed out that such a biography was superfluous, since the life of the author is "complete in the volume itself." She thus raises a fundamental question: why read a biography of Montaigne based on the Essais w...
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