On Pedantry
As a child, I was often irked to see that pedants, or schoolmasters, were always presented as buffoons in Italian comedies, and that here in France the title of Magister was hardly granted more respect. Having been put under the care and instruction of these men, how could I be other than solicitous of their reputation? I sought to excuse them using the natural difference between the common man and those rarer persons of excellent judgment and knowledge, a discrepancy which leads the two groups in opposite directions. But this was a waste of time, given that the most distinguished gentlemen were precisely the ones who held schoolmasters in greatest contempt. Witness our estimable du Bellay:
Mais je hay par sur tout un sçavoir pedantesque.
But most of all I despise pedantic learning.
This attitude is an ancient one, since Plutarch says that the Romans used Greek and scholar as disparaging terms.
Later, with age, I found that they had very good reason to, and that magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes. [Cicero](the greatest scholars are not the wisest men.) Still, I’m at a loss to understand how it is possible that a mind rich with knowledge in many fields does not necessarily become more agile and alert, and how a coarse, vulgar mind can comprehend the speeches and judgments of the finest intellects the world has produced without being elevated in the slightest.
As a young lady, our foremost princess once said to me when speaking of a certain person: To assume so many foreign intelligences, and great and powerful ones at that, his own intelligence has to retract, shrink and withdraw in order to make room for them all.
I would be inclined to conclude that just as plants are suffocated with too much moisture and lamps with too much oil, so the action of our spirits is stifled with too much study and excessive knowledge. Encumbered and confused by a great variety of things, our minds can no longer extricate themselves and are left stooped and bowed beneath this burden. However, this is not the case: the more our souls are filled, the more they expand. And examples from antiquity clearly show, to the contrary, that men skilled in public affairs, great commanders, and great statesmen were also very learned.
As for those philosophers who have withdrawn from public affairs, they were, to be sure, sometimes scorned by the comic lights of the day because their opinions and manners made them appear ridiculous. Would you have them judge the rights of a lawsuit or a man’s actions? They are, indeed, fit to do so! They are still trying to establish if there is such a thing as life and movement, and whether man differs from an ox, and to determine what it is to act and suffer, and what sort of creatures the law and justice are. Do they speak of a magistrate, or to him? They will adopt an irreverent, uncivil tone. Do they hear a prince or king being praised? To them he is but a herdsman, idle as a shepherd occupied with milking and fleecing his flock, just much more roughly. Do you think a man more important for owning two thousand acres of land? They scoff at this, used as they are to embracing the entire world as their own possession. Do you take pride in your nobility since you can count seven wealthy forebears? They do not think much of you because you cannot conceive of the universal image of nature, or how many predecessors each of us has had: rich, poor, kings, valets, Greeks, and barbarians. And even if you were the fiftieth descendant of Hercules, they would find you vain for setting store by this gift of fortune.
And so the common man disdains them as being ignorant of basic and ordinary things, and as presumptuous and insolent. But this Platonic picture does not remotely fit the teachers of our time. Ancient philosophers were envied as being above common ways, as scorning public action, as having established a particular and inimitable way of life according to some elevated and rarefied principles. Our pedants are disdained as being beneath common ways, as incapable of public duties, as trailing their lives and their base, abject ways behind the common folk. Odi homines ignava opera, philospha sententia. [Pacuvius] (I hate men who act basely, but speak philosophically.)
As for those philosophers, I say, great as they were in knowledge, they were greater still in all forms of actions. And just as it is told of Archimedes, the geometrician of Syracuse who was pulled from his contemplations to apply his thoughts to practical use in defending his country, he immediately put dreadful machines in operations with results that surpassed human belief, and yet all the while he disdained what he had built with his own hands, believing it had debased the dignity of his art, of which this handiwork was but an apprenticeship and a plaything, so the philosophers, if ever put to the test of action, were seen to fly with soaring wing at such altitudes that it seemed obvious that their knowledge of things had marvelously enlarged their heart and soul.
But some of them, seeing the seat of political government seized by incapable men, withdrew from it, and the man who asked Crates how long it was necessary to philosophize received this answer: “Until our armies are no longer led by mule drivers.” Heraclitus, who resigned his kingdom to his brother, replied to the Ephesians who were reproaching him for spending his time playing with children in front of the temple: “Isn’t it better to do this than conduct affairs of state in your company?” Others, whose imaginations were set high above the common lot and the world, found the seats of justice and even the thrones of kings to be base and vile. And Empedocles refused the throne offered to him by the Agrigentines. When Thales repeatedly disparaged the efforts needed to manage one’s estate and acquire wealth, he was accused of behaving like the fox belittling what is out of reach. He decided to make an experiment of it for fun and debase his knowledge in the service of profit and gain: he founded a business that brought him greater wealth than those most experienced in the profession could earn in a lifetime.
Aristotle tells us of some people who called Thales, Anaxagoras, and their kind wise but not prudent, because they showed too little concern for what is most useful—never mind the fact that I cannot digest the distinction between these two words—yet this does not excuse my pedants. Indeed, given the humble and destitute fate with which they are satisfied, we have, rather, good reason to declare them neither wise nor prudent.
Leaving this first explanation aside, I believe it is better to say that this evil comes from their way of approaching knowledge, and, in view of the manner in which we are educated, it is no surprise that students and teachers do not grow more intelligent, however learned they become. In truth, our fathers’ care and expense are directed only towards furnishing our heads with knowledge: of judgment and virtue there is little mention! If you were to exclaim to our pedants about a passerby, “Oh, what a learned man!,” and about another, “Oh, what a good man!,” they will not fail to turn their eyes respectfully to the first. What is needed here is a third exclamation: “Oh, what numbskulls!” We gladly ask, “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write prose or in verse?” But the principal thing—knowing whether he has become a better or more sagacious man—is left to last. The question is not who is most knowledgeable, but who is most discerning.
We work only at stuffing our memory and leave our understanding and conscience empty. Just as, from time to time, birds go in search of grain and carry it in their beaks without tasting it to feed their young, so do our pedants constantly peck at knowledge in books and hold it between their lips, only to spit it out and disperse it to the winds.
It’s astonishing how well this foolishness fits my case. Isn’t this what I’m doing in most of this composition? I sniff around here and there in books for thoughts that please me, not to keep them (because I have nowhere to store them), but to convey them here, where, truth be told, they are no more mine than in their original place. We can, I believe, only master contemporary knowledge: not past knowledge any more than future.
But what is worse, their students and their sons are not nourished and fed by knowledge either. Instead, it is passed from hand to hand simply for show, to entertain others and to spin stories, like coins of no value, of no other use than as counters or chits. Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum. [Cicero] (They have learned how to talk to others, not with themselves.) Non est loquendum, sed gubernandum. [Seneca] (One must steer, not talk.)
Nature, in order to show that there is nothing savage in her realm, occasionally generates in the least cultivated nations products of the mind that rival the most refined artistic creations. How nicely the Gascon saying, taken from a song accompanied by the flute, applies to my subject: Blow as hard as you like, you still need to move your fingers.
We know how to state, “Cicero says this; here are Plato’s moral precepts; these are Aristotle’s own words.” But what do we ourselves say? What do we do? What do we judge? A parrot would repeat the same. This tendency reminds me of the rich Roman who went to great trouble and expense to hire men well-versed in all branches of knowledge, whom he constantly kept around him so that whenever he had occasion to talk with friends of this or that, they could take his place, ready to assist him, one with an argument, another with a verse from Homer, each according to his area of expertise. And the Roman thought this knowledge his own because it was in the heads of his men, as do those whose capacity resides in their magnificent libraries.
I know a man who, when I ask him what he knows, requests a book so he can show it to me; and he would not dare tell me his backside itches if he were not immediately able to look up in his dictionary the words “backside” and “itch.”
We collect the opinions and knowledge of others, and that is all: we need to make them our own. We resemble the man who, needing fire, goes to his neighbor’s house and, finding a blazing fire in the chimney, remains a while to warm himself, but forgets to bring any home. What good is a full belly if we cannot digest our food, if we cannot incorporate it into ourselves, if it does not make us bigger and stronger? Do we imagine that Lucullus, whom books without experience made into such a great military leader, would have used them the way we do?
We lean so heavily on the arms of others that we annihilate our own strength. Do I wish to fortify myself against the fear of death? I do it at Seneca’s expense. Do I seek consolation for myself or for another? I borrow it from Cicero. I could have found it within myself, had I been trained to do so. I don’t care for this dependent, begging competence.
Even though we may be learned with another’s erudition, it’s only through wisdom of our own that we can become wise.
Μἰσῶ σοφιστὴν, ὅστις ούχ αὑτῷ σοφός. [Euripides]
I despise the wise man who is not wise on his own account.
Ex quo Ennius: Nequicquam sapere sapientem, qui ipse sibi prodesse on quiret. [Cicero]
Hence Ennius said: The sage knows nothing if he cannot help himself.
si cupidus, si Vanus et Euganea quamtumvis vilior agna. [Juvenal]
if he be covetous and vain and baser than a Euganean lamb.
Non enim paranda nobis solum, sed fruenda sapientia est. [Cicero]
It is not enough to acquire wisdom: we must employ it.
Dionysus would make fun of the grammarians who go to great trouble looking for Ulysses’ flaws, while remaining ignorant of their own; of musicians who tune their pipes, but not their conduct; of orators who study in order to talk about justice, not implement it.
If our soul does not move with more measure, if we do not exercise sounder judgment, I would rather my student had spent his time playing tennis; at least his body would be more agile. See him return from school after putting in fifteen or sixteen years; there is no creature more unsuited for employment. The only improvement you will see in him is that his Latin and his Greek have made him more conceited and presumptuous than when he left home. He ought to have come back with a full soul, but it is merely bloated. Instead of enlarging his soul, he simply inflated it.
The pedantic schoolmasters I am speaking of—as Plato says of their cousins, the Sophists—have, of all men, the most promise of being useful to man and, of all men, are the only ones who not only do not improve what is entrusted to them, as would a carpenter or a mason, but corrupt it, and are paid for having corrupted it.
If we were to follow the rule Protagoras proposed to his pupils—that they either pay him the fee he set, or swear in the temple how they valued the profit they received from his teaching and renumerate him accordingly—my pedagogues would find themselves disappointed if they had to rely on my sworn testimony.
In my Périgord dialect, these superficial savants are wittily called lettreferits—or “word-beaten”—as if their reading had hit them like a hammer, so to speak. In truth, they often seem to have sunk below even the level of common sense. For you see the peasant and the cobbler going simply and naturally about their business, talking of what they know; whereas these others, wanting to puff themselves up and bluster with the knowledge floating on the surface of their brains, constantly become confounded and confused. Fine words escape them, but it is up to others to apply them; they know all of Galen, but nothing of the patient; they’ve filled your head with laws, but haven’t understood the nub of the case. They know the theory of all things; now try to find someone who can put it into practice.
In my own house, I watched a friend of mine who had to deal with one of these men invent for fun a jargon of gibberish and non sequiturs, woven together with borrowed passages, yet interlarded with terms appropriate to their discussion. With this jargon, my friend kept this fool debating an entire day, convinced as he was that he was responding to my friend’s objections. Nonetheless, this man had a reputation as a man of letters, who wore a fine gown.
Vos, ô patritius sanguis, quos vivere par est Occipiti, cæco, posticæ ccurrite sannæ. [Persius]
Oh, noble lords, if you had eyes in the back of your head, you would see the grimaces behind you.
Whoever examines more closely this sort of person—and they are spread far and wide—will find, as I do, that for the most part they understand neither themselves nor others, and that their memory is rather full, and yet their judgment is quite hollow, unless their nature itself fashioned it differently. I observed this in the case of Adrianus Turnebus, who, having no other profession than man of letters—of which he was, in my opinion, the greatest in a millennium—nevertheless had nothing pedantic about him except the gown he wore and a certain external manner that was not refined enough for a courtier, but these are of no importance. And I hate those who find it harder to tolerate a disheveled gown than a disheveled soul, and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing, and his boots. Because inside, Turnebus was the most refined soul in the world. I often launched him on topics that were distant from his usual purview; and he saw into them so clearly, with an apprehension so rapid and judgment so sound, that he seemed never to have had any other profession than war and affairs of state. These are strong and beautiful natures
queis arte benigna
Et meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan [Juvenal]
Whose heart Prometheus formed with special favor and of superior clay
who can suffer a bad education and remain unscathed. Yet it is not enough for our education not to spoil us—it must change us for the better.
When our appellate courts have to admit magistrates, there are some members who examine them only by their learning; others add a test of their intelligence by presenting them with a case for judgment. The second group seems to me to have a much better method, and even though both elements are necessary, and must be present together, knowledge is still less estimable than judgment. The latter can do without the former, but the former cannot without the latter. For as the Greek verse says:
Ὡς οὐδέν ἡ μάθησις, ἢν μὴ νοὺς παρῇ. [John Stobaeus]
How little learning is worth where wisdom is not present.
What use is knowledge without understanding? Would to God that, for the good of our justice, those bodies were as well equipped with understanding and conscience as they are with knowledge. Non vitae sed scholae discimus. [Seneca] (We do not learn for life, but for the schoolroom.) We ought not to append knowledge to the soul, we must incorporate it; we must not sprinkle the soul, but steep it in learning; and if the soul does not change and improve its imperfect state, then we would certainly do better to leave it be. Learning is a dangerous weapon that will thwart and wound its master if wielded by a weak hand that does not know how to use it—ut fuerit melius non didicisse. [Cicero](so that it would have been better not to have learned.)
Perhaps this is why neither we nor the theologians require much knowledge in women and why Francis, Duke of Brittany, son of John V, when he was considering marriage with Isabella of Scotland and was told that she had been brought up simply and without any instruction in letters, replied that he liked her the better for it, and that a woman was learned enough when she knew the difference between her husband’s shirt and his doublet.
Also, it’s not as great a wonder as some would have it, that our ancestors did not hold letters in much esteem, and that even today they are found only by chance among the chief councils of our kings; and if the prospect of getting rich through them—an avenue nowadays only offered us through jurisprudence, medicine, teaching, and even theology—did not keep them in some credit, you would doubtless see them as wretched as they ever were. What a shame if they teach us neither to think well nor to act well. Postquam docti prodierunt, boni desunt. [Seneca] (Now that the scholars have appeared, good men are lacking.) All other knowledge is harmful in those who do not know what goodness is.
But perhaps the reason I was just seeking also comes from the fact that because studies in France have essentially no purpose other than profit, few of those men whom nature has created for noble rather than lucrative offices devote themselves to letters, or they do so only for a brief time, withdrawing before they have even acquired a taste for them and pursuing a profession that has nothing in common with books. As a result, there are, generally, almost none left to devote themselves wholly to study but men of humble circumstances, who seek a livelihood in it. And the souls of these people, being of the basest alloy by nature, by domestic education, and by example, produce a false account of the fruits of knowledge. For knowledge cannot enlighten a spirit that is dark, nor can it make a blind man see. Its function is not to give one sight, but to train one’s vision, to regulate its gait, provided it has feet and legs of its own that are straight and capable. Learning is a good medicine, but no medicine is strong enough to resist alteration and corruption from the defects of the vessel that holds it. A man whose vision is clear but not straight will consequently see the good but not follow it, and see knowledge without putting it to use. Plato’s chief injunction in his Republic is to assign citizens functions according to their natures. Nature can do all, and does all. The lame are unfit for physical exercises, and crippled souls are unfit for mental exercises; bastard and vulgar souls are unworthy of philosophy. When we see an ill-shod man, we say it is no wonder if he is a cobbler. Similarly, it seems that Ariston of Chios was right to say in ancient times that philosophers harmed their listeners, because most minds are unable to benefit from such teaching, which, if it is not used to good effect, it will be used to bad. Asotos ex Aristippi, acerbos ex Zenonis schola exire. [Cicero] (The school of Aristippus produced profligates, and that of Zeno misanthropes.)
In the excellent education that Xenophon attributes to the Persians, we find that their children were taught virtue as the children of other nations are taught to read. Plato says that the eldest son in their royal succession was brought up in the following manner: at birth he was entrusted not to women, but to eunuchs, who were granted the greatest authority in the kings’ entourage on account of their virtue. Their charge was to make the boy’s body healthy and attractive and, after he turned seven, to teach him to ride and hunt. When he turned fourteen, they placed him in the hands of four men: the most sage, the most just, the most temperate, and the most valiant in the nation. The first taught him religion; the second always to be truthful; the third to master his desires; the fourth to fear nothing.
It is something worthy of great consideration that in the excellent constitution drawn up by Lycurgus—in truth prodigious in its perfection—for all the importance it places on the education of children as the state’s primary responsibility, and in the very domain of the Muses, there is so little mention of learning, as if those noble youths, greatly disdaining any other yoke than that of moral valor, had to be supplied only with masters of valiance, wisdom, and justice instead of our masters of knowledge, an example Plato followed in his Laws. Their method of instruction was to question the children about their judgment of men and their actions; and if the children praised this person or that act, they had to justify what they said and, in this way, sharpened their intelligence as they learned what is just.
In Xenophon, Astyages asks Cyrus for an account of his last lesson. “It was this,” the child says. “In our school, a big boy with a small coat had given it to one of his schoolmates who was smaller, and he took that boy’s coat, which was larger. Our teacher made me judge this dispute, and my judgment was that things should be left as they now were, since this seemed to suit both boys; whereupon he remonstrated to me that I had judged badly, because I’d only taken into account what was most fitting, whereas I should have first and foremost considered justice, which dictates that no one should be compelled with regard to his possessions.” And Cyrus adds that the boy was whipped for it, just as we are in our villages for forgetting the first aorist of τύπτω. (The Greek word for “beat,” tr.)
My schoolmaster would have to deliver a fine harangue in the demonstrative mode before he could persuade me that his school is as good as that one. They wanted to take a shortcut; and since it is true that learning, even when properly imparted, can only teach us about wisdom, honorable conduct, and resolution, they wanted their children to experience these right from the start, and wanted to instruct them not through hearsay, but through the test of action, forming and molding their children from lived experience, not only through words and precepts, but chiefly through examples and works. In this way, learning would not become merely knowledge in their soul, but their soul’s very character and habit, not a mere acquisition, but a natural possession. On this subject Agesilaus was asked what he thought children should learn. “What they should do, when they are men,” he replied. It is not surprising if a system like theirs produced such admirable results.
One would go, it is said, to other cities in Greece in search of rhetoricians, painters, and musicians, but to Lacedaemon for legislators, magistrates, and military generals. In Athens they learned how to speak well, and here in Sparta to act well; there to unravel a sophistical argument, and to defeat the imposture of speciously woven words, and here to disentangle themselves from the lures of sensual pleasure, and to fight with great courage against the threats of fortune and death. The Athenians busied themselves with words, the Spartans with things. In Athens, they continually exercised the tongue; in Sparta, they continually exercised the soul. It is, therefore, not strange if, when Antipater demanded of the Lacedaemonians fifty children as hostages, they answered—quite the contrary of what we would do—that they would rather give him twice as many grown men, so great they considered the loss to their country’s education. When Agesilaus invites Xenophon to send his children to be brought up in Sparta, it is not for them to learn rhetoric or dialectics there, but to learn, as he says, the highest science there is—namely, the science of obeying and commanding.
It is very amusing to see Socrates, in his fashion, mocking Hippias, who recounts how he earned a good sum of money teaching, especially in some small villages in Sicily, but in Sparta he has never earned a cent, because they are ignorant people who do not know how to measure or to count, who take no account of grammar or poetic rhythm, who waste their time studying only the genealogies of their kings, the establishment and decline of states, and a jumble of such stuff. After all this, Socrates gets Hippias to acknowledge, bit by bit, the excellence of their form of government, the happiness and virtue of their lives, and leaves him to infer the conclusion that his own arts are useless.
Examples teach us in both this martial government and in all those like it, that studying the arts and sciences softens and unmans the spirit more than it strengthens and hardens it. The strongest state we can see in the world at present is that of the Turks, a people trained equally to esteem arms and despise letters. I find Rome was more valiant before it became learned. The most warlike states in our day are the most uncouth and ignorant. The Scythians, the Parthians, Tamerlane serve as proof of this. When the Goths ravaged Greece, what saved all the libraries from being burned was the idea spread by one of the invaders that such furnishings should be left intact for the enemies, because they were likely to distract them from military exercises and keep them occupied with sedentary and idle activities. When our king Charles VIII, without unsheathing his sword, saw himself master of the kingdom of Naples and a good part of Tuscany, the noblemen in his suite attributed the unexpected ease of this conquest to the fact that Italy’s princes and nobility spent more time and effort making themselves ingenious and learned than vigorous and warlike.
[Translated from the French by Tess Lewis]
“On Pedantry” from How to Teach Children: A Renaissance Guide to a Real Education by Michel de Montaigne. Edited by Scott Newstok. Translated by Tess Lewis. Copyright © by Princeton University Press. Forthcoming from Princeton University Press Fall 2025. Published by permission.
Afterword
The frankness and easy familiarity of Michel de Montaigne’s prose was nothing short of revolutionary in sixteenth-century European literature. He is a genial companion, confiding, inquisitive and insightful, erudite and entertaining, self-ironic and self-aware, unabashed in admitting both his shortcomings and his talents as well as the flaws and strengths of others. Indeed, in an envoi he manages his readers’ expectations, advising them that he himself is the sole subject of his book:
This, Reader, is a book written in good faith. It warns you from the start that my sole purpose has been a domestic and private one. I have given no thought to serving you, nor to my own reputation; such a design is beyond my power. This book is intended for the private enjoyment of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me—which they will soon enough—they may find here certain traits of my character and temperament, and by this means maintain their knowledge of me more completely and more vividly.
He concludes by counseling them not to waste their time on so “frivolous and vain a matter.” But Montaigne knew very well that he was good company both on and off the page, and he did not doubt that the kind of reader he desired would stick with him for all his claims of frivolity.
Trained as a lawyer, Montaigne served as a magistrate for fourteen years and as the mayor of Bordeaux for four and was appointed a “gentleman of the King’s chambers” to two regents. He was a man of the world even though he cultivated his image as a man reluctant to leave the confines of his tower library. He knew how to talk to people of different classes and countries and used this gift to advantage in his intellectual as well as his public life. In the opening chapter of his third book of essays, he announces, “I speak to my paper as I speak to the first person I meet.” As with so many of Montaigne’s pronouncements, this is true, but only provisionally. A few chapters later in Book III, he observes how he changes the way he speaks when away from home. “In Paris, I speak in a slightly different language than I do in Montaigne.” His essays, more often dictated while on the go than written at his desk, were subject to constant evolution. Not only did he continually revise and expand the essays which were published in different versions in 1580 and 1588 until his death in 1592, but he also deployed the many techniques of classical Latin rhetoric and style he had gained in an idiosyncratic education—he purportedly spoke only Latin until the age of six—and a lifetime of rigorous reading. His writing is gregarious and earthy, but also complex and refined, in Jacques Barzun’s words “unrhetorical rhetoric.”
Montaigne saw transience, provisionality, variability, even contradiction as virtues in the life of the mind. In “On the Inconsistency of Our Actions,” he wrote:
If I speak of myself in different ways, it is because I see myself in different ways. All contradictions can be found in me, in some aspect and in some form or other. Timid, insolent; chaste, lustful; garrulous, taciturn; tough, delicate; intelligent, obtuse; sorrowful, good-humored; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; and generous and miserly and lavish: all this I see in myself to some extent, depending on which way I turn; and whoever studies himself attentively finds in himself—yes, even in his judgment—this mutability and discordance. There is nothing I can say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion or mixture, or in a single word.
A master of qualification, counter-qualification, self-questioning and second-guessing, he scattered his Essays with modal expressions, even listing his favorites for his readers: “I like those words that soften and moderate the rashness of our assertions: ‘perhaps,’ ‘somewhat,’ ‘some,’ ‘they say,’ ‘I think,’ and the like.” Indeed, his seal was a pair of balanced scales and his motto “Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?” Or rather, “What do I really know?” If not, “Don’t be too sure.”) This changeability and fluctuation is a constituent element of his writing and a challenge for any translator to render with every shade of nuance and variety.
The delight and fascination in reading the Essays, still fresh after four hundred years, comes from the experience of watching a mind at work watching itself work. In the essay “On Idleness,” Montaigne explains that his “concern is with the manner of speaking, not the matter.” In this case, the manner makes the man as the man has made the manner.
I am grateful to the Renaissance scholar Scott Newstok who commissioned me to translate his selection of Montaigne’s essays on education, which will appear in 2025. The first question we had to resolve was which edition to use. We chose to follow the 2007 Pléiade[2] edition, based on the posthumous 1595 edition, in which Montaigne’s final handwritten revisions to the 1588 edition were entered by his trusted disciple Marie de Gournay. The Pléiade editors made the controversial decision not to indicate the various strata of composition within the text as all twentieth-century editions of Montaigne’s work had done until André Lanly’s translation in modern French in 1989. In a review of the Pléiade edition, Charles Rosen pointed out that “major changes in Montaigne’s outlook are more intelligible when one knows where each passage first appeared [and] the realization that an idea is an afterthought changes its character and often enhances its effect.” Yet for this selection of Montaigne’s reflections on raising and educating children—a topic on which his views were unusually consistent, valuing the training of children’s faculties of judgment and understanding over rote knowledge—we felt readers would be best served if we relied on a version that is not so much definitive as “the last known state of the text,” as the historian Felicity Green has described it.
Second, we faced the question of tone and agreed that this version should aim to be fully accessible to newcomers and seasoned readers of Montaigne alike. Like Rahel Varnhagen, I am profoundly skeptical of literal translations and wish to avoid “word repositories” at all costs. Most importantly, I wanted to capture Montaigne’s feline indirection and constant qualifications, his reticent, good-humored irony, his sinuous reasoning that embraces contradictions, inconstant modesty. My second priority was to capture the ease and flow of Montaigne’s original. Convoluted and lengthy sentences were more familiar to sixteenth-century French readers, particularly those steeped in Latin and other inflected languages, than they are to present-day English readers, so I have occasionally reordered clauses or divided the sentences. Nonetheless, I endeavored to respect his digressive, idiosyncratic, and capacious style while capturing “the mood and the impression” that the original aroused in me.
To do so I occasionally clarified referents. It’s not always immediately clear in the lengthier sentences to whom or what Montaigne’s prepositions—“he,” “they,” “it,” etc.—or adverbs—“here” or “there”—refer, so I added clarifying markers such as “the boy” or “the tutor” or “here in Sparta.” Other translators have adhered more closely to the assumption that the reader can follow these without too much distraction despite the lengthy digressions that interrupt the flow of his references; I preferred to offer the reader a few signposts. Three examples of clarification from “On Pedantry” are:
And Cyrus adds that the boy was whipped for it, just as we are in our villages for forgetting the first aorist of τύπτω. [The Greek word for “beat,” tr.]
One would go, it is said, to other cities in Greece in search of rhetoricians, painters, and musicians, but to Lacedaemon for legislators, magistrates, and military generals. In Athens they learned how to speak well, and here in Sparta to act well; there to unravel a sophistical argument, and to defeat the imposture of speciously woven words, and here to disentangle themselves from the lures of sensual pleasure, and to fight with great courage against the threats of fortune and death.
And somewhat more intrusively I have added proper names, such as Archimedes, whom Montaigne simply referred to as “the geometrician of Syracuse”:
And just as it is told of Archimedes, the geometrician of Syracuse who was pulled from his contemplations to apply his thoughts to practical use in defending his country . . .
I also provide parenthetical English translations of the Latin and Greek quotations interspersed throughout the essays.
As for the first-person voice, its tone and register, I tried to find a suitably nimble and variable tone, avoiding the stiffness that I hear in some earlier translations. Here is a comparison of lines from another essay to illustrate the difference in tone that I aimed for:
Book 1 · Chapter 8
“De l’oysiveté”
“. . . ainsin est-il des esprits, si on ne les occupe à certain subject, qui les bride et contraigne, ils se jettent desreiglez, par-cy par là, dans le vague champ des imaginations.”
André Lanly: “. . . de même en est-il des esprits. Si on ne les occupe pas d’un sujet déterminé qui les bride et les contraigne, ils se jettent, tout déréglés, par-ci par-là dans le champ vague de l’imagination.” 1989
“On Idleness”
My version: . . . so it is with minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject that will curb and constrain them, they will run rampant, this way and that, in the vague field of the imagination.
Jacob Zeitlin: “If they are not occupied with some definite subject that may check and restrain them, they rove about in disorder, here and there, in the vague expanse of the imagination.” 1934
Donald M. Frame: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.” 1943
M. A. Screech: “If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to rein them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts.” 1991
Jonathan Bennett: “If we do not keep them busy with some definite subject that can serve as a bridle to rein them in, they stamp around uncontrollably, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts.” 2017
I am profoundly indebted to Donald Frame’s monumental translation of The Essays for my first extended encounter with Montaigne. I feel privileged to have my versions appear in his shadow. For my translation, André Lanly’s adaptation and translation into modern French was indispensable. I also relied heavily on Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues as well as the OED’s historical database because I encountered many more words than I’d expected that have significantly evolved in meaning from moyen français to contemporary French. For example, “aucunement” which meant “somewhat, in a manner, after a sort” four centuries ago has now become almost exclusively negative, meaning “absolutely not, by no means, nowise.” Most of the existing translations factor these changes in, but occasionally not. For example, in the envoi quoted above, “commodité” is most often translated as convenience, but I chose “enjoyment” for its multiple layers of meaning and to capture the word’s additional definitions listed by Cotgrave: “commoditie, utilitie, profit, benefit, thrift; also aptnesse, fitnesse; conveniencie, ease, handsomenesse.”
I would like to reiterate my thanks to Scott Newstok, a generous and resonant sounding board and advisor in my efforts to fashion prose as worthy as possible of Montaigne’s.
Tess Lewis
[1] Rahel Levin Varnhagen, I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me: Selected Letters and Reflections. Selected and translated by Peter Wortsman (London, 2024).
[2] Les Essais, by Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris, 2007).