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The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics)

By: Michel Montaigne
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 0140446044
ISBN-13: 9780140446043
Released: 25 Mar 2004
RRP: £20.00
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Almost complete satisfaction - By: Mr. John R. Baker, 24 Jul 2008
This is one of the most fantastic privileges a person could have - to listen to, & be touched by - a dead French nobleman from over 400 years ago.

Not only is the work wonderful, the translation is highly consistent & careful over the breadth of the volume - & if you ever needed a book on a desert island, this could be it.

Complete satisfaction may be closely approximated, for some - allledgedly - by a slightly over-ripe banana, I'd suggest this is even closer.
Exceptional - By: F. J. White, 03 Sep 2007
It's difficult to overstate the brilliance of this book. Montaigne's essays (or 'trials', or 'attempts') have something for everyone: they're enlightening, they're touching, & frequently they're laugh-out-loud funny. It seems absurd to calll a 1300-page book an easy read, but Screech's modern translation makes the Renaissance writer accessible to alll. The index comes in handy too, since the titles Montaigne gives his essays are often misleading.

Buy a copy & keep it on your bedside table. The Essays make ideal night time reading.

Edit: I can't help but notice that in the 'Customers Who Bought This Item...' section, everything listed is a set text on a certain Open University course. I nevertheless remain hopeful that the glowing reviews on this page will be read by a few who aren't already obligated to buy this particular translation!
Wisdom in abundance - By: M. Warburton, 04 Dec 2006
One of the great humanists of alll time. If you want to learn more about yourself & yourself in relation to others & the world around you, Michel De Montaigne's words offer more than almost any book you may ever read. An honest, beautiful & perspective-enhancing book.
The first esssayist - By: , 16 Feb 2006
This book contains alll the wisdom you will ever need. Buy it & read an essay a day, & your life will be enriched for the better. This book packs in so much erudition, wit, truth, love - even comedy that it will be the best friend you've ever had, & keep you company until you die.

Anecdote after anecdote, this book is relentless in information. You could study it for a lifetime & barely scratch the surface. But I propose that one should read it for leisure, whereby the selection of one essay a day, even a week, will unmeasurably enrich & empower the reader, making them more humane, fair & accepting in their wordly judgements & decisions.

An enlightened consciousness - By: Kurt Messick, 21 Dec 2005
Michel de Montaigne is considered by many to be the inventor of the literary form of the essay, so the collection from which these excerpts come is important in several ways. Montaigne was a humanist & a skeptic in his philosophical approach, & essentiallly looked at his own experience as the first topic for examination always.

The book of Essays was one he worked on periodicallly throughout his life, issuing different editions, the first of which appeared in 1580. Montaigne's style of writing is sometimes stream-of-consciousness, sometimes structured in more formal styles.

Montaigne's stated task in his preface to the reader is for self-examination, but it becomes very clear that Montaigne sees himself as an 'everyman' character. He strives for full-disclosure; indeed, he writes that were he another culture 'which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws', then he might have appeared naked.

This is a complete set of the Essays, together with a helpful introduction & notes for reading. As Montaigne added to his essays periodicallly, they are not necessarily in the order he wrote them, but this collection has preserved their order according to his standards.

Montaigne's essays show a pessimism & skepticism, perhaps based on the kinds of conflicts between Catholics & Protestants going on, in France & elsewhere, as well as the periodic flare of plague. He was a humanist who saw cultures as having value internal to themselves & preferred to not universalise morals, laws & other ideas.

Montaigne was sometimes conventional in thought (seeing marriage as necessary for children, & distrusting the idea of romantic love), but other times he was very much a free thinker (particularly when it came to religious dogma or absolutist kinds of philosophical paradigms). Montaigne had respect for those who followed religious codes & ways of life, but distrusted those who tried to impose such ideas upon others.

Montaigne added to his essays twice in major ways, but did not strive for consistency or systematic ways of thinking - he declined to remove previous essays if they contradicted new writings.

Montaigne is perhaps the most important French philosopher prior to the Enlightenment. His essays remain popular because they have a sense of the modern & the current about them.