I sing and celebrate Sebastian Biot’s site HyperEssays:
HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.
HyperEssays.net hosts four editions of the Essays:
1. A 1598 edition, in middle French, edited by Marie de Gournay. This is a slightly revised version of Gournay’s original edition published in 1595.
2. A complete and searchable edition of John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays, in early modern English.
3. A 1685 translation by Charles Cotton, also in early modern English. Only some chapters of this edition have been copyedited and posted.
4. A complete and searchable modern edition of the Essays based on W. Carew Hazlitt’s 1877 update of Charles Cotton’s translation. I am slowly replacing the Cotton/Hazlitt translation with a contemporary one and adding new notes.My goals with HyperEssays are to provide context and tools for first-time readers of the Essays and to design a lasting resource for all interested in Montaigne’s work.
To that end, I copyedit, update, and annotate the original text and its translations. I tag them for indexing and searching, and format them them for easy reading on smartphones, desktop computers, and tablets. In addition, I prepare and provide free chapter PDFs for offline reading.
[…]Work on HyperEssays started on January 17, 2020 and likely won’t be completed for many years.
This is what the internet is for, and it makes me want to read more Montaigne. (I was too lazy to copy the links for the various editions, but once you click through, there they’ll be.) Via gwint’s MeFi post.
It seemed rather plausible to me that Montaigne might have fallen out of fashion over the last few generations, since his sensibility is “modern” in a very fusty old way (not unlike e.g. Emerson?) that may not resonate in these times of postmodernity and feminism and whatnot. So I thus find it interesting that the google ngram viewer contradicts rather than supports that supposition. Hits for Montaigne (in “English”) decline substantially from a peak in the 1850’s through about 1920 and then are roughly stable until about 1980, but then start a quite substantial climb toward a 2017 recent peak at a frequency last seen in 1862. I have no idea why. I used “Rabelais” as a baseline control, which exhibits a similar pattern from 1920 to 1980 but without a parallel post 1980 climb. I deliberately avoided “Pascal” as a control after realizing I’d probably get a lot of unwanted hits related to the computer language rather than the dead French writer, and for all I know there’s some data-complicating source of not-the-Montaigne-you-were-looking-for hits out there I haven’t figured out?
Very interesting, and heartening for fans of fustiness.
Sarah Bakewell’s book about Montaigne and his writings, How to Live, came out in 2010 and received a good deal of attention. I don’t know how that fits in with the google graph – but it’s an interesting and thoughtful read.
J.W. Brewer
Montaigne got a good write up in Greenblatt’s “The Swerve”, published 2011, on Lucretius, and Greenblatt speculates that Shakespeare may have been influenced by Florio’s translation. I wonder if that might have contributed to the 2017 peak.
“Montaigne” stories on Google News seem to involve mainly the Institut Montaigne, addresses on Avenue Montaigne, or the mononymous Australian singer-songwriter Montaigne.
I guess those are the not-the-Montaigne-you-were-looking-for hits JWB was worried about.