Michel de Montaigne Montaigne, Michel de Author Tyler Abbot Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Tyler Abbot, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Literature and the Arts Florio, John (1553–1625) Translation Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Tyler Abbott Tyler Abbott

Tyler Abbott was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
His Life

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) grew up in France with all of the wealth and privilege afforded to a young man of noble birth. His father had acquired nobility after fighting in Italy and came back to France with the intention of living a life inspired by classical values. As a result, he sought to educate his family in all that ancient Rome and Greece had to offer. Montaigne learned Latin as a young child, his German tutor speaking no other language to him on the order of his father. Classical thought and wisdom became essential parts of his life, and, in his later age, after having retired from public life, he studied Greek and Roman authors intensively, going so far as to have pieces of their sayings carved into the beams of his library.

Although Montaigne sought a private life, his vast learning and wealth made it difficult to avoid the public eye. In 1571, after the death of a close friend that left him deeply distraught and with a desire to retire from the public sphere, he was awarded the decoration of the Order of Saint-Michel. This distinction was even more unusual because of the recentness of his family’s nobility. Admired in the French royal court, Montaigne was also called on repeatedly to arbitrate between religious factions over the deepening crisis between Protestants and Catholics. Later, while being treated at thermal springs in Italy for kidney stones, he was elected Mayor of Bordeaux. All of these responsibilities, along with the responsibility of taking care of his large inherited estate, made it difficult for him to focus on his chosen calling: meditating on life through the writing of his famed Essais.

Essais

Every student who has ever had to write an essay can thank—or curse—Montaigne. In his work Essais, published in France in three separate editions between 1580 and 1595, Montaigne created the essay genre by examining with deep erudition a vast variety of seemingly random topics. The title, Essais, comes from the French word to attempt or weigh and is appropriate for the philosophical and literary style which Montaigne brought to the exploration of things like Liars, Coaching, and The Lame or Cripple.

The Essais, or Essays as they are known in English, are remarkable for not only their depth of learning and variety of ideas, but for the marked skepticism which Montaigne displays. Montaigne was deeply concerned about the apparent corruption, disillusionment, and violence that characterized 16th century Europe and saw many of these problems as stemming from an inability to discern truth from falsehood. His Essays are written in a spirit of truth-seeking but begin from a position of skepticism which involves the dismantling of commonly held truths like the superiority of man over animals or Western Europeans over the barbarians of other continents (Foglia et al).

Influence on Early Modern England

While a few copies of Montaigne’s Essais made it to England in their original French, they were not widely read outside of elite circles (which included thinkers like Sir Francis Bacon). It wasn’t until they were translated into English by John Florio that they were circulated to a wider audience of readers which included authors as Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Florio, an Anglo-Italian who spent most of his youth in an assortment of places in Europe before coming back to England (where he was born), was fluent in Italian and French, but his translations of Montaigne’s Essays are unique in that he takes quite a few liberties with the original text while also deploying a style of English both eloquent and diverse. So widely read in the early 17th century did his translations become, that much of the English idea of Montaigne at the time was shaped by Florio.

The most famous example of Montaigne’s ideas seeping into Elizabethan culture can be found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Act 2, Gonzalo is describing his perfect utopia and says that: I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all, And women too, but innocent and pure; (Shakespeare 2.1.162–170)

This statement is not original to Shakespeare but can be found in Montaigne’s essay on Caniballes where he says: It is a nation, would I answere Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no vse of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kinred, but common, no apparrell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no vse of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulation, covetousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst— them.

A quick comparison of the two shows that Shakespeare must have had Montaigne’s essay either right in front of him or fresh in mind while he penned Gonzalo’s lines in The Tempest. This isn’t the only place in The Tempest which mirrors Montaigne’s essay and there are many scholarly disputes on how great an influence Montaigne actually had on the writings of Shakespeare.

Key Print Sources Go, Kenji. Montaigne’s <title level="a">Cannibals and The Tempest Revisited. Studies in Philology vol. 109, no. 4, July 2012, pp. 455–473. Hamlin, William M. Florio’s Montaigne and the Tyranny of <quote>Custome</quote>: Appropriation, Ideology, and Early English Readership of the Essayes. Renaissance Quarterly vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, p. 491.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Montaigne. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/new%20knowledge/montaigne.html. Accessed 5 Jul. 2024. Foglia, Marc, and Emiliano Ferrari. Michel de Montaigne. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 20 Nov. 2019. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/montaigne/. Sankovitch, Tilde A. Michel de Montaigne. Encyclopedia Britannica. 23 Apr. 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-de-Montaigne. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. The Folger SHAKESPEARE. Folger Shakespeare Library, 12 Nov. 2019. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/read/.