Roundtable: The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Warren Boutcher’s The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2016) is a ground-breaking examination of the evolution and reception of Montaigne’s Essays in the period when the text was first conceived, edited, and promoted in France; an extended study of its reception in crucial early modern European geographical and cultural sites — Switzerland, Italy, England, and the Low Countries; and an analysis of Montaigne’s legacy as mediated through readers and re-writers of the Essays, translations, editorial praxes, and the critical approaches of the last century that have developed out of and in reaction to these. This roundtable will focus on the resulting “school of Montaigne”, a literate, mobile, and transnational community of inquiry engaged with the Essays but unencumbered by the conventions or strictures of institutionally constituted knowledge, an academy without walls expressed in print and manuscript through varied textual interventions, each of them historically specific and socially embedded.

Sub Unit

• RSA Annual Meeting

Organizer

• Michael W. Wyatt, Independent Scholar

Chair

• Anne E. B. Coldiron, University of St Andrews

Discussants

• Lars Engle, University of Tulsa

• Timothy Hampton, University of California, Berkeley

• George P. Hoffmann, University of Michigan

• Virginia Krause, Brown University

• Eric MacPhail, Indiana University

• Michael W. Wyatt, Independent Scholar