Abstract
On his 38th birthday in 1571, Montaigne retired from his career as a lawyer of the parlement of Bordeaux, “tired of the burdens of Parliament and public duties,” but “in full vigor,” to dedicate the days left him “to his freedom, his quiet and his leisure” (Introduction to the Essays, Pléiade ed. of 2007, XII; cp. Gessmann 1997:11).
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Notes
- 1.
Latin numbers followed by Arab ones in the brackets in the text refer to the books and chapters of the Essays of the 1962 ed.; the following numbers refer to the same 1962 edition. Sometimes (like in the next bracket) I add the page numbers of the 2007 edition. Translations are by Cotton unless indicated otherwise. I use this translation despite its insufficiencies (and at times different chapter numbering) because it translates Gournay’s edition (also used in the 2007 edition of Montaigne), rather than the later found so-called Bordeaux copy, preferred in the first half of the 20th century and used by the more recent translation by Donald Frame . Cp. Bakewell 2010:303–307.
- 2.
Bakewell 2010, by the title of her book (How to Live) indicates this similarity.
- 3.
Yet he does not always do so. Thus, in a note Augustine (1887a Chap. 15) assents to Paul saying that “in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells.”
- 4.
Augustine (Contra duas, III:5, 14; from Connolly 2014:79) allowed “intercourse not only for the sake of offspring, but also for the sake of pleasure.”
- 5.
This is probably an allusion to Bernard of Clairvaux’ words “I love because I love.”
References
Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne, New York: Other Press 2010.
Davidson, Herbert A. Moses Maimonides. The Man and his Works, New York: Oxford UP 2005.
Gessmann, Martin. Montaigne und die Moderne, Hamburg: Meiner 1997.
Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity. From Kierkegaard to Camus, London: Routledge 1995.
Maimonides, Moses. The Guide for the Perplexed, tr. M. Friedländer, New York: Dover 1956.
Steinvorth, Ulrich. Pride and Authenticity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2016.
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Steinvorth, U. (2017). Montaigne’s Authenticity. In: Secularization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63871-3_7
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