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Michel De Montaigne Biography & Facts

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne ( mon-TAYN; French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), commonly known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written. During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ''Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in modern French). Biography Family, childhood and education Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy. His great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant - and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time, and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his father's family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins, while his mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism. His maternal grandfather, Pedro López, from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family, that had converted to Catholicism. His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France. During a great part of Montaigne's life his mother lived near him, and even survived him; but she is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father however is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays. Montaigne's education began in early childhood, and followed a pedagogical plan, that his father had developed, refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help". After these first spartan years Montaigne was brought back to the château. Another objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus, who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin, and they also were given strict orders always to speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he employed; and thus they acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books. The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing engendered in him a spirit of "liberty and delight" - that he would later describe as making him "relish...duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint". His father had a musician wake him every morning, playing one instrument or another; and an epinettier (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing tunes to alleviate boredom and tiredness. Around the year 1539 Montaigne was sent to study at a highly regarded boarding school in Bordeaux, the College of Guienne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He finished the first phase of his educational studies at the College of Guienne in 1546. He then began his study of law (his alma mater remains unknown, since there are no certainties about his activity from 1546 to 1557) and entered a career in the local legal system. Career and marriage Montaigne was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux, and in 1557 he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux, a high court. From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX, and he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of Saint Michael. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became a very close friend of the humanist poet Étienne de La Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame - in his introduction to The Complete Essays of Montaigne - that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate", after losing Étienne, he began the Essais as a new "means of communication", and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend". Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, probably in an arranged marriage. She was the daughter and niece of wealthy merchants of Toulouse and Bordeaux. They had six daughters, but only the second-born, Léonor, survived infancy. He wrote very little about the relationship with his wife, and little is known about their marriage. Of his daughter Léonor he wrote: "All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more, without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones." His daughter married François de la Tour and later Charles de Gamaches. She had a daughter by each. Writing Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's Theologia naturalis, which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (in 1595 Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum because of its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). Montaigne also published a posthumous edition of the works of his friend, Boétie. In 1570 he moved back to the family estate, the Château de Montaigne, which he had inherited. He thus became the Lord of Montaigne. Around this tim.... Discover the Michel De Montaigne popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Michel De Montaigne books.