Lectures de Montaigne

The Confessions of Montaigne

Montaigne rarely repented and he viewed confession—both juridical and ecclesiastical—with skepticism. Confession, Montaigne believed, forced a mode of self-representation onto the speaker that was inevitably distorting. Repentance, moreover, made claims about self-transformation that Montaigne found improbable. This article traces these themes in the context of Montaigne‘s Essays, with particul...

Lectures on Galen's De sectis

W. J. SHEILS (editor), The Church and healing, (Studies in Church History, No. 19), Oxford, Basil Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1982, 8vo, pp. xxiv, 440, £19.50. This collection of essays represents a thoughtful, stimulating, and generally successful cooperative attempt by medical and ecclesiastical historians to study an important topic, the relationship between the Christi...

Lectures

Innovation as Spiritual Exercise: Montaigne and Pascal

The rediscovery of the rhetorical tradition in the past thirty years has transformed the study of early modern authors like Montaigne and Pascal. The categories of traditional literary history, like originality, influence, predecessors, and followers, are now seen as inadequate when it comes to explaining how Montaigne and Pascal thought of themselves as authors and how they understood the proc...

Montaigne and the Coherence of Eclecticism1

Since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s essays on ancient philosophy by Arnold Davidson in 1995,2 Michel Foucault’s late work on ‘‘the care of the self’’3 has appeared in a new light. We now know that Hadot’s work was familiar to Foucault as early as the 1950s.4 It is also clear that Foucault’s notion of ‘‘techniques of the self’’ is very close to what Hadot calls ‘‘spiritual exercises.’’ At th...