Assaigs

At the age of thirty-nine, Michel de Montaigne (Perigord, 1533-1592) retired to the library of his castle to begin a work that he would not leave until his death and that started a new literary genre: the essay Son of humanism and the cultural and artistic desire of the Renaissance, Montaigne believed that knowledge should allow man to learn in order to live and die peacefully. In this sense, his Essays manifest a lucid penetration that reveals, in addition to a curiosity for all the expressions of human nature, a constant power of understanding, spiritual calm and independence. A man of vast erudition and literary culture, Montaigne uses the readings of the classics to interweave his reflections, with a flat style that gives the work a conversational tone. The Essays have been and still are an indispensable reference point of European culture. Insistently quoted and discussed for centuries, they constitute the model of a way of doing and thinking that, alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes, inaugurates modernity.