Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne was born in a château near Bordeaux to a family newly rich from fish and wine. His father educated him oddly: fostered with peasants after birth, then, back home, permitted to hear only Latin, so that he knew no French before six. He studied law at Bordeaux, served thirteen years as a magistrate, and in 1571, at thirty-eight, retired to the tower of the family château, carved maxims on its beams and began to write.

The Essays have no system; the subjects run from cannibals to thumbs, from friendship to coaches, but the real subject is one: the author. I portray not being but passing, he wrote; my book is consubstantial with me. He studied his own habits, body, fears and contradictions, and the more particular he became the nearer he came to universal human nature. Reading Sextus Empiricus threw him into a sceptical crisis; he struck a medal bearing 'What do I know?', and the Apology for Raymond Sebond is the summit of Renaissance scepticism.

He was no hermit. In 1580 he travelled through Italy, was then elected mayor of Bordeaux and served two terms, and during the wars of religion moved between Catholic and Protestant camps as a mediator. He suffered kidney stones for years and wrote the pain into the book. The Essays influenced Bacon, Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson and Nietzsche and founded the essay as a form. Shakespeare read Florio's English translation, and a passage of The Tempest is almost copied from it.