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Michel de Montaigne (1533 1592) is famous for shutting himself away in a book-lined tower in 1572 and assaying his thoughts and opinions, essentially attempting to discover what, if anything, he really knew about himself and the human condition. Descartes attempted the same sort of venture in 1637 in his three Discourses, prefaced by his celebrated Discourse on Method, in which his starting point was that all he knew for certain was that he existed, and systematically climbed his way out of a pit of epistemological doubt.

Montaigne's Essays, being a catalogue of his sober reflections on everything under the sun, began as a self-help cure for a bout of melancholy, and flowered in all directions, in the manner of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy in the next century. These were all men of the European Renaissance, and we can see in them the effects of the collapse of medieval certainties, the growing pains as the modern world struggled to throw off the fetters of centuries of dogmatism and restricted intellectual freedoms.

Montaigne's title for the book is actually Essais de Michel de Montaigne, which is translated as Essays. The word Essais has two meanings in French, as the work of an apprentice, and as an assay in the chemical sense as applied to character, namely an analysis of the writer, the plumbing of his personality and constituent parts. Montaigne is analysing himself, but is not claiming to have produced his masterpiece.

The Essays were originally arranged into two books, though a third one followed later as his ideas developed and proliferated. Each book contains many chapters, each of which in turn contains many assays. They are strewn with quotations from the Latin poets, for Latin was the language he was most at ease with. The original intention seems to have been to write a history of ideas, mainly referring to the ancients, but as he wrote about Socrates and other thinkers and compared them with his own opinions and convictions, he gradually came to realise that what he was really doing was studying himself, Michel de Montaigne, and obeying the injunction of the Delphic Oracle, Know Thyself.

With a background in diplomacy and public service (he was twice elected Mayor of Bordeaux), Montaigne considered himself a gentleman rather than a scholar, and prized honest inquiry above word play and displays of showy verbosity. So there is in his Essays a strong sense of someone honestly probing into what man really is, and looking for advice concerning how to live and die.

The complete Essays is a very thick volume (almost 1,300 pages in the 1987 translation for Penguin Classics by MA Screech). The chapters are not arranged in their order of composition, and various consecutive entries within them were written at widely different times but were left undated. Recent translators and editors have introduced paragraphs, references and punctuation to make the work more digestible for modern taste and the result is a work of endless fascination to anyone with an interest in self knowledge and human nature.

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