Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean ed. by Neal Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean ed. by Neal Kenny, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams James P. Gilroy Kenny, Neal, Richard Scholar, and Wes Williams, eds. Montaigne in Transit: Essays in Honour of Ian Maclean. Legenda, 2016. ISBN 978-1-909662-96-4. Pp. 266. This is a collection of fourteen essays by British scholars, with an introduction by the editors and an afterword by the honoree Ian Maclean. The theme of transit in various forms—intertextuality, the coming into being of a literary text, movement, [End Page 256] transition—is the common thread linking these different but enlightening studies. The editors speak of the theme of movement in the Essais and define it as"the 'transit' of his work through time, space, language, discipline, and genre. [...] The concept of 'transit' is here seen as a complex of processes, ranging from 'genesis' and 'production' to 'diffusion' and 'reception'" (2). A sampling from the whole collection must suffice. Terence Cave writes of Montaigne's love of poetry. For him erotic Latin poetry was a mode of cognition. Its language possessed a sensory, embodied quality which he strove to emulate in his own writing about both his mental and physical life. Rowan Tomlinson studies the parallel openness to eclectic and universal knowledge displayed by Montaigne and the fifteenth-century Florentine humanist Angelo Poliziano. Both shared Pliny the Elder's opinion that some benefit can be derived from every book, even a bad one. Both also transformed ideas gleaned from earlier writers into an exploration and definition of their own unique individualities. Chimène Bateman analyzes the themes of marriage and friendship in Montaigne. He glorifies the latter while voicing reservations about the former, using terms usually associated with marriage to describe his friendship for Étienne de la Boétie. He felt that friendship allows a freer expression of the self than marriage does and viewed women as Other. Frank Lestringant cites Montaigne's description of his essays as a kind of mental and physical excrement. Lestringant sees this as an example of Montaigne's theme of the vanity of all things human and our intermediate status between the spiritual and the bestial. Travel itself, a form of vanity, is an emblem of the universal voyage toward mourning and death. Emma Herdman looks into Montaigne's frequent quotations of ancient Latin works without identifying their sources. What might seem like borrowings of others' ideas actually become something original in the new context in which he places them. She also points out how he strikes a balance between the castigating invective of Juvenal inspired by France's religious wars and the more gentle, self-critical satire of Horace, more in keeping with his generally broad-minded outlook. Colin Burrows offers an insightful analysis of the ways Shakespeare put to use his readings of Montaigne. The playwright deconstructed the complexities of Montaigne's thoughts into their component parts, separating general principles from individual experiences. He then divided these parts among different characters as their voices. Burrows also shows how Shakespeare adopted a playful, contentious approach to his borrowings, similar in spirit to Montaigne's citations from ancient writers. Shakespeare often put the ideas of Montaigne into the mouths of fools. Montaignian themes also furnished Shakespeare with material for philosophical discussions at moments in his plays when action has stopped but emotions are intense. [End Page 257] James P. Gilroy University of Denver Copyright © 2018 American Association of Teachers of French