Montaigne Publishes the Essays

1580

The melancholy Gascon gentleman Michel de Montaigne published the first two books of his Essais, a new literary form that wandered from cannibalism to horsemanship to the smell of old men. Every educated European began copying him. The modern essay had found its first practitioner, skeptical, chatty, and witty. His question Que sais-je? established the essay as a literary form and skeptical self-inquiry as a philosophical method.