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Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (;〔("Montaigne" ). ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.〕 ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592) was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes〔His anecdotes are 'casual' only in appearance; Montaigne writes: 'Neither my anecdotes nor my quotations are always employed simply as examples, for authority, or for ornament...They often carry, off the subject under discussion, the seed of a richer and more daring matter, and they resonate obliquely with a more delicate tone,' Michel de Montaigne, ''Essais'', Pléiade, Paris (ed. A. Thibaudet) 1937, Bk. 1, ch.40, p. 252 (tr. Charles Rosen)〕 and autobiography with serious intellectual insight; his massive volume ''Essais'' (translated literally as "Attempts" or "Trials") contains some of the most influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers all over the world, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes,〔Buckley, Michael J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism, Yale UP, 1990, p. 69.〕 Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt,〔Kinnaird, John, ''William Hazlitt: Critic of Power'', Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 274.〕 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer,〔from ''Truth Imagined'', memoir by Eric Hoffer.〕 Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare. In his own lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would come to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "''Que sçay-je''?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; directly rendered ''Que sais-je?'' in modern French). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling. ==Life== Montaigne was born in the Aquitaine region of France, on the family estate Château de Montaigne, in a town now called Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, close to Bordeaux. The family was very wealthy; his great-grandfather, Ramon Felipe Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur of Montaigne, was a French Catholic soldier in Italy for a time and had also been the mayor of Bordeaux. Although there were several families bearing the patronym "Eyquem" in Guyenne, his family is thought to have had some degree of Marrano (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish) origins.〔Sophie Jama, ''L’Histoire Juive de Montaigne'' (Jewish History of Montaigne'' ), Paris, Flammarion, 2001, page 76.〕 His mother, Antoinette López de Villanueva, was a convert to Protestantism.〔"His mother was a Jewish Protestant, his father a Catholic who achieved wide culture as well as a considerable fortune." ''Civilization,'' Kenneth Clark, (Harper & Row: 1969), p. 161.〕 His maternal grandfather, Pedro Lopez, from Zaragoza, was from a wealthy Marrano (Sephardic Jewish) family who had converted to Catholicism.〔''Introduction: Montaigne's Life and Times'', in ''Apology for Raymond Sebond'', By Michel de Montaigne (Roger Ariew), (Hackett: 2003), page iv: "Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 at the chateau de Montagine (about 30 miles east of Bordeaux), the son of Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, and Antoinette de Louppes (or Lopez), who came from a wealthy (originally Iberian) Jewish family".〕〔"...the family of Montaigne's mother, Antoinette de Louppes (Lopez) of Toulouse, was of Spanish Jewish origin...." ''The Complete Essays of Montaigne'', Translated by Donald M. Frame, "Introduction," page vii ff., Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1989 ISBN 0-8047-0486-4〕 His maternal grandmother, Honorette Dupuy, was from a Catholic family in Gascony, France. His mother lived a great part of Montaigne's life near him, and even survived him, but is mentioned only twice in his essays. Montaigne's relationship with his father, however, is frequently reflected upon and discussed in his essays. Montaigne's education began in early childhood and followed a pedagogical plan that his father had developed refined by the advice of the latter's humanist friends. Soon after his birth, Montaigne was brought to a small cottage, where he lived the first three years of life in the sole company of a peasant family, in order to, according to the elder Montaigne, "draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help".〔Montaigne. ''Essays'', III, 13〕 After these first spartan years, Montaigne was brought back to the château. The objective was for Latin to become his first language. The intellectual education of Montaigne was assigned to a German tutor (a doctor named Horstanus who could not speak French). His father hired only servants who could speak Latin and they also were given strict orders to always speak to the boy in Latin. The same rule applied to his mother, father, and servants, who were obliged to use only Latin words he himself employed, and thus acquired a knowledge of the very language his tutor taught him. Montaigne's Latin education was accompanied by constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation. He was familiarized with Greek by a pedagogical method that employed games, conversation, and exercises of solitary meditation, rather than the more traditional books. The atmosphere of the boy's upbringing, although designed by highly refined rules taken under advisement by his father, created in the boy's life the spirit of "liberty and delight" to "make me relish... duty by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion...without any severity or constraint"; yet he would have everything to take advantage of his freedom. And so a musician woke him every morning, playing one instrument or another, and an ''épinettier'' (with a zither) was the constant companion to Montaigne and his tutor, playing a tune to alleviate boredom and tiredness. Around the year 1539, Montaigne was sent to study at a prestigious boarding school in Bordeaux, the Collège de Guyenne, then under the direction of the greatest Latin scholar of the era, George Buchanan, where he mastered the whole curriculum by his thirteenth year. He then began his study of law in Toulouse in 1546 and entered a career in the local legal system. He was a counselor of the Court des Aides of Périgueux and, in 1557, he was appointed counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux (a high court). From 1561 to 1563 he was courtier at the court of Charles IX; he was present with the king at the siege of Rouen (1562). He was awarded the highest honour of the French nobility, the collar of the Order of St. Michael, something to which he aspired from his youth. While serving at the Bordeaux Parlement, he became very close friends with the humanist poet Étienne de la Boétie, whose death in 1563 deeply affected Montaigne. It has been suggested by Donald M. Frame, in his introduction to ''The Complete Essays of Montaigne'' that because of Montaigne's "imperious need to communicate" after losing Étienne, he began the ''Essais'' as his "means of communication" and that "the reader takes the place of the dead friend".〔Frame, Donald (translator). ''The Complete Essays of Montaigne.'' 1958. p.v.〕 Montaigne wed Françoise de la Cassaigne in 1565, not of his own free will but by prearrangement and under pressure from his family; they had six daughters, but only the second-born survived childhood. Following the petition of his father, Montaigne started to work on the first translation of the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond's ''Theologia naturalis'', which he published a year after his father's death in 1568 (In 1595, Sebond's Prologue was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for its declaration that the Bible is not the only source of revealed truth). After this, he inherited the family's estate, the Château de Montaigne, to which he moved back in 1570, thus becoming the Lord of Montaigne. Another literary accomplishment was Montaigne's posthumous edition of his friend Boétie's works. In 1571, he retired from public life to the Tower of the Château, his so-called "citadel", in the Dordogne, where he almost totally isolated himself from every social and family affair. Locked up in his library, which contained a collection of some 1,500 works, he began work on his ''Essais'' ("Essays"), first published in 1580. On the day of his 38th birthday, as he entered this almost ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion, he had the following inscription crown the bookshelves of his working chamber: In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.〔As cited by Richard L. Regosin, ‘Montaigne and His Readers', in Denis Hollier (ed.) ''A New History of French Literature'', Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 1995, pp. 248–252, p. 249. The Latin original runs: 'An. Christi 1571 aet. 38, pridie cal. mart., die suo natali, Mich. Montanus, servitii aulici et munerum publicorum jamdudum pertaesus, dum se integer in doctarum virginum recessit sinus, ubi quietus et omnium securus (quan)tillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii: si modo fata sinunt exigat istas sedes et dulces latebras, avitasque, libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit.' as cited in Helmut Pfeiffer, 'Das Ich als Haushalt:Montaignes ökonomische Politik’, in Rudolf Behrens,Roland Galle (eds.) ''Historische Anthropologie und Literatur:Romanistische Beträge zu einem neuen Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft'', Königshausen und Neumann, Würzburg, 1995 pp. 69–90 p. 75〕 During this time of the Wars of Religion in France, Montaigne, a Roman Catholic, acted as a moderating force, respected both by the Catholic King Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In 1578, Montaigne, whose health had always been excellent, started suffering from painful kidney stones, a sickness he had inherited from his father's family. Throughout this illness, he would have nothing to do with doctors or drugs.〔 From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, partly in search of a cure, establishing himself at Bagni di Lucca where he took the waters. His journey was also a pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loreto, to which he presented a silver relief depicting himself and his wife and daughter kneeling before the Madonna, considering himself fortunate that it should be hung on a wall within the shrine.〔Edward Chaney, ''The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance'', 2nd ed. (London, 2000), p. 89.〕 He kept a fascinating journal recording regional differences and customs and a variety of personal episodes, including the dimensions of the stones he succeeded in ejecting from his bladder. This was published much later, in 1774, after its discovery in a trunk which is displayed in his tower.〔''Montaigne's Travel Journal'', translated with an introduction by Donald M. Frame and foreword by Guy Davenport, San Francisco, 1983〕 During Montaigne's visit to the Vatican, as he described in his travel journal, the ''Essais'' were examined by Sisto Fabri who served as Master of the Sacred Palace under Pope Gregory XIII. After Fabri examined Montaigne's ''Essais'' the text was returned to its author on 20 March 1581. Montaigne had apologized for references to the pagan notion of "fortuna" as well as for writing favorably of Julian the Apostate and of heretical poets, and was released to follow his own conscience in making emendations to the text.〔''Treccani.it, L'encicolpedia Italiana, (Dizionario Biografico'' ). Accessed 10 August 2013〕 While in the city of Lucca in 1581, he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux; he returned and served as mayor. He was re-elected in 1583 and served until 1585, again moderating between Catholics and Protestants. The plague broke out in Bordeaux toward the end of his second term in office, in 1585. In 1586, the plague and the Wars of Religion prompted him to leave his château for two years.〔 Montaigne continued to extend, revise, and oversee the publication of ''Essais''. In 1588 he wrote its third book and also met the writer Marie de Gournay, who admired his work and later edited and published it. Montaigne called her his adopted daughter. King Henry III was assassinated in 1589, and Montaigne then helped to keep Bordeaux loyal to Henry of Navarre, who would go on to become King Henry IV. Montaigne died of quinsy at the age of 59, in 1592 at the Château de Montaigne. The disease in his case "brought about paralysis of the tongue",〔Montaigne, Michel de, ''Essays of Michel de Montaigne'', tr. Charles Cotton, ed. William Carew Hazlitt, 1877, "The Life of Montaigne" in v. 1. n.p., Kindle edition.〕 and he had once said "the most fruitful and natural play of the mind is conversation. I find it sweeter than any other action in life; and if I were forced to choose, I think I would rather lose my sight than my hearing and voice."〔"The Autobiography of Michel De Montaign", translated, introduced, and edited by Marvin Lowenthal, David R. Godine Publishing, p. 165〕 Remaining in possession of all his other faculties, he requested mass, and died during the celebration of that mass.〔"Biographical Note", Encyclopedia Britannica "Great Books of the Western World", Vol. 25, p. vi "Montaigne"〕 He was buried nearby. Later his remains were moved to the church of Saint Antoine at Bordeaux. The church no longer exists: it became the Convent des Feuillants, which has also disappeared.〔Bakewell, Sarah. ''How to Live – or – A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer'' (2010), pp. 325–6, p. 365 (n. 325).〕 The Bordeaux Tourist Office says that Montaigne is buried at the Musée Aquitaine, Faculté des Lettres, Université Bordeaux 3 Michel de Montaigne, Pessac. His heart is preserved in the parish church of Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne. The humanities branch of the University of Bordeaux is named after him: . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michel de Montaigne」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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