Montaigne's English Journey

Montaigne's English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio's exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. Published in London in 1603, this book was widely read in seventeenth-century England: Shakespeare borrowed from it as he drafted King Lear and The Tempest, and many hundreds of English men and women first encountered Montaigne's tolerant outlook and disarming candour in its densely-printed pages. Literary historians have long been fascinated by the influence of Florio's translation, analysing its contributions to the development of the English essay and tracing its appropriation in the work of Webster, Dryden, and other major writers. William M. Hamlin, by contrast, undertakes an exploration of Florio's Montaigne within the overlapping realms of print and manuscript culture, assessing its importance from the varied perspectives of its earliest English readers. Drawing on letters, diaries, commonplace books, and thousands of marginal annotations inscribed in surviving copies of Florio's volume, Hamlin offers a comprehensive account of the transmission and reception of Montaigne in seventeenth-century England. In particular he focuses on topics that consistently intrigued Montaigne's English readers: sexuality, marriage, conscience, theatricality, scepticism, self-presentation, the nature of wisdom, and the power of custom. All in all, Hamlin's study constitutes a major contribution to investigations of literary readership in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Hamlin's astute assessment of the colorful, controversial John Florio adds another vital dimension to this rich contribution to the history of reading ... Highly recommended. D. M. Moore, Choice Reviews Hamlin's carefully researched book is impressively alive to subtle shifts of register across languages, genres and bibliographical formats. He has uncovered significant amounts of new material, and the thought-provoking insights he makes on almost every page are sure to intertraffique with many early modern disciplines. Daniel Starza Smith, Review of English StudiesIntroduction: Edified by the Margin ; Florio's Theatrical Montaigne ; Sexuality and Censorship in the Essayes ; On the Tyranny of 'Custome': Ideology and Appropriation ; From an English Montaigne to The Dutch Courtesan: Common Customers ; Montaignian Conscience and the Shakespearean God-Surrogate ; Maximising Montaigne ; Afterword: English Readership in the Wake of the Essayes ; Appendix A: British Library, Egerton MS 2982, Folios 22r-29v ; Appendix B: Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.281, Folios 15r-34v ; Appendix C: British Library, Sloane MS 2903, Folios 1r-12r ; Appendix D: Census of Extant Seventeenth-Century Copies of Florio's Montaigne