The Complete Essays (M.A. Screech translation)
Michel de Montaigne · 1991
The M.A. Screech translation (Penguin) is the most scholarly and annotated English Montaigne. Essential for readers who want to understand the classical, biblical, and contemporary references saturating the *Essays*. A different experience from Frame (entry #1). Both deserve shelf space.
The case against
Montaigne rambles by design, and thirteen hundred pages of design is still thirteen hundred pages: essays whose titles promise one subject and deliver six, half-buried under Latin quotation. Screech annotates everything, dutifully, and his donnish English runs cooler than Frame's; you gain scholarship and lose some of the company. A bedside book that punishes completists.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
