In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne
  • Richard Scholar
Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne. Edited by Philippe Desan. Revised and expanded edition. (Dictionnaires et références, 14). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007. 1264 pp. Hb €175.00.

This dictionary offers, in 749 entries by 120 contributors, a wealth of information on all things relating to Montaigne. Although it announces itself as 'une somme des études montaignistes jusqu'à ce jour' (p. 11), it is necessarily selective, choosing to foreground the biographical and material contexts of the Essais as fundamental to historical, philosophical, and literary interpretations of the text. Particular attention is paid to five areas: the lives and works of Montaigne and his associates; the author's use in the Essais of the various philosophical and literary sources and traditions at his disposal; key terms and notions of the Essais; the text's editorial history since its first publication in 1580; and its continuous — and continuing — reception history. The result is a miscellany worthy of the Essais themselves: entries such as 'Peste' and 'Pétrarque', 'Société des Amis de Montaigne' and 'Socrates', rub shoulders. Most of the entries are of high quality. The weaker ones can be rather impenetrable, taking for granted the intrinsic interest of the topic in question and assuming in their reader a good deal of prior knowledge. And because the titles chosen for the entries, and the useful system of cross-referencing deployed, are not uniformly successful, some of the information in the dictionary is not always easy to track down. The entry on the medal that Montaigne had struck in 1576, bearing on one of its sides the visual emblem of a level pair of scales and a motto of the Pyrrhonians (epecho, 'I hold back'), is a case in point. It offers a fascinating glimpse of the object world surrounding Montaigne's famous encounter with the radical doubt of Pyrrhonist scepticism in the pages of the Essais, but the entry is signalled only by the historically accurate yet rather obscure term 'Jeton', making it rather more of a hidden treasure than it might otherwise have been. Those who know what they are looking for, or are prepared to browse, will nonetheless find that the Dictionnaire offers both instruction and food for thought on most of its many pages. The editor's decision to privilege the quality of the entries over their quantity is to be applauded: it allows the contributors the space not only to produce a digest of the scholarship on a given topic, but also to offer a personal view, and this means that, at their best, the entries perform brief exercises in critical interpretation and analysis. The Dictionnaire attests the continuing diversity and vitality of work on Montaigne as well as its distinguished history. It supersedes Eva Marcu's Répertoire des idées de Montaigne (Geneva: Droz, 1965) and deserves a place, alongside Roy E. Leake's Concordance des Essais' de Montaigne (Geneva: Droz, 1981), among the indispensable works of reference available to those working on Montaigne. [End Page 88]

Richard Scholar
Oriel College, Oxford
...

pdf

Share