Source:  19th Shop.com

FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH. John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays is the most important Elizabethan translation of any continental or classical text. The influence of Florio’s Montaigne on English writers and thinkers of the time was immense. Shakespeare’s considerable debt to Florio’s Montaigne is well-documented: King Lear andThe Tempest in particular owe much to Florio. “Upon his version of Montaigne’s Essays[Florio] exhausted his gifts and lavished his temperament…. Turn where you will in his translation, and you will find flowers of speech” (Cambridge History of English and American Literature).

“The brilliance of Florio’s achievement was so generally acknowledged that even those English readers with very good command of French – John Donne, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and Robert Burton, to name a few – chose to encounter Montaigne through Florio’s English. To read the Essays in Florio’s translation is to read them, as it were, over the shoulders of some of England’s greatest writers” (Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Montaigne).

The Essays of Montaigne is the first collection of essays, a literary form that Montaigne invented to express his personal convictions and meditations. Montaigne’s Essays are the “consummate representation of the enlightened scepticism of the sixteenth century.”The essay is “a form in which he can hardly be said to have been anticipated. The most elaborate essay, Apologie de Raimonde Sebonde, is second to no other modern writing in attacking fanaticism and pleading for tolerance” (PMM).

“His influence pervaded three centuries and four continents … Montaigne was the grandfather, as Bayle was the father of the Enlightenment. Through him the psychological analysis of mind entered into French literature, from Corneille and Moliere, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere to Anatole France. Thoreau took much at this fountainhead, and Emerson bathed himself in it before writing his own essays. Of Montaigne, as of few authors before the eighteenth century, it may be said that he is read today as if he had written yesterday” (Will and Ariel Durant , The Age of Reason Begins).

This is an exceptionally appealing copy in its original Elizabethan binding with a crowned Tudor rose and laurel leaves. The Folger Shakespeare Library has two bindings with very similar crowned Tudor rose and laurel medallions (Cicero, Three Bookes of Duties, London, 1596, and Certain Sermons, London, 1595), both without the I.S. initials.This splendid volume is an excellent, tall copy measuring 11½ x 7½ inches. The better of the two Pforzheimer copies of the 1503 Montaigne, also in contemporary calf with a center medallion, has identical dimensions.

High-quality examples of Florio’s Montaigne in period bindings have become rare in the market. The last example in a contemporary binding without extensive restoration was the Berland copy (2001).

Grolier/English 102. Pforzheimer 378. Printing and the Mind of Man 95 (French). STC 18041.

$30,000   (Click link for more information)

“Montaigne’s essays have scriptural status, competing with the Bible, the Koran, Dante, and Shakespeare” – Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

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