The Essays of Michel de Montaigne Online - HyperEssays<br>Menu

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Early Modern English (Florio)<br>Search tips<br>Short searches  — one or two words — work better than long ones.<br>The search target option, located below the Search the Essays box, sets which edition to search. Contemporary English is the default option.<br>Search is case-insensitive .<br>Some articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs have been removed from our index and return no results on their own. They are included when searching for phrases.<br>Search works exclusively on the text of the Essays, not on the whole website.

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HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.<br>HyperEssays.net hosts four editions of the Essays:<br>A 1598 edition, in middle French, edited by Marie de Gournay. This is a slightly revised version of Gournay’s original edition published in 1595.<br>A complete and searchable edition of John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays, in early modern English.<br>A 1685 translation by Charles Cotton, also in early modern English. Only some chapters of this edition have been copyedited and posted.<br>A complete and searchable modern edition of the Essays based on W. Carew Hazlitt’s 1877 update of Charles Cotton’s translation. I am slowly replacing the Cotton/Hazlitt translation with a contemporary one and adding new notes.<br>My goals with HyperEssays are to provide context and tools for first-time readers of the Essays and to design a lasting resource for all interested in Montaigne’s work.<br>To that end, I copyedit, update, and annotate the original text and its translations. I tag them for indexing and searching, and format them for easy reading on smartphones, desktop computers, and tablets. In addition, I prepare and provide free chapter PDFs for offline reading.<br>You can help make HyperEssays a reliable online resource by supporting this project. With your contribution, this site can continue to grow and remain free and accessible to all.<br>What are the Essays about?<br>The Essays is not a single, cohesive book but a collection of short and long pieces on various subjects such as religion, horses, friendship, sleep, law, or suicide, which Montaigne wrote over more than twenty years . His goals for the book and the circumstances under which he worked on it changed over time .<br>The first edition, published in 1580, comprised two books. Eight years later, an updated edition included hundreds of revisions and a new, third book. By the time of his death, in 1592, Montaigne had planned many more changes, which were in­cor­po­rat­ed in the first posthumous edition of 1595.<br>So, while you can read the Essays from beginning to end, starting with Montaigne’s address To the Reader, you can also follow John Cage’s advice and “begin any­where. ”<br>Pick from a selection of some of the most well-known chapters:<br>To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,<br>On the Education of Children,<br>On Friendship,<br>On Cannibals,<br>On Books,<br>Apology for Raymond Sebond,<br>On Some Verses of Virgil,<br>On Coaches,<br>On Experience.<br>Or look at the table of contents and let your curiosity guide you.<br>Who was Michel de Montaigne?<br>Michel de Montaigne, the author of the Essays, is often described as a sixteenth-century French philosopher. But was Montaigne actually a philosopher? And did he really retire from the world to write in solitude for years, as is commonly believed?<br>In On Montaigne, I address these questions and provide biographical context to better understand the Essays. The companion timeline provides a chronological overview of his life.<br>If you want to learn more about him, I recommend these four biographies of Montaigne (along with two modern translations of the Essays). Each one is engaging but written with a different audience in mind.<br>Recent updates<br>Copyediting, translating, writing notes, updating metadata … the work never ends. This is HyperEssays’s work log, a list of the chapters I’ve been working on:<br>Jan 8, 2026 · On Cato the Younger<br>Jan 7, 2026 · Cowardice, Mother of Cruelty<br>Jan 7, 2026 · On Cruelty<br>Jan 5, 2026 · On Some Verses of Virgil<br>Jan 5, 2026 · On Friendship<br>Dec 26, 2025 · On the Power of Imagination<br>Nov 20, 2025 · On Some Verses of Virgil<br>Nov 20, 2025 · On Cannibals<br>Nov 18, 2025 · Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin<br>Nov 18, 2025 · By Various Ways We Arrive at the Same End<br>Nov 18, 2025 · On Cannibals<br>Nov 16, 2025 · The Author to the Reader<br>Work on HyperEssays started on January 17, 2020 and likely won’t be completed for many years.