Montaigne Reading Group: 20 Essays

New people always welcome - just make sure you read the correct set of essays, listed below! All of these essays are available to read for free online - see links below.

We're pleased to announce the second meeting of our new Montaigne reading group! You don't need to have attended the first session to come along - just make sure you read the same essays as us, listed below. We are aiming to read all of Montaigne's essays over an extended period. For our second meeting we will read essays 21-40 essays from the Penguin Classics Complete Essays edition, totalling just over 100 pages. The essays for this meeting are:

21.) On the power of the imagination.
22.) One man's profit is another man's loss.
23.) On habit: and on never easily changing a traditional law.
24.) Same design: differing outcomes.
25.) On schoolmasters' learning.
26.) On educating children.
27.) That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities.
28.) On affectionate relationships.
29.) Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de La Boetie.
30.) On moderation.
31.) On the Cannibals.
32.) Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence.
33.) On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life.
34.) Fortune is often found in Reason’s train.
35.) Something lacking in our civil administrations.
36.) On the custom of wearing clothing.
37.) On Cato the Younger.
38.) How we weep and laugh at the same thing.
39.) On solitude.
40.) Reflections upon Cicero.

Feel free to read any translation (or indeed the original French...). The Penguin Classics edition, which I will be reading, is translated by M.A. Screech and is available for free online:

https://archive.org/details/MontaigneEssayscompleteScreech.num/mode/2up

The Kindle edition of the Screech translation is also currently available for 49p... Many other translations are available, including many that can be found for free online.