| Popis: |
The conclusion summarizes the argument of Volume 2: that in both the early modern and the modern period reader-writers have inferred their own forms of critical agency from Montaigne’s Essais. These are reader-writers who think and judge freely in their private offices as particular individuals not bound to systems of instruction or professional service: in the modern period a ‘cultural observer’ of some kind; in the early modern period a lay participant in practical philosophy. They include a strong tradition of female recipients of the text from Marie de Gournay and Lady Anne Clifford to Virginia Woolf and Natalie Zemon Davis. The official personae of other reader-writers––from physicians and lawyers, to soldiers and monks––were the foil for Montaigne’s ‘natural’ condition as a gentleman who exercises judgement unofficially, not as a jurist or even as a father, in an open-form registre to be seen only by friends and family. |
