Of Cannibals
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Published 1580
France
Michel de Montaigne is best known for the literary genre he largely invented: the essay. His massive Essais, translated by Montaigne’s first English translator Charles Cotton in 1685-1686 as “Attempts,” is a collection of shorter written pieces that raise questions and significant issues while often deferring to give final accounts of the subjects he treats. The Essais feature a frank, skeptical, and (unusual up to this time) personal consciousness, blending serious philosophical discourse with witty biographical anecdotes in a style both original and strikingly modern. His open-minded and questioning approach to his subject matter directly influenced Descartes and other thinkers who paved the way for modern scientific inquiry. When young and growing up in an aristocratic family, Montaigne received a model humanist education devised by his father, who insisted that his son learn Latin as his first language. Later as a distinguished courtier and lawyer at the court of Charles IX, Montaigne witnessed costly and violent religious conflicts pitting Protestants against Catholics, and a disdain for intolerance runs through his writings. The essay “Of Cannibals,” known by Shakespeare and referenced in his late play The Tempest (1610-11), features a central irony one often finds in Montaigne’s writings. Relying upon contemporary accounts of barbarism and savagery in the peoples of the New World, Montaigne contrasts the colonized with their European colonizers, who have their own agenda of greed and violence. Ultimately, he finds war (“the human disease”) more prevalent and more selfishly motivated among the Europeans than among the allegedly uncivilized natives. In characteristic fashion, Montaigne calls into question an accepted binary, in this case, of civilized/uncivilized, as he asks his reader to rethink the subject of inquiry.
Questions to consider while reading this selection:
Montaigne begins his essay with a flurry of quotations from learned writers of the Classical (Greek and Roman) period. Why does he do this? What is the effect of his doing so?
Aside from economics, what sets the two apart?
Montaigne is renowned for being a “skeptic,” a questioner of accepted beliefs and customs. Give a few ex- amples of his skeptical take on things.
Written by Douglass Thomson
Selection from Montaigne’s Essays [of Cannibals]
Michel de Montaigne, translated by John Florio
License: Public Domain
At what time King Pirrhus came into Italie, after he had survaid the marshalling of the Armie, which the Romans sent against him: ‘I wot not,’ said he, ‘what barbarous men these are (for so were the Grecians wont to call all strange nations) ‘but the disposition of this Armie, which I see, is nothing barbarous.’ So said the Grecians of that which Flaminius sent into their countrie: And Philip viewing from a Tower the order and distribution of the Romaine camp, in his kingdome under Publius Sulpitius Ga