Warren Boutcher’s prodigious—and prodigiously important—book is in some ways a remarkably understated project. Respectful of past critical approaches to Montaigne’s Essais, Boutcher argues that “the study of the text’s meanings” must be wedded to and not made distinct from “its reception” (1:xiv). Although he values the histories and methods that portray Montaigne’s writing as prefiguring “modern skepticism,” “modern self-consciousness,” and “modern recognition of Montaigne’s literary genius” (1:xiv), Boutcher offers an “alternative perspective … rooted in the historical study of the diversity of ways in which relations between patrons, authors, producers, models or objects of representation, and readers, can be described by the makers and users of verbal and literary artefacts from sentences to books. Study of instances of reception and survival, instead of departing from a normative modern understanding of the authored work’s meaning-in-context, could change modern understanding of what constituted a context in the period itself” (1:xv).

But there is no “death of the author” for Boutcher; his theoretical guiding spirit is neither Barthes nor Foucault but anthropologist Arthur Gell. From Gell, Boutcher gets his emphasis on the “social life of artworks,” where “biography returns in a different guise” (1:xvi). There is agency in this vision, but it is a mediated one: “the ‘text’ or ‘saying’ does not exist unless there is a reader or auditor who does something with it” (1:xvii). Throughout the book, Boutcher uses the Gellian concepts of “index” and “nexus”: “[Gell] re-roots the study of material and social ‘context’ of a work of art in analysis of all of the ways in which the specific ‘nexus’ of making, using or transmitting an ‘index’ (the art object) can be described. A nexus is comprised of social relations between different types of agents and patients (‘prototype,’ ‘artist,’ ‘recipient’)” (1:xvii). Boutcher’s “alternative perspective” on Montaigne is in no small part an alternative history of Renaissance humanism.

The School of Montaigne consists of two volumes. Very crudely, volume 1 is devoted to Montaigne’s making of the Essais, and volume 2 focuses on his reader-writers’ construction of the Essais: the first part deals with the “authorial milieu,” the second with “reception studies” (1:3). But there is blending in both parts. Early in volume 1, Boutcher juxtaposes the making of Montaigne in the context of late medieval and Renaissance literature and agency (1:1.1) with Pierre Villey’s “making of the modern critical reader” (1:69) in the early twentieth century (1:1.2). And Montaigne himself appears early in volume 2, entering Paris in 1588, his revised, now three-part book in hand (2:2.1). Both volumes, then, are interested not in “literary-critical readings of the Essais” but in testing “the historical grounds on which such readings implicitly rest,” by “keeping in view the specific relations mediated by books and texts in particular social contexts (‘nexuses’)” (1:lix). Reader-writers are, necessarily, “participants with the author in the history of the book” (2:460).

The bulk of volume 1 is devoted to Montaigne’s Essais as part of the “art nexuses” of his culture (1:107). Crucial here are three major texts that swirl throughout the Essais: Jacques Amyot’s translation of Plutarch, Raymond Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis (the stimulus for Montaigne’s longest essay [Montaigne 2.12]), and Montaigne’s friend Étienne La Boétie’s De la servitude volontaire. There are wonderful discussions of the role in the making of Montaigne played by the humanist Justus Lipsius and by Montaigne’s fan, collaborator, editor, and surrogate daughter, Marie de Gournay (who justifiably figures prominently in both volumes). More marvelous still are delvings into the cultural history of healing springs, hydrotherapy, and balneology. And Boutcher reminds us of the importance of Montaignian paratexts: “To understand what Montaigne was doing in the Essais, in revising his text for each addition, we need to look at the history of his text-mediated relations with others before and after 1580 [when the first two-book edition was published], before and after his death in 1592” (1:206). These paratexts include letters and, especially, the Travel Journal, which Boutcher establishes—subtly but convincingly—as crucial to interpreting Montaigne’s own 1588 and post-1588 additions to the Essais.

Volume 2 takes the Essais on its various travels “beyond the reach of friends and family” (2:80). This volume is about mediation in many forms: “whether by translation, commentary, or correction—on the part of professional interpreters (theologians, jurists, medics, humanists) and on the part of publisher-booksellers” (2:187). We see the book made central in France by Marie de Gournay’s editing and promotion (2:2.1); expurgated and reshaped in Geneva and Italy (2:2.2); and claimed as a key text in the instruction of noble men and women via John Florio’s 1603 English translation (2:2.3), “used by scholars, tutors, and advisers to furnish the real aristocracy—and by playwrights to furnish the onstage aristocracy—with matter for topical philosophical discussion” (2:254). One of these playwrights was, of course, Shakespeare, and Boutcher brilliantly explores Shakespeare’s connections not only to Florio’s Montaigne, but to other contemporary English writers who were negotiating with the same Montaignian texts at more or less the same time, including John Marston, Ben Jonson, and—most illuminating here—Samuel Daniel (who almost certainly was Florio’s brother-in-law).

The following chapters (2:2.4, 2.5)—drawing on individual negotiations with Montaigne in England, Holland, and France—”place the reading and rewriting of the Essais in the context of private record-keeping and life-writing” (2:323) and nicely complement the brilliant work of William Hamlin in Montaigne’s English Journey (2013). The volume’s final chapters (2:2.6, 2.7) reprise the juxtaposition laid out in 1.1 and 1.2: the reception of Montaigne in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on the one hand, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the other. In 2.6 Boutcher links Pierre Villey’s canonical construction of Montaigne in the early 1900s to the “framing” of Montaigne by the great American scholar Donald Frame in the mid-late 1900s. He also explores the postmodern reaction to this version of Montaigne, best exemplified by the early work of Terence Cave. Boutcher does not dismiss these versions but claims “they differ in important ways from the early modern concept of self-accounting” with which he returns to close the book (2:399). For Boutcher’s central claim is that, throughout their history, “the Essais find a way of indexing the critical agency of their recipient” (2:397).

One inevitably has reservations with a project so massive. Although passages and moments from earlier chapters necessarily echo in later ones, there is some unnecessary repetition. Too, some will challenge Boutcher’s preference for the posthumous 1595 Paris edition over the so-called Bordeaux Copy, which contains Montaigne’s handwritten additions and changes in the margins of his own 1588 Essais and which served as the base text for many modern editions and translations, including Donald Frame’s. At the same time, the 1595 text was the one that “most early modern people encountered,” indeed the one used by John Florio in 1603 (1:xli). More significantly, the highly localized and contextualized vision of Montaigne’s approach to ontology and epistemology will strike some as too severe and circumscribed. Isn’t it possible to have a properly historicized Montaigne who nevertheless interrogates the more universal problems of the inconstant self and the impossibility of knowledge? But one makes these quibbles with trepidation. For the school of Montaigne has had—and continues to have—textbooks in many editions, countless students, myriad teachers. Warren Boutcher is, quite simply, one of its finest instructors.