The Montaignian Essay and Authored Miscellanies from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The chapter resituates the history of the literary essay in English in the tradition of ‘various and miscellaneous’ literature going back to classical antiquity. This vast and multifarious tradition of writing was defined negatively by its not being classifiable as a contribution to the formal literary and scholarly genres of poetry and philosophy. Montaigne founded the modern ‘essay’ by putting a particular and enduring stamp on what is identified in this chapter as the ‘authored miscellany’. This is not an anonymous anthology of texts but a personal and varied collection of or commentary upon sundry texts and examples of the kind represented in classical antiquity by Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae. The chapter traces the history of the authored miscellany, and Montaigne’s role in its transformation into the essay, from the perspective of a pivotal moment at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries, as captured in the writings and library of Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848).