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The publication and popularity of Henri Estienne’s Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Skepticism allows for a new, skeptical approach to same-sex sexuality that questions its perceived unnaturalness and foreignness. Such an approach is embodied by Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. It is well-known that the French essayist applies a classical skepticism to forms of subjectivity around ethnicity, but his skeptical reading practices can be enlarged to same-sex sexuality. Skeptical approaches to cultural phenomena are easily transferred to same-sex sexuality because they are predicated on questioning the natural through a series of cross-cultural comparisons that reveal the ultimate relativity of culture. In a discussion of hermeneutics in his skeptical manifesto “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne specifically critiques translators of Plato for “putting Plato to bed wherever they want,” thus for imposing their own morality and for reading Platonic sexuality anachronistically. But, Montaigne suggests, because they do not apply a skeptical lens to sexuality and do not consider it in a more objective manner, they—not the assumed crazed lovers of boys—are the ones affected as they try to efface the same-sex elements from the corpus.

Chapter 4 argues that the Montaignean essai’s transformation of literary precedents was understood by contemporaries to be the performance of an unofficial role or unnamed office on the part of a nobleman who had fashioned a distinct philosophical persona. The office was that of private judgemental mediator between expert knowledge and lived experience—both his own experience and that of his ‘friends and family’. The chapter begins with discussion of Florio’s Montaigne, then analyses the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, before focusing on Essais II 37 and the Journal de Voyage. In the latter case, the topic is Montaigne’s relationship to early modern medicine, his experience of spas and baths, and the way he mediates the revived art of balneology for his patrons and readers.

Chapter 6 uses Gournay’s 1595 edition of Montaigne’s Essais to describe how participants in sixteenth-century literary culture routinely cared for their own and others’ critical fortunes. Montaigne does this in relation to the works of La Boétie, Amyot’s Plutarch, his father’s author Sebond (the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’). The chapter also shows how Montaigne sought and obtained a reputation, via dissemination of his book, as a more authentically ‘naive’, unpremeditated philosopher. He is aided in this by Lipsius, Gournay, and Brach. We see that an important cultural condition of the authenticity claimed by the Essais is the medieval and early modern practice of self-accounting, of writing and transcribing private memoirs of miscellaneous matters in tables and manuscript registers.

This chapter looks at how Balzac’s work is judged by his contemporaries to exceed the bounds of vivid, plausible, and persuasive discourse, and at how these concerns with novelty and individualism (concerns that also colour later critical responses to Descartes) are inseparable from the debates about tragicomedy discussed in Chapter 2. The poetic structures of contemporary debate—merging interest, variety, extravagance, plausibility, attentiveness, and belief—are precisely those that define the reception of Balzac’s letters. Only when we consider the demonstrative rhetoric of responses to Balzac’s work, notably the Apologie pour M. de Balzac and Jean Goulu’s Lettres de Phyllarque à Ariste, can we understand Descartes’s own apology for Balzac, the Censura. Close readings of all these texts are given.