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This is one of the few chapters in the present volume that address the role of women in Virgilian translation practices. More specifically, Cox focuses on Marie de Gournay’s translation of Aeneid 2. While de Gournay’s translation is marked by imprecisions, it also conveys her sense of pride—a pride she takes in breaching the stronghold of men as she places herself into the lineage of French translators of Virgil. The author argues that de Gournay uses her translation as part of a struggle for sexual equality, a struggle that is especially intensified by her loneliness and sense of alienation within her own time and culture.

The second case study of a major vernacular writer is Montaigne. The tenses of his Essais (first published 1580–95) communicate wavering and hesitation as to how much presence to attribute or deny to ancients, to the more recently dead, or to what Montaigne represents as the now-dead phases of his own life. The distinctiveness of his tense-use rests partly on a paradox. On the one hand, his emphasis on the tenuousness or even the non-existence of the present moment leads him to use the Présent in a way that drains its referents of stable content. Yet, on the other hand, this very undermining pulls readers with unusual power into a communing with this now-dead author.

Even those families for whom works of literature and learning afforded ways of projecting themselves into the past and the future did not always follow through smoothly on that projecting. Many works of literature and learning therefore communicated a version of family that did not square with smooth patrilinear norms. One kind of disruption was illegitimate birth. Others included bitter personal, confessional, and inheritance-based divisions within families. Two case studies are highlighted: that of the poet and magistrate Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye and his children, in particular his courtier and libertin-poet son Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux; and that of Nicolas Vignier (the once-Protestant historian) and the confessionally divided literary producers who were his descendants.

The ‘Introduction’ describes how in Volume 2 we switch focus from the patron-author to the reader-writers of the Essais, as they circulated around Europe. These are seventeenth-century descendants of the free literate of the late medieval period, as described by Armando Petrucci. The Essais become a context for their works, instead of vice versa. The primary objects of study are less, now, contexts involving Montaigne and his collaborators than those involving various commentators, imitators, promoters, translators, and their networks of friends and family. We are concerned less with Montaigne’s book than with their books—whether printed, manuscript, or a hybrid of both, whether literary works, or personal records. There follow summaries of the individual chapters.