Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

Appreciations represents a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary historiography and to the delineation of the English essay tradition. Pater’s book asserts the centrality of Romanticism and develops a historical schema for the essay in conscious opposition to the prevailing narrative, prominently articulated by Arnold, of eighteenth-century prose as the apogee of the achievement in that mode, an English Attic prose style derived from French neoclassicism. Pater sets a modern tradition of prose derived from Montaigne and inaugurated by English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This alternative genealogy epitomises the romantic impulse of English literature. Pater’s treatment of the literary tradition and the development of English prose constitutes a pointed response to the late-Victorian recuperation of Augustan and neoclassical literature undertaken by critics such as Leslie Stephen, George Saintsbury, and W. J. Courthope, associated with the rise of English Studies and the campaign for the institutionalisation of English at Oxford and Cambridge.

This chapter extends philosophical comparison to Montaigne, whose first translator, Florio, was Shakespeare’s friend. The chapter focusses on likenesses and unlikenesses, but brings out a common wisdom. There are confluences of nature and taste. Both find pleasure the central motivation for literary study. Their essays take different forms but assert Reason’s instability; Montaigne’s array of topics remains prescient of Johnson’s. Thus, the “ondoyant et divers” qualities of Montaigne are reflected in the “mingled” drama Johnson attributed to Shakespeare; likewise, the Johnsonian flux of experience links Johnson’s Rasselas with Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The tendency of Imagination to dominate reason recalls, similarly, Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” The effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature. The chapter concludes with discussion of the Lives. Montaigne’s sense of the random and various ways by which life comes to an end anticipates Johnson’s accounts of the deaths of the poets.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

“Kindness” is gentleness, consideration, care for others. It is related to “kinship”—the genetic and affective bonds among parents, children, brothers, and sisters. By way of “kind,” meaning “species” or “breed,” it expands the reach of those bonds to what Montaigne (in Florio’s translation) calls “the general throng.” The word “kindness” incites us to think about how human virtues, which usually stand apart from the natural world, might be rooted in our kinship with all the other animals. The Tempest is a key text for thinking about the history and the great utility of kindness as a transspecies virtue in the twenty-first century. This chapter makes its case for animal virtue by telling the story of the key arc of action in the play itself and by recounting a story about how the author of the chapter, at a workshop with actors and scholars, was terribly unkind toward Caliban and what he learned from his own lack of animal virtue.

Chapter 7 examines a Plutarch translation entitled Recueil d’avis et conseils sur les affaires d’estat tire des vies de Plutarque by Du Haillan (c. 1535–1610) and strands of Montaigne’s (1533–1592) political thought related to his conception of the public sphere as developed in The Essays. I also briefly examine the translations of Plutarch effected by Montaigne’s close friend Etienne de la Boétie.

This chapter discusses an underexplored and relatively unappreciated, but essential, aspect of Samuel Johnson’s writing and thinking: his intellectual relationship with Renaissance humanism. Looking at representative figures such as Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and Michel de Montaigne, Lee explores the influence these writers and thinkers had upon Johnson, describing his lifelong interest in the kinds of scholarly works for which they were known (dictionary, scholarly edition, biography, satire, skeptical essay) and also detecting their presence in Johnson’s moral and philosophical commitment to an “active” life, and even in his very prose style. In so doing so, the chapter concludes that Johnson embraced Renaissance humanism while simultaneously adapting it into a project relevant and responsive to the demands of his own day and age – and, indeed, suggesting a model for our own potential humanism today.

Elite friendship discourse in the Renaissance was shaped by a set of commonplaces inherited from classical antiquity according to which friends were virtuous, male, and few in number, and their relationships egalitarian and non-sexual. Neoplatonic love had the power to disrupt many of these received ideas. Ficino’s account of male friendship in his Lysis commentary emphasized the importance of spiritual desire in initiating relationships and foregrounded a pedagogical dimension more in keeping with a chaste version of Greek pederasty than the non-hierarchical models of friendship inherited from Aristotle and Cicero. In a poem on the Platonic androgyne, Antoine Héroët used the language of friendship to describe heterosexual unions as offering a potential step towards union with God. Bonaventure des Périers warned instead of the dangers of earthly erotic entanglements in a verse commentary to his translation of Plato’s Lysis, thereby concurring with the beliefs of his benefactor Marguerite de Navarre while suggesting that female community might offer the soul some solace before death provided the possibility of joining with God. Finally, Montaigne’s unorthodox account of his relationship with his deceased friend La Boétie engaged with the Neoplatonic tradition while eschewing the possibility it might facilitate spiritual ascent.

In the history of philosophy, two lines can be distinguished, one represented by Plato, Augustine, and Descartes, emphasizing the centralizing movements in the self, another one embodied by Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Freud, proposing decentralizing movements in the self. As an example of present-day centralizing tendencies, the rise of meritocracy is discussed. An example of a contemporary decentralizing trend is the global–local nexus that implies a decentralizing multiplicity of self and identity. Whereas the centralizing movement in the self is focused on the realization of just one main form of positioning (personal excellence or superiority), the decentralizing movement results in the development of a wide variety of positions (full self-expression). Given this bidirectionality, the self is located in a field of tension resulting in an experience of uncertainty, or even stress, which challenges the dialogical self to liberate itself from imprisonment by alternating between centralization and decentralization.

Shakespeare’s canon includes many military figures, but arguably none is more successful than Henry V. In the play, the key to success is shown to lie in the king’s ability to instrumentalize the vehement emotions necessary to wage war. Shakespeare presents anger in Aristotelian terms as a hierarchical emotion reserved for elite men tasked with military leadership. The king’s deft use of anger demonstrates his self-discipline from his decision to invade France until his overwhelming victory there. This self-discipline distinguishes him from the quarrelsome soldiers (like the choleric Fluellen) who serve under him. The efficacy of Henry’s anger becomes evident when juxtaposed with the contrast in 1 Henry IV between his father’s ineffectual coldness and the reckless tempestuousness of Hotspur. In Henry V, the cool performance of hot emotions makes Henry a modern man of wrath.

Chapter 2 provides a word history of politique throughout the sixteenth-century, considering late-medieval and Italian influences, the context of vernacularisation and the status of language under François I, and the impact of the Reformation and of Calvin’s thought in particular. This is followed by in-depth analysis of Guillaume Budé’s Institution du prince, Rabelais’s Gargantua, Etienne Pasquier’s Pourparler du prince, and Louis Le Caron’s Courtesan dialogues. It also considers the political career of Michel de L’Hospital and his connection with understandings of politique. These case studies are also a pre-history for uses of politique that emerge during the civil war. The chapter concludes with an analysis of François de la Noue’s Essais politiques et militaires and Montaigne’s Essais.

Blaise Pascal’s Pensées hint at a temporal description of soul and mind, and were deeply influential upon subsequent pioneers of the developmental idea. On the one hand, using spatial analogies drawn from geometry, Pascal considered the most important aspect of the individual’s interiority to be ‘Order’. On the other, Order was a temporal phenomenon because it had to manage the movements of interiority over time, which otherwise had a ‘lunatic’ unpredictability. The political theory of absolutism, which Pascal approved, arose in order to control this. Pascal believed it was possible even for the predestined elect to lapse or degenerate, and initiated the focus on time as a ‘counterweight’, a way of pushing back against this. His account of the power of the individual will in relation to God’s operation of that will marks the start of a resemblance to the account of ‘nature versus nurture’ in modern psychobiology.

Of all the many disparaging comments aimed at Jonson over the years, the accusation that he, or his work, is ‘pedantic’, is one of the most common. With reference to Montaigne, early modern debates about Latinate language, and the appearance of Jonson’s plays and poetry in the 1616 Works, this essay attempts to reframe the idea of pedantry to illuminate the broader meanings of the term as it is applied to Jonson. What is that concept doing in critical discourse? How does it position scholars, readers, and teachers in social space? As it pursues these ideas, the essay links some of the evidence of Jonson’s putative pedantry to wider aesthetic and thematic patterns in his 1616 folio. It argues that elements of the Works that get called ‘pedantic’ often reach out in complex ways to an audience that was only just beginning to understand itself as such. Along the way, it pays close attention to the logic of insult, to the place of complex and incomprehensible language in the plays, and to the effects of Jonson’s favourite technique for playful, and sometimes angry audience creation: division and classification.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

In the Machiavellian literature on counsel, the distinction between private and public prudence becomes more pointed, leading to a distinction between a private sphere ruled by morality, and a public sphere in which moral flexibility, or even amoralism, is appropriate. As Machiavellian principles spread, such a view became accepted even amongst self-described anti-Machiavellians, especially in considering ‘policy’ and political deliberation. Counsellors must weigh both private and public expectations, offering advice that takes into account necessity and advantage politically but with an awareness of traditional expectations, embracing the skill of redescription when occasion, still in the tradition of kairos, calls for the employment of vice. Not only does this redefinition of prudence establish a separate sphere of morality (or lack thereof) for politics, it also introduces a language of contingency and exceptionalism, which becomes associated with the counsellor. In contrast with earlier writings on the topic, in this tradition the counsellor must mitigate not the tyranny of the prince, but of fortune.