When Michel de Montaigne published the first edition of his *Essais* in Bordeaux in 1580, he produced both a new word and a new genre. *Essai* means 'to try, to test' — not to defend a thesis but to follow a thought as long as one can. This simple displacement — from conclusion to process — is one of the rare formal revolutions in Western intellectual history.

'I myself am the matter of my book,' Montaigne writes. European philosophy had spent centuries building large systems in search of the universal. Montaigne turns instead to the particular, the personal, the transient: eating habits, fear, friendship, ageing, his own kidney stone. His wager is that human nature is not best understood by reaching for a method that grasps an essence, but by patient inspection of the one concrete case to which one has full access — oneself.

The method is also an epistemic stance. The motto *Que sais-je?* — 'What do I know?' — is a Renaissance revival of ancient Pyrrhonian scepticism. The discovery of the New World and the violence of the Reformation had unsettled Europe's confidence that its own culture was the human norm; in 'Of Cannibals' Montaigne presses this comparison hard, asking who the real barbarian really is.

The *Essays* opened a current of modernity quite different from Descartes' search for mathematical certainty: digressive, self-aware, ironic, modest. That current runs through Pascal, Nietzsche, Emerson, Adorno, Virginia Woolf, and the contemporary personal essay. The book is at once the place where the modern self is discovered and the place where the limits of modern thought are already glimpsed.