Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

In a typical self-effacing gesture, Montaigne refers to his Essays as “ces inepties” (“inanities”).

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

One of Montaigne’s many contemptuous asides about women, especially women of the servant class.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

In French, “of the same nature with ours” is “cousines des nostres,” suggesting an oblique familial tie. It’s becoming increasingly clear that this essay about “fathers and sons” is actually, or also, about different, more unexpected lines of transmission.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

It’s typical of Montaigne to find meaning in exceptions, rather than in rules.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

Montaigne claims to be curious about the physical condition of the goat at its death, as if this were a straightforward autopsy, but the entrails of animals like goats were often read in antiquity by priests, to divine the future. This is an uneasy mixture of the medical and the mystical.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

This whole story – and the strange origin narrative it relates – is about chance and contingency, rather than causality and necessity.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

Montaigne refers to his kidney stones, in the French, as “ma subjection graveleuse” (“my gravelly condition”), almost as if it were a pet name.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

A lot of men in the Renaissance felt anxiety about the unknowability of women’s bodies – what could possibly be going on in their heads, or their wombs, and with what implications for social and political relations between men?! – so it’s surprising that Montaigne implies that women’s bodies (or their wombs, anyway) are entirely knowable, via the speculum, unlike “our” (men’s) bodies.

“Matricis” means “of the matrix,” or womb, which explains a lot of the imagery in The Matrix.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

The idea that even ordinary hunger was a malady has roots in the Galenic thinking behind much Renaissance medicine, which held that “disease” was any “alteration” of an otherwise healthy state, which could be restored by a reversal of the alteration.

In sixteenth-century French, “altération” was a synonym for “soif” (thirst) – thirst altered you, and drinking reversed the alteration, even if drinking wine, for example, could “alter” you in different ways. François Rabelais, doctor and prose stylist, made much of the word’s semantic range in Pantagruel and Gargantua.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.

Unreviewed Annotation 1 Contributor ?

What is this?

The Genius annotation is the work of the Genius Editorial project. Our editors and contributors collaborate to create the most interesting and informative explanation of any line of text. It’s also a work in progress, so leave a suggestion if this or any annotation is missing something.

To learn more about participating in the Genius Editorial project, check out the contributor guidelines.

Loading...

This echoes Montaigne’s description of his own Essays as a “faggoting up of so many divers pieces.”

Here the “piling up” is a “pastissage” instead of a “fagotage,” but it’s the same idea of random materials bundled up by custom rather than by nature or reason.

This video is processing – it'll appear automatically when it's done.