“Se peindre de la plume”: History, Biography, and Self-Portraiture in Montaigne’s Reframing of History

Abstract

We pass in this present chapter from Montaigne’s reworking of narrative from sixteenth-century chronicles to his appropriation and recasting of the works of historians. How does the chronicle relate to history? Writing about history in another context, Lionel Gossman makes an apt distinction between chronicles and history when he states that history, in its retrospective viewpoint, is “not written from a position within it (like the Medieval chronicles), nor from a position absolutely exterior to it and discontinuous with it” (in the manner of Enlightenment history), “but from a privileged vantage point close to the end of it.”¹ It is, as we shall see below, the work of exceptional, mature minds who have lived through the events they are recounting that Montaigne most admires. Whether they come from Antiquity, the Middle Ages or his own epoch, these are the gifted historians who figure prominently among the authors whose thoughts, principles, and stories Montaigne weaves into the fabric of his essays.