The Design of Montaigne’s Essais

Abstact The Design of Montaigne’s “Essais”, analyses Montaigne’s writing in light of dessein—a slippery, semantically soluble term that at the tail end of the sixteenth century could mean both a mental plan, intention, design, as well as a physical, material sketch, outline, or drawing. This study asks what happens if we read Montaigne through the lens of this term, given that he is a writer so carefully attuned to verbal play, and also wedded, at least initially, to a visual metaphor: that of painting. In reading Montaigne through the lens of Renaissance dessein, Fallanca offers a fresh way to capture the essentially gerundive nature of the Essais, constructing a visual and spatial perspective on a text by tracking multiple lines of thought that are, paradoxically, designed to escape its author’s intention and control. In following the vagaries of dessein as it operates in the Essais, the book also builds a case for the relationship between design and literary studies, with a focus on the text as an open-ended object of use that instantiates a chancy, experimental encounter between mind and world.