ABSTRACT
Michel de Montaigne is a trained lawyer, served two terms as mayor of Bordeaux and was a minor player on the national political stage, at a period when France was ravaged by religious civil war of unparalleled savagery. Montaigne's capacity to imagine the other finds its most startling expression in his essay on Cannibals, which also turns on questions of cruelty and presumption. This is one of two essays on the New World in which Montaigne deplores the depredations of the European conquerors with a fierce bitterness rarely articulated before him. Montaigne's most sustained discussion of man's general relationship with other inhabitants of his environment is to be found in the very long Apology for Raymond. Montaigne's apparently undisciplined gathering of the more amazing feats of animals recounted in books, interspersed with the occasional personal observation, has analogies with the encyclopedism and collecting mania of his contemporaries.
