ABSTRACT
Richard E. Keatley engages most directly with the landscape and the physical world as literary tropes transmitting ideas about comparative civilizations. The Alps—right there in the very center of Europe—had long been considered a formidable border between the civilized world; they separated the bucolic homesteads and urbane cities inhabited by Romans from the barbarian-riddled hinterlands. In Montaigne’s hands, however, the borderlands of the Alps though terrifying and home to natural monsters, are themselves a bit of a Utopia. They house the delightful Swiss Republic. This is a land with a true representative government managed with respect for the rights of its citizens. The monsters on either side are the rapacious and conservative Duke of Austria and Montaigne’s own problematic home: a reforming France.
“Gaul alone has had no monsters . . .” Saint Jerome
