ABSTRACT
My title is borrowed from Hamlet, who speaks of death as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ (3.1.81-2), but I use it of the future, and of Michel de Montaigne’s future, in particular.1 Perhaps, as I hope will become clear, I should say ‘futures’. The futures of the past offer a tantalizing insight into what it was to be alive in that past and to look forward in time. It is my aim in what follows to point out that they almost inevitably raise, as a result of their temporal orientation, questions about their possible survival in and pertinence to later ages. We belated investigators need to be wary, in such cases, of projecting our sense of what the future holds for the past back on to that past and, in so doing, misrepresenting its ways of looking forwards. The title of this volume invites case studies of a whole series of phenomena, from apocalypse to utopia and beyond, all revealing of the various ways in which the Renaissance and early modern worlds thought about and imagined the future. Contributors to the volume were also invited to address questions of critical and historical method and in particular to refl ect on the futures which current scholarly practice might entail. This chapter accepts both invitations by exploring the place of the future in Montaigne’s thinking and writing while offering some methodological refl ections on how that future might best be approached and understood. It issues, in turn, an invitation-no more and no less-of its own: to see the case of Montaigne, here, as illustrative of the period that he has so often, in various ways, seemed to exemplify.
