Writing Doubt in Montaigne's Essais: Thinking Relationally with Seneca and Plutarch

Doubtful Writing offers a major reassessment of philosophical uncertainty in one of the early modern period's foremost doubters. It argues that Montaigne's engagement, his endless 'commerce' with two dogmatists, Seneca and Plutarch, produced a radical new mode of doubtful writing; one with which Montaigne could conduct and communicate a double, unresolved, and contradictory mode of thinking.
Seneca and Plutarch have long been recognised as Montaigne's preferred authors: he himself, on numerous occasions, holds them up as authors of the books he could not be without and their influence on his informal, fragmentary style is widely acknowledged. But these authors have, until now, escaped significant attention from the perspective of philosophical uncertainty. Doubtful Writing argues that it was with these authors - dogmatists who nevertheless practised a 'doubtful and unresolved way of writing' - that Montaigne developed his own mani?re de dire ('way of saying'). Reading Montaigne through this lens offers a valuable new perspective on doubt in the Essais and in the early modern period more broadly, understanding doubt not only as a philosophical system or set of arguments but as a practice of thinking in and with writing.

Dr Luke O'Sullivan is a Career Development Fellow in Early Modern French at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. Between 2013 and 2016, he held a Durham Doctoral Scholarship in the French department at the University of Durham and in 2018 he was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, held in the French department at King's College London for a project titled 'Doubtful Truth-Telling in Early Modern France'.