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Chapter 19 - Plutarch in France

Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2023

By
Katherine MacDonald
Edited by
Frances B. Titchener  and
Alexei V. Zadorojnyi
Frances B. Titchener
Affiliation:
Utah State University
Alexei V. Zadorojnyi
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Summary

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

Keywords

RabelaisMontaigneAmyotRacineMirror for PrinceshonnêtetéGalanteriehistoriographyancients and moderns
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch , pp. 383 - 402
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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