SOURCE: Cottrell, Robert D. “Gender Imprinting in Montaigne's Essais.” L'Esprit Créateur 30, no. 4 (winter 1990): 85-96.

In the essay below, Cottrell maintains that Montaigne codes his own authorial voice as female even as he participates in the misogynist discourse of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods.

In “De La Praesumption” (II, 17, 639a),¹ Montaigne remarks that he speaks and writes the French that is spoken and written in the South of France, adding that it is a “langage alteré” (Donald Frame translates this as “a corrupted language”) that would offend “les oreilles pures françoises” of those Northern Frenchmen who were born and reared in la langue d'oïl. After noting that he has no more command of the Perigordian dialect spoken in the countryside around his château than he has of German, he expresses his admiration for the Gascon dialect that is spoken up towards the mountains...