Peter Lang is delighted to announce that Richard Scholar, author of Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking, will be presenting his book at the Oxford Literary Festival at 3.15pm on Friday 31 March.

The event takes place in the Blackwell’s Festival Marquee in the Clarendon Quad of the Bodleian library and is free to attend! Please click here for more details.

We know a great deal of what Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Shakespeare’s near-contemporary and fellow literary mastermind, thinks. We know, because he tells us on page after page of his Essais, which have marked literature and thought since the European Renaissance and remain to this day compelling reading. It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves, as volatile as he is voluble. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to? How is it to be understood? And what value might it have for us?

In Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking, now available in a revised paperback edition, Richard Scholar provides twenty-first-century readers with an invaluable guide to Montaigne’s writing and thought.