The maiden edition of the Urban Art Series is scheduled to take place at the
Montaigne Place store at The Palms shopping Mall, Lekki, Lagos on 31st May 2018 and promises to be an exciting experience for curators, collectors, enthusiasts and lovers of art where an 8ft by 11ft oil painting has been installed on the side windows overlooking the common areas.
Montaigne's preface presents the Essays as a work of self-portraiture intended for his friends and relatives, and warns others against wasting time reading it.
Yet the critical point of
Montaigne's attack on astrology is the section which is at the core of the page we are reading, that is to say, the few lines following the stunning contemplation of the eminence of the stars and preceding the ridiculing of the rantings of human reason that claims to be able to debate the nature of heavenly realities.
(3) The long Hudibrastic poem Alma, or, The Progress of the Mind, written in dialogic form during Priors confinement in 1715-16 and published in 1719, sheds light on a vein of humorous scepticism that descends from
Montaigne to Pope and Hume.
After opening the essay with a few remarks on his contemporaries' inability to synchronize the calendar year with the astronomical or seasonal year,
Montaigne remarks:
No entanto, a 'indiferenca' professada de
Montaigne para a profissao de advogado foi levada excessivamente a serio (ou mal compreendida) tanto pelos seus contemporaneos, como pelos estudiosos posteriores, que tenderam a negligenciar a dimensao juridica dos Ensaios, ate o estudo pioneiro de Andre Tournon na decada de 1980 (FARQUHAR, 2002).
While such renowned appropriators have their place in Hamlin's study, evidence left by humbler, and far more numerous, readers forms the backbone of Hamlin's "descriptive account." Hamlin is no stranger to things Montaignian--the French essayist also features prominently in his earlier monographs Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare's England and The Image of America in
Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare--but here he couples that expertise with a methodological approach established by recent scholarship on early modern readership and manuscript culture.
Montaigne grew up in a deeply polarized society, a France torn by religious wars.