Simon Goulart and the Calvinist Edition of Montaigne's "Essais" (1595).

For some time, scholars have been aware of a "Calvinist" edition of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. This book, published in Geneva in 1595, was censored by pastor Simon Goulart and approved by Calvinist church authorities, the Compagnie des Pasteurs. Despite its potential to inform us of the Protestant response to the Essais, a subject about which little is known, the 1595 Lyons (Geneva) edition has never been studied in any detail, nor has it been edited or made available to modern scholars. In contrast to the reaction of the Roman Censors, who according to Montaigne raised several complaints against the Essais but did not go so far as to censor them, this fully revised edition provides us with concrete information about the Genevan church's position on Montaigne's work just a few years after his death. My study examines Goulart's version of the Essais in its entirety in order to establish how he adapted them for the Calvinist reader. I approach the edition from different perspectives, including book history, philology, intellectual history and theology. I illustrate how, through hundreds of suppressions and modifications, Goulart reconciled the Essais with his faith and moral principles. He suppressed almost one-quarter of the Essais, including entire chapters and hundreds of classical quotations. At the same time, his frequent additions and substitutions show that he edited the text in a painstaking and scholarly manner. Using close readings and textual examples, I consider how transformations of the style, punctuation, spelling and use of translation in the edition conform to certain Calvinist ideals---namely, brevity, clarity and accessibility. In addition to my analysis, I provide a fully edited text of Book Three of this edition, with all relevant variants and suppressions from 1593 Lyons, the edition from which Goulart worked. The Essais are a work that challenged many aspects of Calvinist morality and ideology. Goulart's censors Montaigne's discussion of himself---including his tastes, habits and thoughts---at length in the third book of the Essais and limits his use of pagan terminology, especially "la fortune." He suppresses his comments about Protestants and their role in the religious wars, thus effectively eliminating the religious and political specificity of the Essais. He modifies Montaigne's morality and ethics, removing substantial content concerning his views on the body, sex and pleasure, as well as the nature of vice and virtue. My study shows how, as a result of this extensive censorship, Montaigne's work is utterly transformed.