This volume contains five articles by prominent scholars of French literature and political philosophy that examine the relation between Montaigne's "Essays," one of the classic works of the French philosophical and literary traditions, and the writings attributed by Montaigne to his friend, the French humanist Etienne de La Boetie's.

Three contributors to the volume suggest that Montaigne was the real author of the revolutionary tract "On Voluntary Servitude," along with the other works he attributed to La Boetie's. Two contributors describe the remarkable mathematical and/or...