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HyperEssays

@hyperessays.net

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HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne hyperessays.net

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 28/02/2026

Happy birthday to our pal, Michel de Montaigne, born 493 years ago today! 🎉

Colorful confetti over a black and white engraved portrait of Michel de Montaigne.

Montaigne is depicted as a middle-aged man, with a mustache and a goatee. He is wearing a ruff and a black hat that covers his receding hairline. He is staring at the viewer with a calm expression.

There is no known portrait of Montaigne, only imagined or possible portraits, most, if not all, done after or long after his death. This engraving, by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, is from 1774.

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 05/01/2024

The second, Leonor, is a TEI file and lexicon manager. It is still a work in progress and developed only with HyperEssays in mind at this point. But it has already made copy editing, updating, and working with its lexicons much faster and easier.

Screenshot of a MacOS app. It shows a list of words (from John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s “Of Experience”) with their associated normalized forms and lemmas. It also displays information about this chapter’s TEI file: its location, its last update date, etc.

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 18/12/2023

It’s mid-December and I know what you’re thinking: Time for another end-of-year recap. So here’s one you didn’t know you needed: HyperEssays 2023 Wrapped!

Top chapter views. 1: To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die (6549 views). 2: On Sorrow (5862 views). 3: On Friendship (2871 views). Out of 105466 chapter requests, 61670 were for the contemporary edition of the Essays. Chapters in Middle French got 27,565 views.

Top searches. 1: “marble-hearted” (30 searches). 2: “mingle-mangles” (29 searches). 3: “Pyrrho” (25 searches). HyperEssays users searched for 2,022 unique words in 2023. Recurring search terms were often connected to social media posts.

Top downloads. 1: Of Idleness (561 PDFs). 2: Of Friendship (538 PDFs). 3: On Solitude (437 PDFs). HyperEssays hosts 542 chapter PDFs which were downloaded 8449 times this year.

A Year of Words. In 2023, HyperEssays added 48131 lemmas to its 11 lexicons. These are used to populate 1479628 indexable TEI W elements across 434 chapter files. [The slide shows examples of JSON-encoded lexicon entries showing lemma, normalized form, and original printed form of two words.]

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 15/11/2023

Some words are more special than others. ;) #florioism

A list of words, in JSON format, showing one of them with a “notation” attribute set to “florio-ism.”

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 18/09/2023

Here’s what we’re looking at…

The words “the impertinent bedrowle,” in print, shown from John Florio’s edition of Montaigne’s essays.

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