iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

2) Many chapters now come in two versions: a main page with text, source markers ❦, and notes; and an alternate page which adds layer markers, typographical corrections, and page numbers. The previous design relied on overlays to indicate textual layers. This current solution is more accessible.

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There are a couple of other new features worth mentioning: 1) Word frequency stats in search results and indices (people, places, and sources) are normalized for better comparison.

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Not every word is findable using contemporary French yet, but I’m tagging and indexing more historical forms every day. Like everything else on the site, it’s a work in progress. 🐌 (Same goes for Early Modern English forms, btw)

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For instance, if you search for “enfant”—the modern Fr. spelling of “child”—HyperEssays will also look for instances of “enfan” and “enfans,” the late Renaissance forms of the word. hyperessays.net/search/?q=en...

Search the Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Search the full text of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Find words, phrases, and common nouns.

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Like Florio’s text, the French text is searchable both as originally published and using contemporary spelling of 16th century words.

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HyperEssays has had full-text search of John Florio’s and my own ongoing translation of the Essays (w/ Cotton/Hazlitt’s as a placeholder) for a while. Today I’m happy to announce that the original Middle French text is also searchable on the site. 🥳 hyperessays.net

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

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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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Ivan Kreilkamp @ivan812.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

People talk about "On Solitude," "On Cannibals," "On the Power of the Imagination," et al.., but to really grasp Montaigne you need to go to the deep cuts. Like "On Thumbs," which is kind of like a Notes files about references to thumbs in history and art

On Thumbs - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

On Thumbs. Chapter 26 of Book 2 of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne translated by Charles Cotton

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 09/09/2025

hyperessays.net was offline briefly this morning (US EST) but it’s up and running again now. 😮‍💨 Back to reading, translating, annotating, coding, transcribing, copyediting, learning, and just having fun with the Essays.

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

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 22/07/2025

Let it be said that this is after a year of web traffic dominated by AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, etc.) scraping and indexing every byte of hyperessays.net. They ought to know what the original text is and says by now.

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

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 19/07/2025

“Upon review, the passage I gave you … was incorrect and not an authentic transcription from Montaigne’s Essais. I did not fabricate it deliberately, but I mistakenly generated a reconstructed text based on paraphrases rather than directly sourcing the original.” 🙄

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 19/07/2025

LLMs making stuff up, Montaigne edition: chatgpt.com/share/687bc2...

chatgpt.com

ChatGPT - Quote Attribution Inquiry

Shared via ChatGPT

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 28/02/2025

“I was born between eleven and noon on the last day of February 1533 (as we reckon nowadays, with the year starting in January).“ “Je nasquis entre unze heures et midy le dernier jour de Febvrier, 1533. comme nous contons à cette heure, commençant l’an en Janvier.” hyperessays.net/essays/to-ph...

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Death is nothing to worry about!

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 17/01/2025

Happy birthday to us! 🎉🎂 HyperEssays turns 5 today. Still working on it. Still making progress. hyperessays.net

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

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H-Net Job Guide @h-net-job-guide.bsky.social · 01/10/2024

New job: Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History University of California - Los Angeles www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?…

h-net.org

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 22/02/2024

I use what sounds like a mix of both for HyperEssays: list of structs in TEI files—my source of truth—are split into discrete lists to support efficient, full-text querying online. Definitely related to db fields, as you note (if I understand you correctly).

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 14/01/2024

Absolutely yes. I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with and share.

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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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Krista K. Thomason @kkthomason.bsky.social · 16/11/2023

Happy World Philosophy Day, everyone! www.unesco.org/en/days/phil...

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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Magnus Pharao @magnuspharao.bsky.social · 27/10/2023

Yesterday something quite remarkable happened: The Florentine Codex, an Encyclopedia of Aztec culture in 12 volumes finished in 1569, was posted in a digital version with beautiful images and translation. Everyone with an interest in history should check it out. florentinecodex.getty.edu

florentinecodex.getty.edu

Digital Florentine Codex

The Getty Research Institute provides global access to the Florentine Codex, considered the most important manuscript of early colonial Mexico

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Conversations with People who read Montaigne: Jeff Persels

“Conversations with People who Read Montaigne” continues Monday, Nov. 27, at 1:00 PM (EST), with Jeff Persels (French lit., University of S. Carolina) More info and registration at as.nyu.edu/research-cen...

as.nyu.edu

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Conversations with People who Read Montaigne, Episode 4: Frank Lestringant and Phillip John Usher

Lestringant’s answers to Usher’s Montaigne Questionnaire: 1. First contact with the Essays: youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?... 2. Favorite chapter(s): youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?... 3. Why read the Essays today? youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?... 4. Book/article recommendation(s): youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?...

youtu.be

« Conversations with People who Read Montaigne », a series hosted by Phillip John Usher (NYU). For more details on the series, including future dates, past r...

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Lestringant touches on Montaigne’s “laicization of history,” the construction of “Des Coches” (a legal mind’s denunciation of European savagery built around nausea/“écœurement”), and where Montaigne fits, or doesn’t, in post-/anticolonialism.

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Conversations with People who Read Montaigne, Episode 4: Frank Lestringant and Phillip John Usher

Phillip John Usher’s latest installment of “Conversations with People who Read Montaigne,” in French, is on YouTube: youtu.be/10QCtkOL8pI?... Frank Lestringant talks about ”Des Coches” and Montaigne’s place in 16th cent. discussions of the colonization of the “New World.”

youtu.be

« Conversations with People who Read Montaigne », a series hosted by Phillip John Usher (NYU). For more details on the series, including future dates, past r...

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 24/10/2023

Phillip John Usher’s next guest on “Conversations with People Who Read Montaigne” will be Cathy Yandell (French/Francophone Studies, Carleton College) on Monday, Oct. 30. Registration info: as.nyu.edu/research-cen... (The URL says “--frank-lestringant” but is for Yandell’s talk.)

as.nyu.edu

Conversations with People who read Montaigne: Cathy Yandell

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 24/10/2023

as.nyu.edu

Conversations with People who read Montaigne: Cathy Yandell

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What Do I Know? | Pushkin Press

The book includes no notes, index, or bibliography but serves, in the words of Yiyun Li who wrote a short intro to the collection, as “a fine introduction for readers who are just about to discover Montaigne.” pushkinpress.com/books/what-d...

pushkinpress.com

A selection of Michel de Montaigne’s most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li ‘I myself am the subject of my book��...

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“Essential” might be a stretch for this particular collection (#marketing) but we’re always happy to see new translations of the Essays in print.

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The book is organized in three sections: “Montaigne on Montaigne” (I.2, I.7, I.8, I.9, I.19), “On the Pursuit of Reason” (I.18, I.27, I.38, I.39, I.47, II.2), and “On Governance and Governors” (I.31, I.42, I.44, I.57, III.6).

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Pushkin Press just released a new collection of 16 “essential essays” by Michel de Montaigne, newly translated into English by David Coward.

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Conversations With People Who Read Montaigne (www.montaigne.us) – Conversations With People Who Re...

Phillip John Usher’s series of “Conversations with People Who Read Montaigne,” is soon to resume with its next guest, Frank Lestringant, on Sept. 25th at 1:00 PM (EST). 📅 For more information (and registration, when the time comes?) visit wp.nyu.edu/artsampscien...

wp.nyu.edu

Conversations With People Who Read Montaigne

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HyperEssays @hyperessays.net · 19/09/2023

The answer, for those of you following along at home, was “beadroll:” a list of names. Thank you, Twitter’s iohannesflorius, for the answer!

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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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Montaigne wrote “rompt la teste” which Screech translated “bash everyone’s ear” and Frame “splits everyone’s head.”

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People familiar with Early Modern English, what word is “bedrowle” in John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s III.8 “Of the Arte of conferring”? “[He] doth nothing but molest al men with the impertinent bedrowle and register of his pedigrees….” hyperessays.net/florio/book/...

Of the Arte of conferring - The Essays of Michel de Montaigne

Chapter 8 of Book 3 of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne translated by John Florio

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