Texts as the (orphaned) children of MdG and Montaigne

If a person in France in the 16th century wrote a book but suddenly died and was unable to finish the text, what happened to the unfinished text? Which people could and were allowed to publish it and perhaps even finish or change it? How did these people proceed and what role did women play in this endeavour, who for a long time were not allowed to edit, write and publish books themselves? By discussing the example of the author Montaigne (1533-1592) and the author Marie de Gournay (1565-1645), this doctoral thesis answers these questions. When Michel de Montaigne died in 1592, he left behind a disorganised pile of notes on his main work, called "Les Essais" and containing many hundreds of pages. Montaigne first published Les Essais as a book in 1571. Since it showed the people of his time a completely new way of thinking and writing, it caused sensation. However, it is thanks to Marie de Gournay that Les Essais was not forgotten after Montaigne`s death and over the decades. This young woman read Les Essais as a teenager and was very enthusiastic about Montaignes book. However, at that time women were primarily supposed to be housewives and mothers. Consequently, the fact that Marie de Gournay never wanted to marry, read a lot, and later published her own texts, was therefore considered scandalous. Nevertheless, she met Montaigne in person in 1588 and an `alliance` developed between the two, i.e., a very close friendship. From then on, they called each other `father` and `daughter`. However, Montaigne, who was already the father of his own daughter named Léonor, never adopted Marie. It is therefore even more astonishing that Marie de Gournay was asked by Montaigne`s family after his death for help in working through that disorganised pile of notes and publishing the last version of Les Essais. Marie was inexperienced as an editor and, as a woman, did not have a lot of support in the book world. Nevertheless, she mastered the task and published several versions of Les Essais starting from 1594. In the decades that followed, she also managed to pass the text on to posterity in such a way that it is still in print today. This doctoral thesis traces the strategies she used to achieve this: Firstly, Marie repeatedly presented herself as a member of the Montaigne family through her own texts. In addition, she wrote about Les Essais and her own complete works, Les Advis, as her `(orphaned) children`, which she entrusted to various people as `children` and texts for the time after her own death. In parallel to her work as an editor, Marie de Gournay dared to follow an unusual path for a woman of her time: She lived unmarried in her own flat in Paris, wrote and published a variety of texts and took active part in social discussions.