The Essais of Michel de Montaigne are particularly difficult to edit. They were published four times during Montaigne’s life, and a posthumous edition was published three years after his death. Each of these publications reflected substantial changes that Montaigne made to his manuscript, including extensive marginal additions, words changed and deleted, and an entirely new volume added in the 1588 edition. Incorporating all of Montaigne’s text into one comprehensive yet usable critical edition is a significant challenge to modern scholarly editors.
This thesis proposes a prototype electronic edition of the Essais to address these editorial problems and discusses the features that an ideal electronic edition of the Essais might include. Such an edition would be more complete than traditional printed critical editions, which are often forced to omit many textual variants because of space constraints. It would also be easier to use: in place of the traditional critical apparatus, it would provide an interface allowing the reader to view the complete body of textual variants in an accessible format. The thesis also discusses the issues surrounding electronic critical editions in general, and an electronic copy of the prototype edition is included.