A View of the "Montaigne": A Look at How Montaigne Influenced Fielding’s Views of Pedagogy

Elise Carol Thomasson, French

Due to the social changes in Europe in the sixteenth century, a new kind of educational system was needed to prepare the aristocracy to enter their local administrations.  Among those debating on just how to ready these nobles youths for their political posts was the humanist Michel de Montaigne.  In his Essays (1580), he wrote a piece called ‘De l’Institution des enfants’ making plain his educational expectations and goals centered around a curriculum teaching humility, absorption of Classical philosophy, and the continuous formation of judgment by extensive travel and broadened outlook.  Across the English Channel and two hundred years later, another writer-philosopher, Henry Fielding, published the novel Tom Jones (1749) describing a pedagogical philosophy so parallel to that of Montaigne’s that the question of influence is raised, but has never been quite answered.  Fielding made it plain in his letters that he read and admired Montaigne; however a comparison of their texts is necessary to examine the degree to which one philosopher absorbed the other.

    This paper attempts to demonstrate that Fielding was influenced by Montaigne’s views of pedagogy based on a comparison of the three characteristics integral to both of their philosophies.  It will then go on to explain how Fielding elaborated and possibly improved upon Montaigne’s original idea of what it meant to be “well educated.”