Religion was one of the reasons why many English readers, from the late seventeenth century on, felt so free to enjoy Montaigne. It was of no concern to English Protestants when the Church put his book on the Index. It even allowed them to enjoy the pleasant feeling of getting one up on Catholics and, more gratifyingly still, on the French. The latter could be portrayed as a people unable to recognize their own best writers, especially after the French Académie began imposing rigorous standards of classical elegance on all its literature. A “free and unruly” writer (as Montaigne described
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