The theme of travel, prominent in the essay “De la Vanité” (III, 9), and the subject of many of its “digressions,” serves, in a sense, to disguise the more central and unifying theme of vanity. The question of vanity lies behind all of Montaigne’s so-called “digressions” on travel, which are not really digressions from his stated theme at all, but rather ways of recasting and examining vanity in a more personal vein. Travel is perhaps the essayist’s chief vanity; yet, despite its inherent vanity, Montaigne takes great pleasure in this self-indulgence.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Green, V. M., (2025), "Montaigne's Vanity: Reading Digressions on Travel", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Green, Virginia M. "Montaigne's Vanity: Reading Digressions on Travel." Renaissance and Reformation 30 (4): 2010. 29-37. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v30i4.11520. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.