In the eyes of Rousseau, Montaigne had shared too little, not too much: he was not truthful about himself. But this charge reflects the fact that Rousseau was unwilling to allow that there had been any accurate self-portraits in words before his own “Confessions.” It was Montaigne, though, who was the real pioneer. The famous autobiographies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages — St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and Abelard’s “History of My Misfortunes” — bared all in order to help other sinners save their souls; unlike Montaigne’s “Essais,” they were professedly intended for sober religious purposes. And Renaissance autobiographies, like those of the artist Benvenuto Cellini or the mathematician and gambler Girolamo Cardano, tended to be published only posthumously.

Somewhat like a link-infested blog post, Montaigne’s writing is dripping with quotations, and can sometimes read almost as an anthology. His “links” are mainly classical, most often to Plato, Cicero and Seneca. Modern readers may find all these insertions distracting — there is, as it were, too much to click on — but some may be thankful for a fragmentary yet mostly reliable classical education on the cheap. (Montaigne should not, however, have credited Aristotle with the maxim, “A man . . . should touch his wife prudently and soberly, lest if he caresses her too lasciviously the pleasure should transport her outside the bounds of reason.” The real source of this unromantic advice is unknown.)

Bakewell, Frampton and Kent all stress that the distinctive mark of Montaigne is his intellectual humility. Like Socrates, Montaigne claims that what he knows best is the fact that he does not know anything much. To undermine common beliefs and attitudes, Montaigne draws on tales of other times and places, on his own observations and on a barrage of arguments in the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptical tradition, which encouraged the suspension of judgment as a middle way between dogmatic assertion and equally dogmatic denial. Montaigne does often state his considered view, but rarely without suggesting, explicitly or otherwise, that maybe he is wrong. In this regard, his writing is far removed from that of the most popular bloggers and columnists, who are usually sure that they are right.

For Bakewell, it is Montaigne’s sense of moderation in politics and his caution in judgment from which the 21st century has most to learn. For Frampton, whose style is more academic than Bakewell’s (and not always in a good way), one of Montaigne’s most valuable insights is that self-knowledge is connected with the knowledge of others, and that empathy is the heart of morality. Kent concludes that the wisdom of Montaigne is a wisdom for Everyman, and that the “Essais” are a tool for thinking that anyone may use.