From the borders of Montaigne's Essais to the edges of Christian Europe, from peripheries marked by gender and sexuality to those delineated by ethnicity – borders, edges, and peripheries that are literary and philosophical, geographical, cultural, social, or religious, and that can be literal, figurative, or symbolic – the concept of the ‘margin’ provides a valuable hermeneutic perspective for considering French thought and literary production in the sixteenth century. Margin is not, of course, an absolute term but a relational one whose precise location can only be plotted by association with a centre. Although one could argue that it is the margin that frames and thus produces the centre, in this binary structure the margin has tended traditionally to be subordinated, plotted spatially as the outside of a privileged inside, dependent on what for all intents and purposes Western culture has traditionally consecrated as the point from which all else radiates and derives meaning and value.

If we were to begin our discussion with Montaigne's Essais (1580, 1582, 1595) we could plot a specific disposition of centre and margin both physically within the space of the written page and mentally in the emergence of a distinctive sense of self. Montaigne opens the well-known essay ‘De l'amitié’ (i.28) with a vivid metaphor of the origin and the development of his work in just these terms, depicting himself emulating a painter who selects the finest place in the middle of the wall for a picture elaborated with all his skill and who then fills up the empty space all around with grotesques and fantastical paintings.