Until recently one of the most neglected aspects of Western European history in the modern period has been the role of ceremonial in forming and reflecting the development of political thought and institutions. Medieval historians have long used the coronation ceremony extensively as source material, but Ernst H. Kantorowicz was really the first to show scholars how to use ceremonial in understanding the early modern age. The extent to which ceremonial is a significant source of political ideology was clearly demonstrated by Ralph E. Giesey in his The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France, a study which shows how the French acted out crucial political conceptions in the period when the modern state was being born, and which elucidates some of the ways in which the development of ceremonial embraces political thought and acts.

None of the many studies on Montaigne appears to have pursued in a consequential manner the attitudes which the author of the Essais assumes towards his own work in the course of his twentyone years of literary production. For the most part, Montaigne's allusions to his book have been related to the moment when he made them (as facilitated by Pierre Villey's fine work on the chronology of the various chapters), or to whatever major theme the commentator has been developing. The aim of this essay is to assemble in chronological order Montaigne's observations concerning his book in order not only to compare one phase with another, but also to demonstrate the progressive manner in which the book becomes an integral, organic function of the essayist's introspective odyssey.

Two difficult passages in the second act of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar can be illuminated if each is interpreted as an emblem. Brutus’ troublesome first soliloquy and the strange dialogue among three conspirators about where the sun rises are both moments of great moral intensity; Brutus meditates on the necessity of assassinating Caesar in the first passage and commits himself to the conspiracy during the second. We might plausibly look to iconography as a perspective on such morally intense moments; emblems, certainly, are in keeping with the pageantry, symbolic statuary, ritual, and solemn moral utterance which permeate this play.