This study explores Michel de Montaigne’s interest in how communication functions through intention and inference. Throughout his Essais, Montaigne suggests that communication, whether verbal or extralinguistic, is fundamentally an interaction between minds. To account for this portrayal of human interchange, the thesis draws on relevance theory, a cognitively-inflected framework of utterance interpretation in the field of pragmatics. Relevance theory holds that communicative acts provide only sparse evidence of the communicator’s intended meaning. The addressee must engage in a series of inferential processes to fill in the gaps and arrive at an interpretation of the utterance, gesture, or text, as the case may be. Relevance theory’s attention to the cognitive mechanics and non-verbal aspects of communication allows the thesis to depart from debates over strictly textual meaning in the Essais that dominated Montaigne scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century. Rather than focusing primarily on the status of the Essais as Montaigne’s communicative act, on the play of signifiers in the text and the stability or instability of the meaning it produces, the thesis considers how Montaigne conceives of communication as an interactive process with implications for the social and political spheres.

To that end, the thesis examines Montaigne’s discussions of communication in four contexts, devoting a chapter to each: conversation, diplomacy, law and jurisprudence, and exegesis and prayer. The sustained use of a pragmatic framework to analyse Montaigne’s evocations of four seemingly disparate communicative domains, typically treated separately by intellectual history, reveals patterns in his thinking that traverse these domains. In each setting, this analysis underscores Montaigne’s persistent concern with how power discrepancies and social hierarchies affect communication, and how communication shapes society in turn. In exploring this facet of the essayist’s thinking, the thesis pushes beyond relevance theory’s largely apolitical account of the fundamental mechanics of interchange. It draws on additional theoretical models to better grasp the power dynamics Montaigne evokes, including speech act theory and Erving Goffman’s sociological study of human interaction. By supplementing relevance theory with these frameworks, the thesis effects a rapprochement between the emerging field of cognitive literary criticism and analysis attentive to power and politics.