This essay situates the political thought of the French Renaissance prose writer Jean Bodin within the dual tradition of political theory and epideictic rhetoric. Bodin’s pragmatic reappraisal of superstition, as a bulwark against atheism and anarchy, represents a sort of convergence of paradoxical encomium and political realism in the service of religious pluralism and pacification of civil war. When juxtaposed with his more famous predecessor Niccolò Machiavelli and more renowned contemporary Michel de Montaigne, Bodin’s treatment of superstition, both in his vernacular masterpiece Les six livres de la République and in his neo-Latin works, emerges as a timely intervention in confessional strife and a classical adaptation of epideictic wisdom.

This article studies the essays of Michel de Montaigne in the context of the tradition of epideictic rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance, with particular attention to the humanist reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The focus of this attention is the relationship between epideictic and consensus, which proves to be more problematic than Aristotle seems to have anticipated. If we read Montaigne’s essay “Des Cannibales” as a paradoxical encomium and compare it to Plutarch’s declamation on the fortune of Alexander, we can see how epideictic works to undermine consensus and even to challenge the very impulse to conform to social and ethical norms.

This essay examines Montaigne’s admiration for ancient Sparta from a rhetorical and an ideological standpoint. The praise of Sparta in the Essais takes the form of a paradoxical encomium which allows Montaigne to challenge the received opinions of his time and to define his own values against the prevailing discourse of humanism. In the process the Essais also confront the problem of comparing the past to the present and of reconciling ancient and modern institutions. In this way the praise of Sparta emerges not only as a rhetorical exercise but also as an essay of self-definition and an inquiry into historical relativism.