The pastoral is the perfect portrait of the innocent state that is associated with the Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is described with the qualities of purity, simplicity, passion, and as having an atmosphere of the paradisal Golden Age. The Golden Age was a common theme for discourse in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that held many contrasting beliefs upon subjects such as art and nature, idealism and realism, optimism and cynicism, finiteness and infiniteness, and male and female. All these serve the myth of the pastoral as the Golden age. A great skeptic of the Golden Age who lived during the sixteenth century, Michael de Montaigne, introduced a book of Essays in which Montaigne’s skeptical ideas would travel widespread across France and would become a part of the culture and dialect of the French people. In his essays titled "On Cannibals", he writes for some time about the civilized nature of the cannibal people. He writes, "Among them, you hear no words of treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, …show more content…
The reason why this is important to the theme of the pastoral is that Montaigne, opposing the present atmosphere of his society, had the view that his society was corrupt, violent, and dishonest. By comparing it