The stakes and methods that have long determined the historiography of intellectual life in French provincial towns have undergone far-reaching transformations, especially in the fields of book-history and bibliography. Those disciplines, with the comprehensive overview of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book-production they generated, now enable us to delineate the institutional framework within which literary and scholarly activities thrived, to write a prosopography of intellectual life’s agents (writers, scholars, university professors and patrons), to analyse their works and value their importance and singularity. When we define this remarkable period of Bordeaux’s intellectual life as the “Time of Montaigne”, we do not only predicate chronological demarcations but we also engage in a complex debate: how to understand the local circumstances in which took shape such a masterpiece as the Essais, while highlighting various other forms of culture that existed in Bordeaux during the period 1530-1620, without being overwhelmed by Montaigne’s centrality.