Natalie Zemon Davis,CC (November 8, 1928 – October 21, 2023) was an American-Canadian historian of theearly modern period. She was theHenry Charles Lea Professor of History atPrinceton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and theCaribbean. For example, her book,Trickster Travels (2006), views Italy, Spain,Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens ofLeo Africanus's pioneeringgeography. (By 2023, the text had appeared in six translations.) Davis' books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two forThe Return of Martin Guerre. She was the second female president of theAmerican Historical Association (the first,Nellie Neilson, was in 1943).
Natalie Zemon Davis (née Zemon) was born inDetroit,Michigan, on November 8, 1928, into a middle-classJewish family of Eastern European origin.[1] Her mother worked as a homemaker, and her father worked in the textile trade.[2] She traced her intellectual path to her Jewish heritage although her work did not center on Jewish issues.[3][4] Davis attendedCranbrook Kingswood School and she was subsequently educated atSmith College,Radcliffe College,Harvard University, and theUniversity of Michigan, from which she received her PhD in 1959. Her dissertation treated religion and class among the printers of Lyon in the 16th century.[5] In 1948, she met and married the mathematician and activistChandler Davis (1926–2022).[6] Natalie became involved in left-wing politics while at Smith College[1] and the couple had difficulties in the U.S. during the era of theRed Scare. Chandler Davis lost his professorship in Michigan, and in the 1960s, the couple moved to Canada with their three children.[6]
Natalie Zemon Davis subsequently taught atBrown University, theUniversity of Toronto, theUniversity of California at Berkeley, and from 1978 to her retirement in 1996, atPrinceton University, where she became the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of theShelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In addition to courses in the history of early modern France, she has taught and co-taught courses in history and anthropology, early modern Jewish social history, and history and film. She was also an important figure in the study of the history of women and gender—founding, withJill Ker Conway, a course in that subject in 1971 at the University of Toronto (one of the first such courses in North America).
Following her retirement, she lived inToronto, where she was Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She died of cancer at her home in Toronto on October 21, 2023, at the age of 94.[7][2]
Natalie Davis' main interests were in thesocial andcultural history of the Early Modern Europe, especially France, and focused on individuals and social groups previously ignored by historians. She made use of numerous sources such as judicial records, plays, notarial records, tax rolls, early printed books andpamphlets, autobiographies and folk tales.[8] She was a proponent of cross-disciplinary history, which consists of combining history with disciplines such asanthropology,ethnography andliterary theory.[9] In herSociety and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), she explored the lives of artisans and peasants: their relation to the Protestant Reformation, their carnivals, uprisings, and religious violence, and the impact of printing on their ways of thinking.[10]
Davis's interest in story-telling continued with her book,Fiction in the Archives:Pardon Tales and their Tellers in 16th-century France (1987), a study of the stories people of all classes told to the king to get pardoned for homicide in the days before manslaughter was a possible plea.[11] In herWomen on the Margins(1995), she looked at the autobiographical accounts of three 17th-century women—the Jewish merchantGlikl Hamel, the Catholic nunMarie de l'Incarnation, who came to New France, and the Protestantentomologist-artistMaria Sibylla Merian—and discussed the role of religion in their lives.[11]
Her book onThe Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (2000) is both a picture of gifts and bribes in the 16th century and a discussion of a viable mode of exchange different from the market. InTrickster Travels (2006), she describes how the early 16th-century North African Muslim "Leo Africanus" (Hasan al-Wazzan) managed to live as a Christian in Italy after he was kidnapped by Christianpirates and also sees his writings as an example of "the possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence." In 2017, she served as historical consultant forWajdi Mouawad's new playTous des Oiseaux that premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de La Colline. Set in present-day New York and Jerusalem, the play follows a German/Israeli family riven by conflict when the geneticist son wants to marry an Arab-American woman who is doing her doctoral dissertation on Hassan al-Wazzan/Leo Africanus, the subject of Davis'Trickster Travels.[13] Her book (unfinished),Braided Histories on 18th-centurySuriname studiesnetworks of communication and association among families, bothslave and free, on theplantations of Christian and Jewish settlers.[14]
Davis's historical writings sometimes resorted to speculation through her use of analogous evidence and inserting words like "perhaps" and phrases like "she may have thought." Some critics of her work find this troubling and think that this practice threatens the empirical base of the historian's profession.[citation needed] Davis's answer to this is suggested in her 1992 essay "Stories and the Hunger to Know", where she argues both for the role of interpretation by historians and their essential quest for evidence about the past: both must be present and acknowledged to keep people from claiming that they have an absolute handle on "truth".[15] She opened herWomen on the Margins with an imaginary dialogue, in which her three subjects upbraid her for her approach and for putting them in the same book. In herSlaves on Screen (2000), Davis maintains that feature films can provide a valuable way of telling about the past, what she calls "thought experiments", but only so long as they are connected with general historical evidence.[16]
In 2010, theHolberg International Memorial Prize, worth 4.5 million Norwegian kroner (~$700,000 US), for her narrative approach to the field of history. The award's citation described her as "one of the most creative historians writing today" who inspired younger generations of historians and promoted "cross-fertilization between disciplines". The citation said her compelling narrative "shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action".[17][18]
In November 1990, a symposium to honor Davis was held at Boston University: "Dialogues with the Past." The ensuring conference proceedings[25] served also as aFestschrift to celebrate the work of Professor Davis as author and teacher.[26]
Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit, Berlin: Wagenbach, 1986.
Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, Stanford University Press, 1987.
"Gender in the Academy: Women and Learning from Plato to Princeton: An Exhibition Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Undergraduate Coeducation at Princeton University" / organized by Natalie Zemon Davis ... [et al.]: Princeton University Library, 1990.
"Stories and the Hunger to Know,"Yale Journal of Criticism Volume 5, no. 2 (Spring 1992): pages 159–163.
Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, co-edited with Arlette Farge, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993. Volume III ofA History of Women in the West. [Originally published in Italian in 1991.]
Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1995.
A Life of Learning:Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997, New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1997.
"Religion and Capitalism Once Again? Jewish Merchant Culture in the Seventeenth Century" fromRepresentations no. 59 (Summer 1997): pages 56–84.
Remaking Impostors: From Martin Guerre to Sommersby, Egham, Surrey, UK: Royal Holloway Publications Unit, 1997.
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
^Davis, Natalie Ann Zemon. "Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyons: A Study in the Problem of Religion and Social Class During the Reformation." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1959. Proquest dissertations (subscription required).
^Diefendorf, Barbara B.; Hesse, Carla Alison, eds. (1993).Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.ISBN0472104705.
Adams, R.M. Review ofFiction in the Archives page 35 fromNew York Review of Books, Volume 34, Issue No. 4, March 16, 1989.
Adelson, R. Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis pages 405–422 fromHistorian Volume 53, Issue No. 3, 1991.
Benson, E. "The Look of the Past:Le Retour de Martin Guerre" pages 125–135 fromRadical History Review, Volume 28, 1984.
Bossy, J. "As it Happened: Review ofFiction in the Archives", pages 359 fromTimes Literacy Supplement, Issue 4488, April 7, 1989.
Chartier, RogerCultural History Between Practices and Representations, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
Coffin, J. & Harding. R. "Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis " pages 99–122 fromVisions of History edited by H. Abelove, B. Blackmar, P.Dimock & J. Schneer, Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984.
Diefendorf, Barbara and Hesse, Carla (editors)Culture and Identity in Early Modern France (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Finlay, R. "The Refashioning of Martin Guerre" pages 553–571 fromAmerican Historical Review Volume 93, Issue #3, 1988.
Guneratne, A. "Cinehistory and the Puzzling Case of Martin Guerre" pages 2–19 fromFilm and History, Volume 21, Issue # 1, 1991.
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