Natalie Zemon Davis
Encyclopedia
Natalie Zemon Davis is a Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 and American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 of the early modern period. She is currently a professor of history at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

 in Canada. Her work originally focused on France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, but has since broadened to include other parts of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

, and the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

. For example, Trickster Travels (2006) views Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 and other parts of North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

 and West Africa
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:...

 through the lens of Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus
Joannes Leo Africanus, was a Moorish diplomat and author who is best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa describing the geography of North Africa.-Biography:Most of what is known about his life is gathered from autobiographical...

's pioneering geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

. It has appeared in four translations, with three more on the way. Davis' books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre. She is a hero to many historians and academics, as "one of the greatest living historians", constantly asking new questions and taking on new challenges, the second woman president of the American Historical Association
American Historical Association
The American Historical Association is the oldest and largest society of historians and professors of history in the United States. Founded in 1884, the association promotes historical studies, the teaching of history, and the preservation of and access to historical materials...

 (the first, Nellie Neilson
Nellie Neilson
Nellie Neilson was an American historian.-Biography:Neilson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to William George Neilson and Mary Louise Neilson. She attended Bryn Mawr College, from which she received an A.B. in 1893, an A.M. in 1894, and a Ph.D. in 1899...

, was in 1943) and someone who "has not lost the integrity and commitment to radical thought which marked her early career".

In 2010, Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize
Holberg International Memorial Prize
The Holberg International Memorial Prize was established in 2003 by the government of Norway with the objective of increasing awareness of the value of academic scholarship within the arts, humanities, social sciences, law and theology, either within one of these fields or through interdisciplinary...

, worth 4.5 million Norwegian kroner (~$700,000 US), for her narrative approach to the field of history. The awards 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".

Life

Davis was born in Detroit into a middle-class family, the daughter of 19th century Jewish immigrants to America. She attended Kingswood School, Cranbrook and was subsequently educated at Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

, Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...

, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

, from which she received her Ph.D. in 1959. In 1948, she married Chandler Davis, now retired from the faculty of the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

, a mathematician who has also written science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 under the name Chan Davis
Chan Davis
Horace Chandler Davis is an American-Canadian mathematician, writer, and educator.He was born in Ithaca, New York, to parents Horace B. Davis and Marian R. Davis. In 1948 he married Natalie Zemon Davis; they have three children...

.

She and Davis had difficulties in the U.S. during the era of the Red Scare
Red Scare
Durrell Blackwell Durrell Blackwell The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong Anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker revolution and...

. He lost his job, they both lost their passports, and in the 1960s, they moved to Canada (Toronto) with their three children. Her passport was subsequently reinstated.

Natalie Davis has taught at Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

, the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

, the University of California at Berkeley, and from 1978 to her retirement in 1996, at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, where she became the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In addition to courses in the history of early modern France, she has taught or co-taught courses in history and anthropology, early modern Jewish social history, and history and film. She has also been an important figure in the study of the history of women and gender, founding with Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway
Jill Ker Conway is an Australian-American author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain. She was also Smith College's first woman president, from 1975–1985, and now serves as a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

 a course in that subject in 1971 at the University of Toronto: one of the first in North America. Since her retirement, she has been living in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, where she is Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

Research interests

Natalie Davis' main interests are in social
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...

 and cultural history
Cultural history
The term cultural history refers both to an academic discipline and to its subject matter.Cultural history, as a discipline, at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural...

, especially of those previously ignored by historians. She makes use of numerous sources such as judicial records, plays, notarial records, tax rolls, early printed books and pamphlets, autobiographies and folk tales. She is a proponent of cross-disciplinary history, which consists of combining history with disciplines such as anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

, ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

 and literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

. In her Society 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.

In her book best known to the public, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), she followed a celebrated case of a 16th-century impostor in a village in the Pyrenees
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees is a range of mountains in southwest Europe that forms a natural border between France and Spain...

 so as to see how peasants thought about personal identity. Often linked with Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg
Carlo Ginzburg is a noted historian and proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for his Il formaggio e I vermi which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.- Biography :The son of Natalia Ginzburg and Leone Ginzburg, he was born...

’s microhistory The Cheese and the Worms about the radical miller Menocchio, Davis’s book grew out of her experience as historical consultant for Daniel Vigne’s film Le retour de Martin Guerre
Martin Guerre
Martin Guerre, a French peasant of the 16th century, was at the center of a famous case of imposture. Several years after the man had left his wife, child, and village, a man claiming to be Guerre arrived. He lived with Guerre's wife and son for three years. The false Martin Guerre was tried,...

. Her book first appeared in French in 1982 at the same time as the premiere of the film.

Davis’s interest in story-telling continued with her book, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon
Pardon
Clemency means the forgiveness of a crime or the cancellation of the penalty associated with it. It is a general concept that encompasses several related procedures: pardoning, commutation, remission and reprieves...

 Tales and their Tellers in 16th-century France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan 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. In her Women on the Margins (1995), she looked at the autobiographical accounts of three 17th-century women — the Jewish merchant Glikl Hamel
Glückel of Hameln
Glückel of Hameln was a Jewish businesswoman and diarist, whose account of life provides scholars with an intimate picture of German Jewish communal life in the late-17th-early eighteenth century Jewish ghetto...

, the Catholic nun Marie de l’Incarnation
Marie Guyart
Marie Guyart, known latterly as Marie de l'Incarnation, , was an Ursuline nun who was the religious foundress of the Ursuline order in New France. Marie Guyart was also known as Marie Martin when she got married to Mr. Martin.Born in Tours, France, Marie married Claude Martin and had a son before...

, who came to New France, and the Protestant entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian
Maria Sibylla Merian was a naturalist and scientific illustrator who studied plants and insects and made detailed paintings about them...

—and discussed the role of religion in their lives.

Davis’s studies of the past have sometimes had present-day resonance. Her book on The 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. In Trickster Travels (2006), she describes how the early 16th-century North African Muslim "Leo Africanus
Leo Africanus
Joannes Leo Africanus, was a Moorish diplomat and author who is best known for his book Descrittione dell’Africa describing the geography of North Africa.-Biography:Most of what is known about his life is gathered from autobiographical...

" (Hasan al-Wazzan) managed to live as a Christian in Italy after he was kidnapped by Christian pirates and also sees his writings as an example of “the possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence.” Her book (in-process), Braided Histories on 18th-century Suriname
Suriname
Suriname , officially the Republic of Suriname , is a country in northern South America. It borders French Guiana to the east, Guyana to the west, Brazil to the south, and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Suriname was a former colony of the British and of the Dutch, and was previously known as...

 studies networks
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...

 of communication and association among families, both slave and free, on the plantations of Christian and Jewish settlers.

Though Davis’s historical writings are extensively researched, she sometimes resorts to speculation, using 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. 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.” She opened her Women 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 her Slaves 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.

Works

  • Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975.
  • "Women's History" in Transition: the European Case" pages 83–103 from Volume 3, Issue 3, Feminist Studies, 1975.
  • "Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France" pages 87–114 from Daedalus, Volume 106, Issue #2, 1977.
  • "Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820" pages 123–144 from University of Ottawa Quarterly, Volume 50, Issue #1, 1980.
  • "Anthropology and History in the 1980s: the Possibilities of the Past"pages 267–275 from Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 12, Issue #2, 1981.
  • "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-century Lyon", pages 40–70 from Past and Present, Volume 90, 1981.
  • "Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-century Lyon" pagers 47–80, Volume 8, Issue 1, from Feminist Studies, 1982.
  • "Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-century France" pages 69–88 from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Volume 33, 1983.
  • The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

    , 1983.
  • Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit, Berlin: Wagenbach, 1986.
  • "`Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead': Film and the Challenge of Authenticity" pages 457–482 from The Yale Review, Volume 76, Issue #4, 1987.
  • Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987.
  • "Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Life as an Early Modern Autobiography" pages 103–118 from History and Theory, Volume 27, Issue #4, 1988.
  • "History's Two Bodies" pages 1–13 from the American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue #1, 1988.
  • "On the Lame" pages 572–603 from American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue #3, 1988.
  • "Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s)" pages 1–32 from Representations, Volume 32, Issue #1, 1990.
  • "The Shapes of Social History" pages 28–32 from Storia della Storiographia Volume 17, Issue #1, 1990.
  • "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 : Princeton University Library, 1990
  • "Women and the World of Annales" pages 121–137 from Volume 33, History Workshop Journal, 1992.
  • Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, co-edited with Arlette Farge, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993. Volume III of A 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
    Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

    , 1995. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DAVWOM.html
  • A Life of Learning: Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997, New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1997. http://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/OP/Haskins/1997_NatalieZemonDavis.pdf
  • Remaking Imposters: From Martin Guerre to Sommersby, Egham, Surrey, UK: Royal Holloway Publications Unit, 1997.
  • "Beyond Evolution: Comparative History and its Goals" pages 149–158 from Swiat Historii edited by W. Wrzoska, Poznan: Instytut Historii, 1998.
  • The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, University of Wisconsin Press 2000
  • Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press
    Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...

    , 2002
  • Trickster Travels New York: Hill & Wang, 2006.

External links

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