Name: Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives
Price: 658.89 ZAR
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Author: Natalie Zemon Davis
ISBN: 9780674955219

portada Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

Type

Physical Book

Author

Natalie Zemon Davis

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Year

1997

Language

English

Pages

360

Format

Paperback

Weight

1.30

ISBN

0674955218

ISBN13

9780674955219

Synopsis "Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives "

Natalie Zemon DavisAs she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women—one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant—left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history. All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands. Drawing on Glikl's memoirs, Marie's autobiography and correspondence, and Maria's writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. Shereconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time—childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature—and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.

Natalie Zemon Davis

(Author)

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Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023) was an American-Canadian historian known for her innovative approach to the cultural and social history of early modern Europe. Her most famous work is The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a pioneering study in microhistory that has been translated into more than twenty languages. Other notable works include Fiction in the Archives (1987), Women on the Margins (1995), and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). Davis taught at institutions such as Princeton and the University of Toronto, and her work is characterized by blending history, anthropology, and literature to recover the voices of marginalized people in history.

Throughout her career, Davis received numerous accolades, including the Holberg Prize in 2010 and the National Humanities Medal from the U.S. in 2012. She was also named a Companion of the Order of Canada. Her legacy continues in the field of historiography, where her interdisciplinary approach and focus on personal narratives have deeply influenced generations of historians.

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