Adventure and Empathy

In the prologue to Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives, Natalie Zemon Davis imagines a remarkable dialogue with her three women subjects. The three rise up in protest against Davis and her book about them. They are not mere “women,” they insist, nor do they see themselves as “on the margins.” They are Catholic, or Protestant, or Jewish; they are mothers or have abandoned motherhood; they have followed their beliefs and their callings. In this dialogue, Davis reveals to her readers the historian’s dilemma: she cannot help but see the past through modern lenses such as “gender,” but she knows that this past will resist such categories. How can a modern historian access the foreign territory of history? For Davis, navigating such dilemmas is all part of the “adventure” of historical writing.

Perhaps it is this sense of passion and adventure that has made Natalie Zemon Davis one of the most important historians alive today. Author of innumerable...