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| Natalie Zemon Davis | |
Natalie Zemon Davis, a social and cultural historian "whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures--peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts--profoundly influenced the discipline," died October 21, the New York Times reported. She was 94. Drawing on anthropology and literary criticism, as well as archival digging, Davis "both represented and inspired an emerging approach to history in the second half of the 20th century, often by filling in gaps in the historical record with informed speculations based on deep immersion in the period under study."
Her best-known book was The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who for several years successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family. The Times noted that the book was "a kind of follow-up to a 1982 movie," Le Retour de Martin Guerre, and Davis, who had published a groundbreaking essay collection, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), was the historical adviser to director Daniel Vigne and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière while they were working on the film.
Upon its release, Davis realized the movie could not convey the nuances of the story and so decided to give "this arresting tale," as she put it in a preface to the book, "its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past."
Her next book, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987), explored stories that common people accused of homicide told in order to secure a pardon from the king. Other books include Women on the Margins (1995), The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (2000), Slaves on Screen (2000), and Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006).
During a long teaching career, Davis eventually moved from Toronto to Princeton in 1978 and stayed for 18 years, succeeding Lawrence Stone as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. She retired in 1996 as the Henry Charles Lea professor of history. She had helped found women's studies programs at both Princeton and UC Berkeley. Returning to Canada, she was named a professor emerita in the University of Toronto's history department.
Davis became president of the American Historical Association in 1987, only the second woman to hold that position. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2012 and was presented with the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
In a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, she considered how her years of study had given her confidence in the resilience and adaptability of societies: "No matter how bleak and constrained the situation, some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future." She added, "The past reminds us that change can occur."