Natalie Zemon Davis: A Remembrance

Natalie Zemon Davis:A Remembrance Bonnie G. Smith (bio) The origins of Natalie Zemon Davis's life as a pioneer of women's and gender history—as in historical scholarship tout court—sit like a legend in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was then that a multi-paged mimeographed bibliography of books and other sources on the history of European women circulated among those wanting to study and research that field. The problem with pursuing this topic, we had been told, was that there were no primary sources, no scholarship, and no histories of such women. It was barren terrain, and scholars repeated age-old warnings of the futility of such inquiries to women who wanted to study or do scholarship themselves. Jill Ker Conway and Natalie Zemon Davis, then at the University of Toronto, gave the lie to this assertion when they produced this bibliography. The warnings and the aspirations came during America's "little wars" in Vietnam and elsewhere, along with an upswing in civil rights and feminist activism. During the 1960s, scholarship on US women began to take flight, yielding works by Gerda Lerner and Ann Firor Scott who asked, for example, how the biographer of the celebrated men in the Otis family could have entirely omitted Mercy Otis Warren. Almost miraculously, the Conway-Davis bibliography—the fruit of intense labor—offered inspiration to would-be scholars of European women. The bibliography was to many of us—not to exaggerate, as I was there, but to repeat—magical. Davis described her own trajectory between her graduate work in the 1950s and the several intellectual apotheoses shaping her intellectual life over the decades. In graduate school, she had to read Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies, a Renaissance defense of womankind. This experience, she claimed, was "a delight" as she had never read anything by a woman either in her undergraduate or graduate courses until then. She had also been assigned the work of the medieval Muslim philosopher and traveler Ibn Khaldun—another first. Taking up the enthusiasm for social history and Marxist scholarship at the time, she turned to studying women printers in Lyon—not women of the court—in the early modern period. However, her twin forays into the works of Christine and Khaldun, along with the rise of subaltern studies and attention to enslaved peoples, sparked—perhaps ignited is more accurate—her determination not to be a Europeanist but to study the world's peoples. However, by that time, Davis had become renowned for her attention to the details of everyday life and close-up comparisons of individuals. Global history, in contrast, studied "big" and world-shaking phenomena. Davis's strategy became bringing individuals, often from different cultures and circumstances, onto the world End Page 10 stage. From there, she charted the intermingli ng of languages, lifeways, skills, beliefs, values, and know-how across cultures. From the same stage, she would bring together and interrogate a new historical "intimacy"—global, but up-close, individual, social, and gendered. Virtually the entire corpus of Davis's scholarship took shape around these categories. For all that this might sound sociological, readers of Davis's work know that it is lively, full of odd, sober, self-fashioned, wily, erudite, and altogether unique characters. In Davis's telling, these figures—humble, seemingly ordinary, or grand—emerge full of historical import and rich in life experiences from which we can profitably draw images of the past. Can one put down a Davis book from boredom? Davis's work was transformative on many levels, including her determination to focus on characters interacting with one another and having conversations, thus her simultaneous emphasis on the flow of languages among disparate peoples and the creation of multilingual dictionaries in many histories structured around cross-cultural actors. Davis developed her own intimate style of relating to those in the academic world and even outside it. In her presentations, she spoke relevantly to any audience, including local historical figures. Davis seemed to craft a new essay for every occasion, many of which remain pivotal. Refusing to resort to her specialty or older writings, on receiving an honorary degree from the...