Listening to Natalie Zemon Davis

The title of this paper is inspired by the title of Natalie Zemon Davis’s last book, Listening to the Languages of the People (2022), which focuses on the philologist Lazare Sainéan.1 This book seems to me to indirectly reflect a specific tension in Davis’s writing, which is itself a philological experiment. Sainéan, whose tomb is located in a section of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, where both Jews and gentiles are buried, no doubt appealed to Davis because he embodied the duality that was in some ways displayed on the ground floor of her Toronto home: on the back wall hung two portraits of her husband’s Quaker ancestors; on a small table sat a nine-branched candlestick. In Sainéan’s analysis of François Rabelais, Davis saw a kind of transcription akin to what she had been trying to do all her life as a historian: for her, language had a power, the power to recall “the whole life of Renaissance men in its most diverse aspects.”2 Language tells us who the people of the past were and what their lives were like. For Davis, language had the power to help decipher history and verbalize the past for the benefit of the men and women of the present, so that they might find reason for hope in the course of their lives.I would like to try to listen to the languages of Natalie Zemon Davis and analyze her work by asking the same key question that she asked of Sainéan: why and how did she give priority to this epistemological quest, that is, to fight against what she called the tragic “silences” of the past?If you listen to Davis’s language, you can see that her historical work is built around five major interdependent tensions that work against those silences:Natalie Zemon Davis implemented a form of writing that, in her view, allowed her to overcome a fatality: the historical inaudibility of women, the poor, the weak, and, more broadly, “the people.” Davis set herself the task of overcoming this silence, of repairing it in some way. So why her commitment to this “silence” so often invoked in her work?3 For her, the reconfiguration of “past experiences” was a vital duty that allowed her to find an alternative to the restrictive paths of historiographies; in this sense, she posited the methodological postulate that the fatality of silence could be subverted through archival work, opening the way to a hermeneutic overcoming.4 As she shared in her many interviews, with me, and with others, Davis saw her role as a historian as giving voice to those she discovered in her research, in the archives, and in so doing moving beyond their deaths.5This fixation on voice could be misleading, resulting in a kind of romantic conception of history, like that of nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who, wandering through the archives, encountered ghosts to whom he thought he had the power to give life and voice.6 History really did penetrate Michelet, so much so that he said he had suffered a nosebleed while working on the September Massacres. Certainly, for Davis, ghosts were also among “the people” she was trying to bring to life, just as Michelet sought to do with his “instinctive wisdom.” And for Davis, paraphrasing Michelet, the epistemological break between the present and the past does not exist. But thinking and writing about “the people” involved a game of skillful restitutions that made possible the discovery of “what really happened.” And in contrast to Michelet,7 for Davis this did not lead to an almost mystical euphoria and “moral chemistry.”8 An essential difference was that, from a methodological point of view, the past that she sought to recover required a reasoned interactive method that operated intrusively within the historian herself, through what could be described as the creation of a kind of virtual dialogical reality.There was a great tension in her quest: despite the absence of written records of their thoughts and motivations, in her eyes, urban and rural people had to be seen as actors, using all the physical, social and cultural means at their disposal to survive, to cope, and sometimes to change things.9 Despite what their disappearance had erased, they had at one time thought and acted, and it was this thinking and acting that fascinated and opened her up to this virtual methodology. Her desire was to connect the dead with their twentieth-century contemporaries, or, more precisely, to restore to the people of the past the use of language in order to fight the forces of death in the present.10Davis was a historian of humility, but she was nevertheless confident that she could confront the silence of the past, a silence all the more unbearable because it affected the “humble,” the “most ordinary”: “My wish is to save or preserve people—women and men—from obscurity, from the hidden, and give some dignity or sense to their lives, even when they end tragically.”11The word “save” is crucial because it places the historian in a quasi-humanitarian mission. For her, these lives cannot remain outside the fields of historicization, and they seek a form of assistance, manifesting in their very silence a “need” to enter into writing and thus be revived: these lives that begin to speak have identities that are not fixed but are rather self-created “by countless negotiations according to situations and relationships of power.” The key notion here is fashioning, which means that the history Davis activates is a rescue anthropology of the subject, carrying within it an infinite number of evolving variations, mobilized, for example, by women to outwit patriarchal attitudes.12 “I had a very strong sense of the humanity of these people, and that they once existed as I do now, and I wanted to recapture that.”13More specifically, Davis confided that it was her fundamental ethical duty to give these people of history the gift of herself. Her insistence on the tool of language, she knew, put her in “agreement” with her subject, the sixteenth century. Indeed, sixteenth-century people believed that it was through words that people could hope to promote a society of caritas, or compassion. Compassion was for Davis an extraordinarily inspiring commitment. About this compassion she spoke of the need to decenter so as to avoid presenting the history of the past only “from the vantage point of a single part of the world or of powerful elites, but rather widen[] his or her scope, socially and geographically, and introduce[] plural voices into the account.”14 These voices didn’t just speak to her about themselves; they led her on a journey to a more distant otherness in an active process of interaction: “the experience of writing Women on the Margins changed my sense of myself as a historian. I was no longer going to think of myself as ‘a Europeanist,’ but would be a historian who could change her sites. Moreover, when I wrote from Europe, or from anywhere, I would always try to run my story, if only as a mental exercise, through the eyes of those elsewhere in the world.”15One question guided Davis’s work and led her to give voice to Glikl, Marie, and Maria Sibylla, the protagonists of Women on the Margins: how did these three women, in the face of social, familial, and religious opposition, find loopholes that allowed them to live their lives and pursue their individual choices without giving up? As I said, for Davis history had a restorative vocation, as it sought to highlight the dignity of the lives of the women it focused on. Her mission as a historian was to restore the respect that these women deserved and often did not receive during their lifetimes: to be a historian is to independently assume the duty of telling the stories of those who have not spoken about them.16This ethical duty, beyond the mimetic compassion that animated her, was driven by a passion for justice. Davis equates her work with an enterprise of preservation in the face of an engulfment that obscures the lives of the humble and oppressed as much for the living as for the dead, but even more so for the dead as they can no longer speak for themselves. Underpinning her work is a principle of the permeability of past subjectivities and, therefore, a duty to retrospectively intrude on them, which is necessary to the practice of history. Listening to the languages of Natalie Zemon Davis means becoming aware that the work of history is a work of salvation in which language is at the center.For Davis, history is an adventure that happens backward in time. Women on the Margins begins with a prologue in which Glikl, Marie, and Maria talk, protesting that they have nothing to do with each other. In the midst of this conversation, Davis suddenly emerges from the shadows to tell them that they were intrepid women in their time, intrepid because they set out to do what no one had done before, and which was in keeping with their own ideals: “It was an adventure following you three to so many different climes. And I wanted to write of your hopes for paradise on earth, for remade worlds, since I have had those hopes, too.”17As we can see, Davis’s stories are about other people, and these people are her doubles. And as I’ve been suggesting, to read Davis is, in a sense, to listen. It means accepting an implicit contract by which the reader allows himself to be drawn into the imaginary world of a possible communication between past and present that only the writing of history can perform and bring to us.18 The important thing is that the duty of history is to put into practice a hermeneutics of otherness, through a strategy of distancing, and to take responsibility—or even an “appetite”—for the past. Davis wanted to bring back into the present those who had preserved their identity in the past “in spite of the disappointments, the things unfinished, the suffering.”19History is not a closed book. Davis wrote for the present, for a third protagonist of this experiment: a readership for whom these “dignities” emerging from the silence of the past could be a pedagogy for the present. It must be said again that restoring the voices of these three women of the past is not only an ethical paradigm but also a political one, reflecting Davis’s commitment to fighting social injustice, racism, the atomic bomb, the harmful effects of McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, George W. Bush’s interventionist militarism, and so on.Yet at the heart of Davis’s quest is doubt. Thus, she reports that, at the end of writing The Return of Martin Guerre, her tour de force investigation of a case of early modern stolen identity, she questioned herself and the form of dialogic necromancy to which she had resorted: “I think I have uncovered the true face of the past—or has Pansette [Arnaud du Thil] done it once again?”20 That the historian is only ever a historian of an incompleteness makes it impossible to know when the empathetic function of her writing veers into overinterpretation: “I had conceived my book as an exploration of truth and doubt, to suggest analogies between the quest for truth about the identity of a community in the sixteenth century and the quest for truth about the past of a historian today. As historians, we do our best to find evidence and offer a convincing interpretation, but the thorny issues remain, more often than not, and prompt further research.”21Davis emphasized that she remained “haunted by the ghost of unanswered questions,” as if the dead never left her, making her feel guilty for living in uncertainty.22 She spoke of the disappointments and frustrations of her career as a historian, which she described as a constant struggle against the “opacity of the past.”23 Her hopes were shattered when, for example, in the archives of the Grand Priory of Navarre she found the gift of land from a father to his son, Martin Guerre—only to discover that the affair had taken place in 1274 and therefore concerned a completely different Martin Guerre. “We must not abandon our practices of proof,” she confided; “we must stay faithful to the ideal of proof, that is, to the ideal possibility—always receding, never fully achieved—of forms of common knowledge in this world of differences.”24Sometimes what Davis found in the archives led her to nuance what she had expected to find. In the case of the Huguenots, for example, she ended up oscillating between positive and negative interpretations of their involvement in social change, demonstrating the complexity of history and the difficulty of teleological reductionism: “the Reformed solution did promote a certain desexualization of society, a certain neutralizing of forms of communication and of certain religious places so that they became acceptable for women.”25 Hence her idea that, despite appearances, the Reformation actually accentuated the subordination of women. Until the eighteenth century, both Protestantism and Catholicism reduced the scope for female autonomy. The danger for the interpreter would be to fall into the temptation of teleology when every event is marked by ambivalence. In the upheavals of the sixteenth century there was a kind of reversal of initial promises. To avoid reductionism and prejudice was a priority for her.26Davis claims to have followed what she called a Rabelaisian path, in which we move back and forth between these two angles of attack, that is, between the true and the possibly true, between the libido sciendi and the mediocritas of the fabled woodsman Couillatris, whose epistemic dilemma is evoked by Rabelais in Book IV of his masterwork.27 She wanted to go beyond silence “by paying particular attention to the interplay between the actors, between them and their judges, between the facts, their narrator and their readers.”28 This does not prevent her from claiming that the texts she writes are based on the facts of the past, with the nuance that this is the case “to some extent.” “If it’s uncertain, then I must use the marker that a fiction writer would not have to use: ‘perhaps,’ ‘we may think that,’ ‘maybe,’ or my favourite, ‘surely.’ If I’m really unsure, I use a question: ‘We don’t know, but might we think that…?’ And by asking the question, I expand an area of thinking about the past. I do try to write in a way that uses the best features of fictional style. But not fiction!”29This led her to try to invent a form of discursive métissage, which is effective because the otherness of the characters from the past is deposited in her. Her writing is at once the writing of the other in herself and the writing of the projection of herself in the other. We may well ask ourselves whether what she experienced and refused to endure, in her determination to discover new sources, was not a sensitive confrontation with an silence that she with her. Hence her commitment to a history of the sixteenth century that she had to speak as if it were an and as if her experience of it into was her this need to overcome to the point of a virtual to her from the past of her who the of left on her and opened a in the in and left and on her around Her was from its her was were who never about their past or their past, and even their from what was in And she the of one I working on that they that is, that them to or that I had from but were not in these It is no that her method is a constant of an Davis, as for the of the work is to an of Indeed, for the historian is with the of which very to To be a historian, is to people to them to to a and thus to a of the past that us to the present, to us to live within the of a of and an anthropology that, in “the of the dead with that of the recall the Davis in when she was the by In she spoke of her passion for history as an of her to go to to the of the Reformation from the of rather than She the to which she and her had been when they were from the of of in And she how two men from the had to her to her making it impossible for her to her in “I was by the of my But in the course of this she she that were of from the sixteenth century, early forms of to be made to voices that had not spoken these voices speak became a for the impossible journey into the silence of In this out of and what was conceived as a social history became a cultural her historical paradigm based on her own as I have In this of with her as she in her made her aware that between to and of for of or in the very silence to which she had to herself. And so her was not just a event that place in the of the of the century. It became a tool for that her or voice had to be into an ethical voice and for her own experience into her work as a historian, it in the of the sixteenth and whom she as put into History thus seems to be the discovery of a that she found in “the people” of the sixteenth I would that this dialogical is sometimes by Davis to for example, those of the religious whose she it as a quest for These with their spoke to her in the same way as and for her, they the following of are not the of in us that if we try to and within a try to that the it take and then we must think about and more about the is an not to the words of from the past. The by of the religious the historian to against in the present, and thus to their writing, in Davis’s own a history, according to Davis, has to that of fighting the silence of the us that the other is very much like that his or her must be and that we must have a passion for the other. The historian is there to the to who might be to this between ourselves and the other. and a society was at the heart of Davis’s as she when she her at in on take us from the of and they us to think beyond they us of the within And is than a single language, because the diverse the don’t just fight each they they they they they even in a The voices of the past us of the of the present. The past and the present are in the sense that the of history is to give to those who can it a of These voices are not to forms of can also be in of or and their can be the of a in which history has the role of giving to the and in this to listen to the languages of Natalie Zemon Davis, I have not only to analyze some of the of an experience of but also to highlight the that this experience has a Davis history as a with the a with a past that makes an of the present. And the of de has a role that the past is what history can know and about it than “what it and for History thus up a of its own to the to a past is to for the dead, but also to the of why I don’t think that Davis’s historical work can be reduced to the of For her, despite all the and of the past, there is hope that the of the past can have the of the past are to think about for the and the me, the of the past a commitment to humanity and offer a of hope for the