Natalie Zemon Davis, 1928-2023

When I was in graduate school at Princeton in the 1980’s, Natalie Zemon Davis presented two chapters of her book Fictions in the Archive to the History Department’s weekly research seminar. It was a memorable moment. Here was one of the greatest historians of our time, having her book commented on in draft by colleagues such as Robert Darnton, Anthony Grafton, Lawrence Stone, Sean Wilentz, William Chester Jordan, Arno Mayer and Christine Stansell. At a remove of some thirty-five years, I don’t remember many of the specific points they made. I do recall that several of Natalie’s male colleagues kept insisting that the book did not have a sufficiently robust thesis. One of them kept jabbing his finger in the air, saying “what’s the point, Natalie? What’s the point?” making me think rather more deeply about gendered styles in academia than I had previously done. But what I remember most vividly was the comment from Stone, a great historian of early modern England. He said that reading Natalie Davis’s work was like seeing fire arrows shot into a dark cave, illuminating the sides as they flew by. He didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment. Stone always liked strong theses; the more combative, the better. But it struck me as very apt. Natalie Davis’s work was nothing if not an illumination.

I was very lucky to have known and studied with Natalie. I took a graduate seminar from her, did a general exam field with her, and had her as one of the readers of my dissertation. Her warmth and generosity were legendary. Natalie had the ability to make everyone she encountered feel special. Her face would light up upon seeing you. She would take your hand and say how good it was to see you. She would ask questions about your work, your family, your state of mind, all out of genuine interest and care. Her cup of human kindness was always overflowing. As graduate students, we could never quite figure out how she had time for all of us, amidst all her other commitments, and the life she divided between Princeton and her other home in Toronto. We used to joke that there were actually three of her, the famous “Zemon triplets” who divided each day into eight-hour shifts. She would sometimes call us to discuss dissertation chapters from an airport telephone, while waiting for a flight.

She leaves behind a warmth and a glow that those who knew her will continue to feel for a very long time. But after we are all gone in our turn, her work will remain. Her human qualities glow through it as well: an enormous sympathy for her historical subjects, an ability to see the world through their eyes, to capture something essential about them, to laugh with them, even while acknowledging the blank spots and uncertainties in the record. This was the case with her most famous work, The Return of Martin Guerre: the story of a man named Arnaud du Tilh, known as Pansette, who assumed the identity of a sixteenth-century French peasant named Martin Guerre, with the apparent complicity of Martin’s wife, Bertrande de Rols (Natalie also collaborated on the film of the story, starring Gérard Depardieu). In a sharp criticism in The American Historical Review, the historian Robert Finlay argued that Natalie had gone beyond the evidence in portraying Bertrande as a strong and canny woman, doing the most possible in a patriarchal society to protect herself and her children by consciously going along with Pansette’s deception. But Natalie defended her interpretation vigorously, and, in any case, had admitted from the start that she could not know for sure what had happened. To quote the last, memorable line of the book: “I think I have uncovered the true face of the past—or has Pansette done it once again?”

But, a little counter-intuitively, what this most kind and giving person also illuminated so beautifully through her work were the roots of fanaticism and religious violence. One of her most memorable essays, for me, is her portrait of the Catholic missionary nun Marie de l’Incarnation in her book Women on the Margins. Marie’s fervent devotion led her to abandon her young son, never to see him again, in order to enter an Ursuline convent. It led her to sail for Canada to take part in missions to Native Americans. And it led her to dream ecstatic dreams of martyrdom and sacrifice. She was utterly strange and alien to me, but after reading Natalie’s essay, I felt that I had begun, at least, to understand her.

And then there was my single favorite among her essays: “The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon.” It is a study of the radically different ways that Catholics and Protestants saw, understood, and both mentally and physically arranged urban space, in a time of Reformation and religious war. It builds on another great essay of hers, “The Rites of Violence,” republished in Society and Culture in Early Modern France. And it illustrated, with incredible power and eloquence, the way that different communities could see each other as committing sacrilege, profane violations of the sacred, filling them with righteous anger and giving them a lust to kill.

But perhaps this is not so counter-intuitive. Seeing another person with genuine sympathy means being able to see into the dark and rage-filled parts of them as well. It means taking their beliefs seriously, and not attributing them to some other, supposedly deeper cause. Natalie’s deep reading in cultural anthropology gave her the intellectual basis on which to analyze beliefs in this manner (she was one of the first historians to show just how deeply anthropological work could inform historical analysis). But her own experience mattered as well. She had certainly seen a great deal of darkness and rage during her life, and not only at a safe remove. During McCarthyism, her husband, Chandler, was imprisoned and fired from his Mathematics professorship at the University of Michigan. Natalie herself was investigated and had her passport taken away, depriving her of the opportunity to do research in France. She herself later recalled: “I decided long ago that it wasn’t worth the trouble to be bitter…It’s not as though Chandler were in a Nazi or Soviet prison or as if we had been dragged off to a concentration camp.” But it was not nothing, either.

I last saw Natalie when she came to Princeton for a celebration of her 90^th birthday. She was as vibrant, as energetic, as kind, and as thoughtful as ever. She died this past weekend, a few weeks shy of 95, but her memory, and her works, will remain an illumination.

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For those who are interested, a while back I wrote a review of a book-length interview done with Natalie by the French historian Denis Crouzet: Hope and Play | The New Republic.