[Early modern studies series 4] Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Crouzet, Denis_ Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Wolfe, Michael - A Passion for History_ Conversations With Denis Crouzet (2010, Truman State Univ Press) - libgen.lc.pdf
[Early modern studies series 4] Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Crouzet, Denis_ Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Wolfe, Michael - A Passion for History_ Conversations With Denis Crouzet (2010, Truman State Univ Press) - libgen.lc.pdf
[Early modern studies series 4] Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Crouzet, Denis_ Davis, Natalie Zemon_ Wolfe, Michael - A Passion for History_ Conversations With Denis Crouzet (2010, Truman State Univ Press) - libgen.lc.pdf
General Editor
Michael Wolfe
St. John’s University
A
Passion
for
History
Conversations with
Denis Crouzet
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from
the publisher.
The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for
Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword by Orest Ranum ix
1 Wonderments 1
2 Encounters 30
3 Fashionings 63
4 Memories 93
5 Women 109
6 Commitments 130
7 Hopes 158
Epilogue 180
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 184
Works by Denis Crouzet 203
Index 211
BLANK
Acknowledgments
I often tell my students that “making history” really means entering into a
conversation about the past that began long ago and, thankfully, will never
end so long as people remain willful and unpredictable. How lucky we are
to be able to listen in on this conversation between Natalie Zemon Davis
and Denis Crouzet, two historians who make history so masterfully. I am
sure that students and scholars alike will learn or be reminded that the pur-
suit of history is a matter for both the heart and the mind. The idea for an
American edition of this eavesdropping project began with Anne Jacobson
Schutte, who brilliantly alerted the press to the opportunity upon reading
the French original. Solène Chabanais at Albin Michel offered her kind of-
fices in helping Truman State University Press secure rights to an English
translation, while Geneviève Douillard at the Archives départementales de
la Haute Garonne generously donated the cover image of a document from
the Martin Guerre case. Chandler Davis provided timely expertise and sound
counsel throughout the project, for which we are all most grateful. And I
wish in particular to thank Orest Ranum, my mentor and friend (as he is
Natalie’s and Denis’s), for setting the stage with his wonderful avant-propos.
Our appreciation also goes to Nancy Rediger, director and editor-in-chief of
the press, and Barbara Smith-Mandell, head copy editor, who so patiently
and ably guided the text on to publication. The translation reflects a col-
laborative effort, as Natalie quite rightly translated her original French into
her native English and translated the document on the cover, which she dis-
covered when researching The Return of Martin Guerre. She also expanded the
text in several places for the benefit of English-language readers. I tackled
the translation of Denis’s questions and comments, leaning heavily on both
him and Natalie for clarification when necessary. Finally, I prepared the ac-
companying notes, again with much assistance from Natalie, which we hope
will help our readers follow and enjoy even more this thrilling conversation.
Michael Wolfe, Editor
Queens, New York
November 2009
vii
BLANK
Foreword
Orest Ranum
She’s done it again! Natalie Zemon Davis places her mind squarely
between past and present, and she dares to be her candid, learned, and
adventurous self. No other historian is so authoritative and free, so pro-
fessional and engaged in the research and writing of humanist history.
Denis Crouzet has done what great and very accomplished teach-
ers do: he puts himself in a position of intellectual vulnerability in order
to prompt Davis to go deeper and deeper about her nature [sic] as a his-
torian. There is no boilerplate in this dialogue. It is truly a dialogue, and
it absolutely convinces the reader that Davis is saying exactly what she
thinks on all the key questions about method, choice of research topics,
and her deeply personal sense of adventure in politics and in practicing
history. There is no dumbing down.
Most dialogues involve one person and an imagined other. Not so
here. Denis Crouzet is genuinely curious about the mind, life, and writ-
ings of Natalie Zemon Davis, and the result is a major addition to the
humanist culture of the twenty-first century.
Some individuals can cross oceans and frontiers without any appar-
ent need to reflect on the shifts and exchanges between places and cultures;
others are prompted to write, to inventory, to note down the ordinary things
in life. Still others are prompted to try to capture vast continental histories
and cultures. Natalie Zemon Davis finds these writer-explorer-historians to
be her windows onto different times and places. When they fall silent, as
Leon the African does when he returns to his native culture, she finds this
difficult to accept. But she also understands how these silences have mean-
ing. But what meaning?
Her engagement in feminist history became very strong during
the years at Berkeley. Christine de Pizan had deeply interested her as a
student, but the subject lacked significance in those years just prior to the
rise of feminist history. After the glassworkers of Carmaux, and beyond
ix
x Foreword
printers, and beyond peasants who stopped the shipping of grain from
their villages, Joan Scott, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Louise Tilly turned to
constructing the field in which the life and works of Christine would have
the preeminence of a Pico, a Poggio, a Lefebvre d’Étaples. Few historians
participate in the creation of a whole new field of history; and without the
intense engagement that characterized the earlier work, and without its
continuing learned intensity, women’s history might not have gained the
vitality and legitimacy it has today.
There are occasional seemingly offhand remarks, really categori-
cal statements about how Davis has learned to practice history. While
grounded in personal experience, they are in fact loci, or commonplaces
that, taken together, constitute a body of principles about the practice
of researching, analyzing, and writing history. While history brings to
the fore diverse modes of existence, these may be either discouraging to
a reader or hopeful. Then, on reflection, Davis adds that while past and
present human experiences may appear to be the same, they never are. For
a historian who has sought to interpret historical thinking that is prover-
bial, the reader may be certain that what seems personal is really a coher-
ent body of principles that are as social-scientific as they are humanist,
and that constitute true understanding of verstehen. Just how these loci are
formulated is evident in the exchange about Dipesh Chakrabarty’s relativ-
ist (my term) questioning of the general scientific and rationalist “system”
of proof agreed upon among most historians. Why not let the rational-
ist and the magical systems of proof coexist! Davis grounds her rejection
of this proposal on the principle of exchange, in this instance, exchange
between historians. How can there be fruitful debate over the facts of his-
tory, she asks, if there is no agreement on the “rules of the game”? The
implication that Western historical thought cannot be validly developed
about non-Western cultures is rejected, because since antiquity this so-
called Western historical thought has constantly incorporated into it the
facts not only of non-Western history but also of non-Western systems
of validation. After grounding her argument on the need for rules of ex-
change, Davis then turns to ethics, stating that it is her “duty” to search
for consensus about the rules of historical proof.
The process of acceptance and/or rejection of the principal con-
cepts developed by social scientists has culminated in an imaginative, in-
tegrated, and personal vision of the human and social. She lays no claims
to originality, as she occasionally uses quotation marks to indicate to her
Foreword xi
readers (e.g., “distance,” page 53) that the meaning is technical and goes
beyond the usages in Webster’s dictionary.
The family members who pull together to help one of their own
construct a story that possibly will convince a judge to be lenient, is not
history, any more than the procès-verbal of the court is history. What is
history is carefully studying the evidence in all surviving sources and con-
structing a plausible narrative that can be questioned by another histo-
rian who has examined the same evidence. The thousands of references
that characterize all of Davis’s writings awe readers and convince them of
the accuracy of her historical narratives.
By now the reader has inferred that, in Davis, the autobiographical
is never just that. Her joy in sharing her learning, her enlightening personal
history, has no equal in twenty-first-century thought. What may seem ca-
sual is certainly the most serious and professional aspect of this dialogue.
Davis literally offers her life and her works as exemplary. This primordial
(pace Geertz!) mode of teaching is as pervasive in twenty-first-century cul-
tures around the world as it was in all ancient societies. Montaigne offers
an impressive critique of the ethical status of exemplarity, but he became
an exemplum in his own lifetime. Huizinga called these role models “histori-
cal ideals of life.” Recently, they have been particularly effective in African-
American and women’s movements. Exemplarity is not merely implicit in
Davis’s writing. In the 1980 interview and also in 2004, she recognizes Ei-
leen Power and Sylvia Thrupp as more than historians whose works she
admires: they were an inspiration for her, as would be the life and works of
Simone Weil. And yes, naming her children after ancestors and heroines is
also characteristic of exemplarity.
Binary types of cultural analysis often lead to superficiality, and
what follows is no exception. In the great heritage of radical revolution-
ary and/or reformist movements centered on the Internationals of the
late nineteenth century, two complementary but distinct strategies were
proposed for changing the world. One was more quantitative and social-
scientific, and it was grounded on studies of increasingly poor working
conditions, lower wages for workers, and exploitation of children and in-
digenous populations across the world. Would a proletarian Spartacus
come forth? In her earliest studies of the sixteenth-century printers at
Lyon, Natalie Zemon Davis respected but remained unsatisfied with this
overly mechanical approach to reform and revolution. Ideas, including
radical religious ideas, seemed to be part of the equation.
xii Foreword
Wonderments
DC: I would like to begin our conversation with a question about the
kind of history you write. At times, you stress the joy, the wonder that his-
tory brings you; that for you, history is not some cold dispassionate disci-
pline where the historian stands outside what he or she studies. Instead,
you allow a place for feeling in your search of the past. How, when, and
why did you discover this feeling for the past?
NZD: I felt that wonder at the very start of my studies: I was discovering
facts that I never knew existed—discovering a past that at first seemed so
different from the present I knew as a high-school girl. It filled me with
amazement: “Ah, so that’s what it was like in ancient Athens. What ideas
they had!” Then I was amazed all the more when I came upon forms of life
and institutions that seemed to resemble those of my own time: “Already
so long ago, people wanted democracy!” To begin with, it was the great
movements of the past rather than particular persons that aroused my
sense of wonder. And even as a young girl, I was fascinated by the simple
facts of history, the things that people always complain about as boring,
that they hated to memorize, that turned them off from history. I didn’t
find them boring at all. I enjoyed memorizing them, the names of kings,
the dates of their succession, the names of presidents as well—I liked the
sense of mastery I got from being able to remember and use all that his-
torical information.
I had this pleasure of discovery from the beginning, and it lasted.
I felt the same way, if not more, when I was an undergraduate at college
and was studying the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the
French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. This grand history, full
of troubles and violence, struck me as an example of the aspirations and
1
2 Chapter 1
tragedies of the human spirit, but also I loved reading about it because I
was simply fascinated by the past: “What interesting things happened—all
these events, so many of them unexpected and fortuitous!” Later on, I
began to have the same feelings about the lives of individual persons and
more intimate relations.
DC: It thus all began with a fascination with events and facts, right?
NZD: Yes, the great events of history and the aspirations that I thought
of as “democratic,” which history seemed to reveal over the centuries. I
know now that Athens had many features that weren’t democratic at all—
slavery, for a start. But I remember how I felt long ago, when I first began
to immerse myself in the mysteries of the past: the Athenians wanted to
create an equal society, a society founded on the equality of citizens—
today, of course, I’d add “male citizens.” I was attracted both by the “curi-
ous” things in the past and also by similarities and differences between
the past and my own day.
DC: You’ve spoken of the sense of wonderment you felt before these “cu-
riosities.” Haven’t you also responded with wonder to the stories you’ve
read, even the musty smell of the archives, when you’ve discovered them?
NZD: Yes, that happened when I began my research in France. But even
before I crossed the ocean, there was another dimension to my pleasure. I
was starting to read archives—not the real archives, but books with docu-
ments from the archives—and also books printed in the sixteenth century.
I loved this reading; it drew me closer to the societies and social move-
ments of the past and now even to individuals. I wrote a seminar paper
on Christine de Pizan1—the first woman I’d ever really examined—and an-
other on Guillaume Budé,2 the humanist. I began to think hard about
issues in personal lives, about the contradictions, conflicts, and tensions
between intimate personal life, professional projects, and the social, politi-
cal, and religious realities of the past. It wasn’t yet the “perfume” of the
archives themselves, but it gave me a stronger sense for the past. I felt that
I was coming to know Christine de Pizan, that I was having an encounter
with Guillaume Budé.
But watch out! I’d add today. This passion to know and to un-
derstand is positive insofar as it encourages us to explore a mysterious
world. But it also brings a danger—that of being possessed by the illusion
of greater familiarity with the past than one really has. I hope I was taking
Wonderments 3
But once again, I say “Danger!” I have the impression that I’ve
met, touched, seized the past. “Watch out, Natalie. You’re being taken over
by a romantic fantasy.” One must always gird oneself with the certainty
that one can never reach the living heart of the past from which the docu-
ments are speaking. The past always recedes. And yet, while I’m absorbed
in the documents, I nonetheless have the sense of being surrounded by
the persons I’m discovering, of a kind of ghostly presence.
DC: Don’t you frequently use the conditional tense precisely because of
the pleasure history gives you, because you’re on such friendly terms with
men and women in the past? Or when you also decide to intervene in the
text in the first person to highlight that you explicitly control the narra-
tion of the past’s possibilities, a past which you both direct and create?
It comes through particularly in your book on Martin Guerre, a character
for whom you had very few documents upon which to rely. There are obvi-
ously the texts of Jean Coras, such as L’Arrêt mémorable, but beyond those
there are just mere tidbits of information. Don’t readers instead see you
fill the evidentiary void with all kinds of rhetorical tricks, such as “I would
be inclined to think …”? At the same time, isn’t this “I,” when you’re forced
to reveal yourself, the active agent who realizes this sense of wonderment
and desire for history that captures the imaginations of those same read-
ers? Isn’t this all an intentional subversion of a certain kind of traditional,
if not old-fashioned idea of history?
NZD: The use of the conditional is a safeguard for the historian. More
and more it seems I have to use it. When I started out studying large
social movements, such as the relation between artisanal conflicts and
Protestant commitment in Lyon, there were times when I had to venture
an interpretation, a kind of guess. That is, there might or might not be
a correlation between social aspirations and religious beliefs. But while
working on general movements with lots of data, I had fewer instances
where it seemed urgent or obligatory for me to use the conditional. And
this was still the case in more recent books, such as the ones I wrote on
letters of remission and on gifts, where I had lots of examples: I made
interpretations, which could be open to challenge, but I could make a flat
assertion.
But when I took off in pursuit of the ideas, feelings, conflicts, and
dreams of particular persons, I sometimes encountered big gaps in the
documentation, especially since I was often tracking people who had left
6 Chapter 1
DC: Precisely how do you see the relationship between past and present?
Do you find in the present world, indeed in yourself, this type of game?
Isn’t a historian, even the most conscientious one who respects the ba-
sic rules of knowledge, still just someone who makes the past into some
kind of game? Doesn’t a historian put this mask or that one, however
knowingly, on the characters she claims to give voice to, be they major or
minor figures, based on the sources or not? Isn’t a historian thus only a
charlatan, a mere trickster, who should leave all of us skeptical about the
historian’s craft? This is a little like what Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim
wrote in the 1520s when he said that history is just a pack of fables (most
of which recount, he went on, atrocities and acts of violence!).7 Your hero-
ines, for example, are usually unhappy women who behave in ways that
create for them an alternative, closed, and protected space that they can
master, where they can exercise power and thus rise above the normative
social and gender rules that label them as weak and confine them to cer-
tain prescribed roles. Don’t you actually realize that they come to you as
you wish to see them, thereby avoiding a more complex reality? It’s almost
as if you wanted to escape from harsh circumstances that threatened your
own hopes and dreams by taking refuge in your study of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries? When it comes to this moment right now, what do
you see or want to see?
NZD: Yes and no. In interpreting the past, I have in fact drawn upon in-
sights from my own experience: a family in which my grandparents or great-
grandparents were immigrants. That’s the American drama, a country of
immigrants. My ancestors came to the U.S. in the mid- or late nineteenth
century, speaking European languages or Yiddish, and with their own cus-
toms. They wanted to create for themselves an American life with a Jewish
identity. As for me, I belong to the third generation; on my mother’s side,
it was the first where the women went to university. I also had to trans-
form myself, to Americanize myself, to find my own identity—but it was
a complex matter, because I was very tied to France, the study of France,
and to French culture. So self-fashioning was part of my own experience.
And then I went on to marry a man with a very different background from
my own, another pattern of self-fashioning. This transformative work on
the self, my own and that of my family, does provide a link between what
I write and the present-day world.
But no, I do not refashion the men and women of the sixteenth
12 Chapter 1
one might think, for inhabitants of North Africa or for the Ottomans to
have at their disposal a description of what al-Wazzān had seen in Italy.
DC: For you too!
NZD: For sure! I was left with imagining, with speculating from every-
thing al-Wazzān said in The Description of Africa (his manuscript actually
had a different title, but the printed work was entitled this way). What
to think? I speculated that he was not able to write perhaps because of
a lack of readers for or listeners to his story: perhaps his fellow Muslims
were suspicious of him and of what he’d done in Italy even though he’d
returned to Islam; perhaps he had not been able to find an important
patron or protector. In my view, the answer to the question is first of all
psychological. To put it succinctly, the leap he made during his nine years
in Italy was both intellectual and psychological.
As I see him in Italy, during his time as a Christian, he both re-
mained faithful to his Muslim and Arab origins and at the same time
learned a great deal, enlarged his angles of vision and perceptions; he
opened out. In his manuscript of his Africa book (though not in the much-
edited printed version), there are literary, expository, and rhetorical signs
of his state of mind, which we can detect through attentive reading. His
exposition indicates a break with an important feature of the Arab and
Muslim mental world. There it is expected that the writer acknowledge a
line of professional transmission (reverence in regard to my teacher, the
teacher of my teacher, etc.). This requirement originated in religious life
and pronouncement: to have authority, what one says in the present must
always go through a chain of transmission (isnad) back to the Prophet or
the Companions or wives of the Prophet. Thought is supported by this
kind of reference.
Now in al-Wazzān’s manuscripts in Italian and Latin, this chain of
transmission is suggested sometimes for others, for example, for the great
scholar Ibn Rushd (Averroës), but never for himself.9 He never gives the
names of his teachers or the teachers of his teachers. He presents himself
to Christian readers as a man educated as a Muslim, who has read many
Arabic manuscripts, but who is interpreting his world and the great Mus-
lim figures as an independent observer—cut off, liberated, detached from
the chain of transmission. This expository practice, this writing practice
is—so I claim—an index of a new sense of self, a new self-consciousness
that is precariously solitary.
16 Chapter 1
And then al-Wazzān returns to North Africa. He cuts off his rela-
tions with the great but dangerous adventure of his Italian years, years
that were for him simultaneously Christian and Muslim. And then he
can’t put himself back to work. Had his mental uprooting been too ex-
treme? His desire to write seems to have dried up, or at least to write in
Arabic. Alas, I am left with some wistfulness. I started this project with
the naïve idea, “Ah, here is the creative work of a man in the course of a
complicated life.” Well, the ending turned out not to be quite the fulfill-
ment of my first hopes.
DC: Shouldn’t you really interpret this final speechlessness as a kind of
self-criticism of his own making while he was in Italy? Wouldn’t it be bet-
ter to talk about remorse or even estrangement, where distance becomes
a necessary condition for such discourse? Remorse or was it nostalgia?
Or is it rather a fact that the tools he used—Latin, Italian, printed books—
proved most conducive to express this realization? Wouldn’t he have lost
one of his identities, the one he fashioned to deal with his condition as an
alien, when he eventually returned home? Wouldn’t he have taken some
pleasure in closing this chapter of his life? In the sixteenth century, it seems
to me that an individual could choose to deploy any number of differ-
ent identities; that in fact an individual’s identity developed in a plural
manner. We’d have to admit that this cultural fact would have required a
ceaseless accommodation of the self with respect to others. In this light,
the question of contradiction becomes secondary. A person is who a per-
son is as the result of a particular moment in time, space, and the greater
human community.
NZD: Perhaps … But above all, I think the life of al-Wazzān/Leo Afri-
canus led me to a criticism of myself. One should never begin with …
DC: Hopes too high …?
NZD: Yes, perhaps it’s always like that when one starts out on a research
project—one’s ideas are too simplistic, optimistic. But I should restrain
myself some here, as I’m still in the process of writing this book. Per-
haps it was the world to which al-Wazzān came back that accounts for
his “speechlessness,” as you call it. But I would not follow Bernard Lewis
here, according to whom the Muslim world had become a closed world
and that would explain why al-Wazzān could no longer be creative after
his return.10 Everything I see about this world indicates this was not true,
Wonderments 17
it was not a closed world, and possibilities were opening for the writing
of books.
I’m reminded of an assertion I made about Marie de l’Incarnation.
In her situation—that of a seventeenth-century woman who was not at all
erudite, who sought her own education and fashioned her own goals—the
most important book she wrote on theological matters was not in French,
but in Algonquian, produced for the Amerindians. She had written other
texts with religious themes, as in her autobiography, but when she wanted
to treat theological questions directly, in her Sacred History, she did not
do it in French. To be sure, she was not authorized to write a theologi-
cal work: she was not a theologian, she had never studied theology. She
had never studied Latin, and claimed that God had “infused” Latin into
her head. Thus I find it interesting that it was in Algonquian that she, an
unschooled woman, had the audacity to write on learned questions of
theology.
This brings me back to your questions about al-Wazzān. Did his
audacity in writing a great work on Africa, with its new concept of Africa
itself, emerge from the fact that he was writing for Italians? I say “new
concept” because though the genres he was deploying—geography, the
travel account, history—had existed for centuries in Arabic literature, his
concept of Africa, geographical and cultural, had new features to it in rela-
tion to the thought of Arabs and Europeans both.
DC: It’s necessary to be “outside of” to be able to …
NZD: To do it. And in a symbolic sense, in another language.
DC: Overcoming such personal inhibitions would make sense when
thrusting oneself, either voluntarily or involuntarily, into another place,
another culture, another language. Could you have written a book about
American history before you first enlarged your own orbit to encompass
the life of al-Wazzān/Leo Africanus?
NZD: It may be a little bit my own history that I’m approaching through
al-Wazzān or Marie de l’Incarnation: to go to a foreign land to be able to
write, or for me, first of all to find a past for myself in a foreign land and
then to write. I’ve turned to America and its history only recently. Earlier I
sometimes mentioned American themes, as in my study of charivaris. But
in my Slaves on Screen, a book I published a few years ago about the his-
torical vision of slavery and especially slave revolts and resistance in film, I
18 Chapter 1
the ones who bring out the tragic elements underlying the story. Yes, Ar-
naud du Tilh lost, but even to him I wanted to offer a release, or rather I
gave him an execution with a certain quality. At the end of his adventure,
he could have denounced Bertrande de Rols as his accomplice. Instead he
decided to die with some dignity (I didn’t make up this ending: it’s right
there in the documents; but I did stress it and write about it). Arnaud re-
fused to take with him to death and opprobrium the woman with whom
he had lived in imposture and perhaps, too, in some happiness …
DC: Was this “dignified” death perhaps tied to the possibility he was
a Calvinist or at least open to Jean Calvin’s ideas14 (much as was the au-
thor of the Arrêt mémorable, Jean de Coras) and that death, for a man
converted to the Reformed religion, brings an end to anguish, that it is
God’s will before which man must surrender humbly and patiently, a test
that God sends to him to test the strength of his faith so that he proves all
his thoughts are firmly fixed on the hope of Christ, on the rock of Christ?
Didn’t his self-restraint provide a chance to introduce Christians to Cal-
vin’s teachings on Christ’s charity and love? Wasn’t there a sort of hidden
message in the Arrêt mémorable about willingly accepting death with calm
assurance? Man is certainly a sinner, but his consciousness of sin is regen-
erated when he places all his hope in divine forgiveness, no?
NZD: Conversion is certainly a strong possibility for Arnaud du Tilh, as
I argued in the book, though I haven’t got sure proof. I think it very prob-
able that he was part of the Protestant faction in Artigat, in which case
your speculation would be justified.
DC: Or rather that Jean de Coras would, in some way, want to insert a
subtext into his Arrêt mémorable, one about how an exemplary faith led
a man to no longer fear death because death made possible his union
with Christ. Leaving aside the question of knowing Arnaud du Tilh’s faith,
didn’t Coras want to send an almost subliminal message to his readers? As
for al-Wazzān/Leo Africanus, couldn’t we surmise that, beyond your own
dissatisfaction when confronting his silence, likely his coping mechanism,
his return to Islam would have forced or triggered in him a sense of fatal-
ism? Could he really enjoy his silence without a bad conscience somehow
lurking in the background? As a historian, you take something of a risk
when you emphasize your own sense of disillusionment, thereby forget-
ting that serenity or wisdom once had other pathways than the ones you
20 Chapter 1
idealize for yourself and for the characters you conjure in your own mind …
Can’t a person’s silence in fact bespeak their own peace of mind?
NZD: No, I believe that after his years of dissimulation and exploration—
and opening out?—in Italy, he may well have been thrown off balance
when he returned to Islam. Rather than fatalism, I’d suspect he would
have plunged into practices of expiation. We know of other apostates who,
in returning to Dar-al-Islam, left for Mecca. Why not a second pilgrimage
for al-Wazzān? He himself described the conversion of the great scholar
al-Ghazāī l , who gave up his professorship of law to become a Sufi mystic,
and we can imagine that al-Wazzān, after seeing the splendors of Rome,
might have done something similar.15
I’d like to tell you about another tool I’ve been using to interpret
this life so full of mysteries. There’s an extremely interesting literary tra-
dition in the Arab world, the genre of the maqa−ma−t, that is, the “assem-
blies,” created by two writers, al-Hamadhānī16 in the late tenth century,
and then al-Hariri17 at the beginning of the twelfth century. The maqa−ma−t
were always composed in a rhymed prose, full of alliteration. But it’s the
hero of the maqa−ma−t who’s important here (for some scholars today he’s
an antihero, but not for me!): a traveler, a vagabond poet, and eloquent
speaker, who has adventures everywhere in the Muslim world and who is
always in disguise. The maqa−ma−t have a typical form: there’s always a nar-
rator, himself a voyager, who travels about as a merchant, a pilgrim, or a
judge, and who tells to his friends assembled around him the adventures
of the vagabond poet. In each tale, the latter puts on a different disguise,
but the narrator always recognizes him at the end, especially when he be-
gins to speak in striking metric verse, sometimes touching on theological
questions. The vagabond poet always gets what he’s after, whether he’s
begging or seeking money or some other benefit—he lands on his feet and
leaves with his pouches full. You see how I can use this figure, this trope,
to interpret my voyager—not in every aspect of his life, but at least in part.
Toward the end of al-Hamadhānī’s maqa−ma−t, the tensions and
contradictions in the life of this vagabond poet with all his ruses are fore-
grounded in a dramatic way, followed by an effort at resolution. In the
maqa−ma−t entitled “Wine,” there’s a movement between delicious wine,
served by a magnificent hostess, and the mosque.18 The hero, in disguise as
imam, expels the wine-drinkers from the mosque (in the story, the wine-
drinkers are the narrator and his buddies); and then as shaykh and lover
Wonderments 21
of the beautiful hostess, the hero joins these same friends and drinks in
their company. Unmasked and chided for his hypocrisy, he gives a defense
in verse for his behavior and his choices. The narrator is not fully per-
suaded by his argument and leaves the question to God. But he stays with
the vagabond poet, rejoicing in his presence. I see here a possible open-
ing toward the celebrated mystical wine-poem of the Sufi Ibn al-Farid,19
which al-Wazzān recalled often during his Italian years. I would love to
have found a text by al-Wazzān where he fit together the different parts of
his life as happens in the maqa−ma−t “Wine.” In fact, what I’m having to do
is conjecture that he could have made use of the verses of the great poet
and thinker, the Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabi20—that he would have known them and
meditated upon them: “My heart is open to all forms.” Here was a mys-
tical movement that stayed within Islam, yet opened the heart to other
religious sensibilities.
DC: Does this strange journey finally end in a flash of insight that com-
pletes an inner conversation giving voice to a mystic?
NZD: Maybe so. I still wish I had a text from al-Wazzān after his return
to North Africa: if I could rewrite the past, there would be such a text
with some sort of resolution, perhaps with poetic sensibility. As it is, it
is Natalie Davis who will be deciding whether to end the life of al-Hasan
al-Wazzān with the text of al-Hamadhānīand the poem of Ibn al-‘Arabi.
DC: As a person who’s always loved storytelling, haven’t you wished at
some exact moment in your analysis you could just escape from the con-
fines of history based on sources? Haven’t you wanted yourself to write
what the primary or secondary sources don’t provide you in order to cre-
ate your own virtual reality? It seems to me that historians become too
timid as a result of their attachment, even if unconscious, to this prevailing
positivism. Is there some precise stage in writing, when history becomes
obscured in shadows, that it’s impossible to see how to grab hold of the
past, to realize a level of discourse that possesses its own coherence and
logic and that develops as a kind of projection of a likely future only set in
the past? All history is thus virtual in its essence and by necessity—even if
there are historians who say it and assume it, as well as those who don’t
say it or ignore it. Why don’t we once and for all begin to admit what we
might call an “imagined” past? Take, for example, the imagined past of Leo
Africanus upon his return home after a long absence, returned perhaps to
22 Chapter 1
die among his own people, under another sky and on another ground?
NZD: For me, the sources from the past, primary or secondary, are not
a prison. They are a magic thread that links me to people long since dead
and with situations that have crumbled to dust. The sources set off my
reflection and imagination, I stay in dialogue with them, and I love this.
This liaison with the past is the heart of my vocation as historian. The
sources leave a space for speculation, and I will have to use it sometimes
in my book on al-Wazzān. But I must always identify my speculations as
such for my readers, and show them the bases for believing a certain thing
is possible, probable, or contingent.
DC: It suddenly seems to me that historians often become too timid
when faced with contingencies. Why, when a kind of interpretive wall is
reached, don’t they leap beyond the limits of what their sources tell them
and concoct instead a critical space rife with possibilities? It’s true that
history has tended toward its own sort of marginalized discourse; but
apart from the moment where the limits of the past’s admissibility are
accepted, recorded, and perceived as inevitable constraints, apart from
the moment where we can’t escape from the realm of the plausible or the
admissible unless it’s all locked up in a vicious cycle of logical absurdity, all
might be possible, for it’s this purposeful loss of control, if I can use that
expression, which would be interesting to put into practice in order to try
to go beyond …
NZD: The sphere of the possible or probable is very large. Indeed, things
considered “prodigious,” to cite the title of Jean de Coras’s book on the
Martin Guerre case, actually happen—things considered at the time
“monstrous,” “beyond nature.” I want my speculative jumps to start from
a springboard of documentation. And out of respect for my readers and
for the past, I must interject my personal voice—“this is what I see.” But
frankly, al-Wazzān/Leo Africanus is much more interesting than I am; I’m
not the important one, he is.
DC: Yes, but he doesn’t exist without …
NZD: Without a biographer, without a relation to me—okay, but it’s al-
ways he who is the subject. I’m not writing an autobiography. I’m doing
my best to respect the sources about him, but mysteries remain, more
than in more usual historical inquiry. Or to put it another way, I’m not
Wonderments 23
the past, and be absorbing to watch as well. As for the truth status of such
films, I’ve suggested we think about them as “thought experiments.”
DC: What did you think, for example, about the film La Reine Margot, set
as it is in the middle of your beloved sixteenth century? 21
NZD: Well, it had some visually beautiful moments, as in the hunting
scene and in the court ceremonial. But I found La Reine Margot much more
expressive of the spirit of France of the nineteenth century, or even the
twentieth century, than of the sixteenth century. It is shot through from
start to finish with all the fables that make up the “black legend” of the
Medici and Queen Margot, a legend well studied by Éliane Viennot.22 I’d
like to know what she thinks of this film! It recreates precisely the repul-
sive image of absolute monarchy of the sixteenth century, the bad mon-
archy of the Valois, which was needed by liberals of the 1830s in order to
glorify the liberal monarchy of their own time.23 The massacre of Saint
Bartholomew’s Day24 is modeled after the twentieth-century Holocaust.
This is what happens with bad films: the strangeness of the past gets re-
made as today’s familiar news.
DC: One rightly senses that this kind of film could be a perfect counter-
example to the ways in which one’s own personal opinions intrude in the
making or remaking of history. It’s a film that instead mixes together Alex-
andre Dumas25 with Patrice Chéreau,26 which combines the dark roman-
ticism of a rogue monarchy that uses poison, sex, and murder with the
much rawer realism of a Holocaust memoir and the more recent memories
of events in Bosnia.27 The final forms arise from the grafting together of
these two approaches, even though they speak with one unified voice as
a tragedy, thus leaving the viewer unable to reflect upon facts, unable to
think about why even the characters and events are depicted in such stark
terms. In this kind of film, there’s only a story that unfolds, without any
doubt or suspicion, no awareness of relativism, according to its own logic
since the goal of the film isn’t history but rather to follow the parabolic
arc of a narrative. The entire problem turns on the question of reception;
its viewers who see history, once and for all, and rare are those of them
who suspect that this parabolic path bends history to its own purposes,
that it lays hold of history as one would modeling clay. While the promise
of history, such as you might make it, would be a dialogue with the reader
that allows him to let his imagination course from the most nefarious of
Wonderments 25
the Valois to the most modest in society, which would have been the most
enlightening, a dialogue that left room for suspicion …
NZD: I’d like to mention as a contrast a very good film, Alain Corneau’s
Tous les matins du monde.28 On the fine details about the music, the court,
various objects, I’m not specialist enough to make any judgment. But the
film offers much understanding of the Jansenist spirit,29 the relation be-
tween life at the court and life in the country, and the ambivalence aroused
by the court, both its appeal and its repellent qualities. There’s a French
film that imagines the past with rich historical insight, and I certainly
learned a lot from it. I’m not so sure, however, that it introduces moments
of dialogue with the spectator. For that, we can turn to Ettore Scola’s
La Nuit de Varennes.30 The construction is completely artificial—all those
people, some of them celebrities, crowded together in a coach in 1791—
but it’s very informative on the different responses contemporaries had
toward the French Revolution, and amusing besides. And the film, includ-
ing its anachronistic ending, when Restif de la Bretonne31 walks up a flight
of stairs into the streets of modern Paris, invites us spectators to react …
DC: I would like for us now to talk a little about a matter I raised a short
while ago; namely, when you study a document, be it a letter of pardon,
an autobiography, and so on, you look right away for underlying reasons
to explain a particular form of writing. You state, for example, that a letter
of pardon is a text whose nature is fictional enough but that also, in its
means of enunciation, relies on stereotypes that lend it historical mean-
ing because these same stereotypes are purposely structured composites.
Doesn’t this example epitomize the challenge facing historians who study
past fictions? Don’t they have to plumb the relationship between what a
person says and how he or she says it? Aren’t a person’s rhetorical choices
predicated on his or her particular situation (or that of anyone helping
them) and the ends they seek, in this case regaining one’s place in society
by projecting a sense of self they think others would believe?
NZD: At the beginning, when I was working on the Protestant Refor-
mation and the workers as a pure “social historian,” I didn’t ask such
questions. I was using all kinds of texts: from Calvin, Rabelais, and other
humanists to pamphlets intended to be distributed in the streets and tav-
erns and popular songs and stories. I loved this diversity. I knew you had
to be careful about the “prejudices” (to use the old word) that might lurk
26 Chapter 1
behind these writings, but I didn’t worry about or even ask myself about
their literary construction. I read the learned texts to discover the point of
view of their authors, their opinions, their doctrines, whatever I needed to
prop up my argument. For the popular texts, I read them for the point of
view on God, on work, on strikes, on women, and the like.
In later years, I never put aside this kind of inquiry, that is, into
the modes of thinking and representation embedded in a text, but I asked
new questions about ways of writing and the forms and rituals of dis-
course. I began to look not only at what was stated or declared in a text,
but also at what was suggested through expression, through performance.
This happened for several reasons. First, we’re always influenced by our
friends and colleagues, and many of my friends in the university milieu
were in other disciplines: with Rosalie Colie32 and Stephen Greenblatt33
I talked about many “purely” literary matters, but they also turned to
history to enlarge their own analyses. Our conversations gave me a new
orientation. And then, I got caught up in certain historical topics that
took me beyond the usual paths of social history: the history of the book,
where the question was not only the content of the book, but also the
way in which the book was organized, framed, and formed; the history of
oral culture and expression, where the question was not just the moral set
forth—“be prudent,” “be wary,” “be a good neighbor”—but even more the
way in which oral expression was given (say, so as to echo an earlier prov-
erb, or to take on the form of an adage). And then especially, feast days,
festivities, and rituals. The charivari interested me not just for what was
said—for example, “don’t beat your husband” or “don’t marry a girl too
young”—but for its form. When I decided to try to make a film or work on
a film, I was already captivated by notions of performance.
Those were the practical problems that led me to the account,
the narrative, the story. A real turning point for me was in 1979, when I
was writing a review of Montaillou34 for the Annales. For the fun of it and
to learn more about the text Le Roy Ladurie had used, I decided to read
the inquisition records of Jacques Fournier, which had been published.35
Reading this document, I said to myself, “My goodness! We have here not
only what these men and women were declaring to the inquisitor—and
already this was complicated, because they were speaking in Occitan and
it was being translated into Latin and then the Latin read back to them in
Occitan for their concurrence—but also the fashion in which they spoke,
and specifically the elaboration of each interrogation into a story. ‘Fifteen
Wonderments 27
years ago, I was crossing the village square, and carrying a sheepskin …’;
or ‘Twenty-four years ago, I saw a man in the distance, he had a beard
and the color of his clothing was …’” They didn’t just give such concrete
details about events long ago in this narrative fashion, they also recre-
ated precise conversations, the questions asked and responses given. It
was astonishing. I entitled my review “Les conteurs de Montaillou,” “The
Storytellers of Montaillou,” because it seemed to me that this faculty of
storytelling was as fascinating as the extraordinary things Le Roy Ladurie
told us about the village of Montaillou and its mentalities.
With my interest in rituals, in stories, in performances—and I
mean by that the techniques or dramatic modes by means of which per-
sons carry out an action—I have taken another path, or rather I should say,
I’ve enlarged my path, as I’ve never effaced the practice of social history
at all. And furthermore, as you have suggested, I believe strongly that this
way of looking at sources from the past does not undermine their value as
documents, but rather enhances their value even while going beyond the
literal statements they include.
Notes
1. Christine de Pizan (1363–1434) was born in Venice but was brought up at the court of
France, where her father was royal astrologer, and spent the rest of her life in France. Poet and
moralist, she wrote French manuscripts on many subjects, earning both contemporary acclaim
and criticism from her male contemporaries.
2. Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) was a French humanist scholar who served King François I
and helped found what in time became the Collège de France and the Bibliothèque Nationale.
3. Jean Anouilh (1910–87) was a dramatist and author of several dozen plays. He published
Antigone in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France. The play uses allegory to criticize
collaboration with the Nazis.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was a philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political
activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in twentieth-century
philosophy and Existentialism.
5. François Rabelais (1494–1553) was a physician and a major humanist writer of the French
Renaissance. His books include Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1534), and the Tiers Livre (1546), which
won him many readers and the condemnation of the French Faculty of Theology.
6. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was among the most influential writers of the French
Renaissance, who popularized the self-reflective essay as a new literary genre in his collected Essais,
first published in 1580.
7. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) was a German magician, occult
writer, theologian, astrologer, and alchemist. He made this remark in De incertitudine et vanitate
scientiarum atque artium declamatio invectiva [Declamation Attacking the Uncertainty and Vanity of
the Sciences and the Arts] (1527).
8. Lucette Valensi is a leading expert of the Islamic Mediterranean world and author of several
books, most recently (with Gabriel Martinez-Gros) Islam en dissidence: Genèse d’un affrontement (2004).
Oumelbanine Zhiri is a specialist of French and comparative literature who has published two
books on Leo Africanus, L’Afrique au Miroir de l’Europe: Fortunes de Jean Léon l’Africain à la Renaissance
28 Chapter 1
(1991) and Les Sillages de Jean Léon l’Africain du XVIe au XXe siècle (1995). Faustina Doufikar-Aerts
works on medieval Arabic literature.
9. Abū’l-Walīd ibn Rushd (1126–98), known in European languages as Averroës, was a Muslim
polymath who lived in Andalusian Spain, writing on philosophy, law, medicine, and poetry. His
commentary on the philosophy of Aristotle and defense of rational speculation had great influence
throughout the world of Islam and also in Europe.
10. Bernard Lewis (1916–) is a British-American scholar of Middle Eastern history and culture
who taught at Princeton University until his retirement in 1986.
11. Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) was a major American film director, producer, and screenwriter.
Spartacus came out in 1960 and won four Oscars.
12. Steven Spielberg (1946–) is a leading American film producer, director, and screenwriter.
Amistad debuted in 1997.
13. Robert Jonathan Demme (1944–) is an American filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter.
Beloved appeared in 1998.
14. Jean Calvin (1509–64) was an influential French theologian during the Protestant
Reformation whose vision of reform was laid out in his seminal work, Institutes of the Christian
Religion (1536), and implemented in Geneva.
15. AbūHāmid Al-Ghazāī l (1058–1111) was an Islamic theologian, jurist, philosopher, and
mystic of Persian origin, and remains one of the most celebrated scholars in the history of Sunni
Islamic thought. The Sufi movement arose in the seventh century and advocated that believers seek
to draw closer to God to realize a closer mystical union with the divine in this life.
16. Badī' al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (967–1007) was a master of Arabic rhymed prose, whose
maqa−ma−t founded a genre of storytelling of importance in Arabic literature in the next centuries.
17. Muhammad al-Qasim ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Hariri (1054–1122) was an
Arab poet and scholar best known for his work Maqa−ma−t al-Hariri, an English translation of which
appeared in 2008 under the title Assemblies of al-Hariri.
18. An English translation of “The Wine” (XLIX) is in The Maqa−ma−t of Badī’ al-Zama−n al-
Hamadha−nī (1915).
19. Umar Ibn al-Farid (1181–1235) wrote qas¸īdah (odes). An English translation of his poem on
wine is in The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fārid (1956).
20. His full name was Abū'Abdullāh Muhammad ibn 'Alīibn Muhammad ibn al-'Arabīal-
Hāt. imīal-Tāī ' (1165–1240). He was an Andalusian mystic and philosopher. The quote is from his
poem “The Duties of Brotherhood,” which can be found in The Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq: A Collection of
Mystical Odes (1911).
21. La Reine Margot was directed by Patrice Chéreau (1944–) and was released in 1994. The
title refers to Marguerite de Valois (1553–1615), who was queen of France and Navarre in the late
sixteenth century. The House of Valois ruled France from 1328 to 1589.
22. Éliane Viennot (1951–) is a French historian, feminist, and one of the founders of the
Société Internationale pour l’Étude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime. Her book is entitled Marguerite
de Valois: Histoire d’une femme, histoire d’un mythe (Paris: Payot, 1994).
23. This regime came to power following the Revolution of 1830 and established a constitutional
monarchy by King Louis-Philippe d’Orléans. It was overthrown in the 1848 Revolution.
24. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre began in Paris on August 24, 1572, and spread to a
number of cities across France. Catholic violence claimed the lives of several thousand Protestants
as the event marked a major turning point in the French Wars of Religion.
25. Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) was a French writer best known for numerous historical
novels, such as The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Christo (1845–46), and La Reine Margot
(1845).
26. Patrice Chéreau (1944–) is a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor, and
producer known for his dramatic, modernized stagings.
27. Armed strife in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 was especially violent toward civilians
following the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
28. Alain Corneau (1943–) is a French movie director and writer. His movie, known in
Wonderments 29
English as All the World’s Mornings, came out in 1991. It contrasts the superficial life at court of the
seventeenth-century composer Marin Marais with that of his teacher, the austere Saint-Colombe,
who lives a simple and authentic life in the country.
29. Jansenism was a Catholic movement emphasizing austerity and human depravity that
originated after the Council of Trent (1545–63) in the writings of the Dutch theologian Cornelius
Otto Jansen (1585–1638). It was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1655.
30. Ettore Scola (1931–) is an Italian screenwriter and director. His film, known in English
as That Night in Varennes, appeared in 1982. It depicts the attempted flight from France by King
Louis XVI and his family in 1791 during the French Revolution. The film follows the debates and
intrigues of a group of characters, historical and fictional, as they follow the king in a carriage.
31. Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) was a French novelist known for his social
commentary and bawdy stories.
32. Rosalie Colie (1924–72) was an expert on early modern European culture. She wrote Some
Thankfulnesse to Constantine (1956), Light and Enlightenment (1957), and Paradoxia Epidemica (1966).
33. Stephen Greenblatt (1943–) is a literary critic and scholar of Renaissance literature. One
of the founders of the New Historicism, his books include Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (1980) and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1992).
34. The full title of this book, in English translation, is Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
(1978).
35. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–) is a noted French historian of the Old Regime. The
inquisition records, originally in Latin, of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, appeared in a
French translation, coedited by Ladurie, as Le Registre d’Inquisition de Jacques Fournier (Evêque de
Pamiers) 1318–1325 (1978).
Chapter 2
Encounters
DC: This now leads us to shift our attention to the fact that wonderment
definitely seems a bit like Ariadne’s thread which guides us from one curi-
osity to another. But aren’t all our various encounters also a determining
factor for the course this journey takes, encounters with persons dead as
well as alive? Aren’t there, in certain situations, experiences in writing that
can’t be joined with persons we’ve met?
NZD: Yes, I made that link in Women on the Margins, in the dialogue that
opens the book and which I like a lot …
DC: Me too!
NZD: I must say that when I first showed it to my editor at Harvard Uni-
versity Press, she was very dubious about it. She wanted a more “normal”
preface …
DC: Maria Sibylla Merian addressed to you words that sound a little
reproachful: “I have the impression, Mistress Historian, that it’s you who
are looking for adventure …”
NZD: [laughter] I wanted to make fun of myself and also suggest to my
readers the distance between our preoccupations (for instance, on ques-
tions of gender) and the perceptions of these women of the past. Here are
my stakes in this issue; those of my heroines might be different. I thought
the dialogue form would be amusing and accessible, and, besides, my sub-
jects become temporarily alive for a time while I’m working on them—in
the shadows, but alive. In the books I’ve written since then, I haven’t used
any imagined or direct dialogue, but who knows what I might do in the
future?
30
Encounters 31
DC: In your Fiction in the Archives, you wrote about letters of pardon and
remission that forgave offenses as laboratory instruments that enabled
you, as you put it, to retrieve the voices of forgotten people—not just from
the lower classes, but also nobles and clergymen … But it’s also true that
you start from the principle that these documents have a life of their own
and that from these documents you can breathe new life into these actors,
actors who above all want to tell a story according their own criteria for
explaining change and storytelling. This story is hardly their own, but is
rather a story as it’s expected to be told, a story that’s going to win for
them forgiveness! In other words, you simultaneously make your anchor
point the individual who faces facts he or she wants to explain, but that
this same individual allows you, after a fashion, to take stock of a society
in such typical situations.
NZD: In reading letters of remission over the years, I was often aston-
ished by and sometimes even laughed over the curious things I found
there. It’s the way things are told that makes them so amusing. Who
knows whether all the events described in such vivid detail really hap-
pened that way? Once I’d read Fournier and the villagers of Montaillou, I
realized that the stakes were similar to those in the letters of remission: a
situation orchestrated by a notary and limited by the formal and stylistic
constraints required for what one must say to ask the king for pardon for
a homicide. A person who’s committed a homicide must give his or her
own version of what happened—extenuating circumstances of one kind
or another that will make the homicide excusable—and eventually, if the
pardon were to be ratified by the king’s judges, he or she would have to
repeat the same story in his or her own words. The letter requesting the
pardon had to be convincing, plausible, and given at least in part in the
words of the pardon-seeker.
Because of these requirements, one can imagine a storyteller prac-
ticing his or her art, despite all the obligatory formulas and direction ex-
ercised by the notary. I realized that those letters of remission, which I’d
been using for social-history material about crime, geographical mobility,
and the like, could also let me listen to the voices of peasants, artisans, no-
bles (not the great aristocrats, but nobles nonetheless), women, traders.
True, there is another possible path toward those voices: the path
of the collectors, who, in the sixteenth century and especially in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collected tales from the country-
32 Chapter 2
among others about the visionary mystic, Guillaume Postel.2 Are you go-
ing to introduce them to each other?
NZD: Yes, and all the more because Guillaume Postel knew his works:
he talks of reading al-Wazzān’s manuscript on Arabic grammar. And al-
Wazzān himself had contacts with humanists. He taught Arabic to Car-
dinal Gilles de Viterbo, a great Christian Kabbalist of the sixteenth cen-
tury,3 who was one of the godfathers at his baptism. I’ve been working
hard on the various relations between the two men. And then there was
Alberto Pio, the prince of Carpi,4 for whom al-Wazzān transcribed Arabic
manuscripts. I’ve been exploring the humanist circles with which Gilles
of Viterbo and Alberto Pio were associated, especially the people in them
interested in subjects that al-Wazzān knew about—the Ottomans, for in-
stance, or Egyptian symbolism. This is how I’ve been trying to imagine
the world in which al-Wazzān/Leo Africanus moved. Reading the sources
here has been frustrating! Archival documents, diaries, letters, and manu-
scripts give proof of his captivity, his baptism, and role as a teacher and
transcriber of Arabic. And yet some of the people he was in touch with and
even dedicated manuscripts to never mention his name—and I’ve been
through page after page in their writings looking for reference to the man
they called Giovanni Leone. I figure he was a marginal person.
Here’s an amusing fact for you. Manuel, king of Portugal,5 pre-
sented Pope Leo6 with a white elephant from India. Another captive! That
elephant is talked about in numerous places at the time and there are even
pictures of him: Raphael7 drew his picture and painted him. There are few-
er contemporary mentions of Giovanni Leone the African than there are
of Hannibal, the elephant from India. [laughter] So to imagine al-Wazzān’s
relations with the great figures of his day, I’ve had to use sources in an
indirect way. What did they think of him? What did he think of them?
I’ve had to search hard for clues. One of the most fascinating encoun-
ters or crossings for me—perhaps not a personal encounter, but a cultural
crossing—is between al-Wazzān and Rabelais. Rabelais is always present in
my writing and he’ll be an important person at the end of my book. Of
course, if I can establish a direct connection between the author of the
Tiers Livre and al-Wazzān, I’ll be delighted.
DC: Do any of the characters found in Rabelais share any resemblance
with Leo Africanus?
36 Chapter 2
NZD: That’s the case with Panurge. Right now I’m looking to see wheth-
er there could be any direct connections. Rabelais spent time in Italy and
he and his patron, Cardinal Jean du Bellay,8 were in contact with Paolo
Giovio and other humanists who knew the onetime convert from Islam.
Perhaps Rabelais heard people talking about al-Wazzān, perhaps he even
saw the manuscript of the Africa book al-Wazzān had left behind when he
went back to North Africa, for one or two were in circulation. It had the
Italian title Libro della cosmografia e geografia dell’Africa (later when it was
published, it had the title Description of Africa).
But even if there were no direct contact, there are terrific possibili-
ties here. For instance, we can reflect on the treatment of the Ottomans
in the celebrated chapter where Panurge tells the story of his escape from
his Turkish captor. It’s a comic tale, shot through with exaggerations and
lies. Rabelais has Panurge claiming that his captor had prepared him for
roasting and eating by wrapping him with lard (forbidden, of course, to
Muslims), but then Panurge escapes, aided by other Muslims. Two sorts
of Muslims appear in the chapter. Panurge, as hero in this episode, knows
how to save himself, but he does not behave well at all. I’ve been wonder-
ing if there’s an echo of al-Wazzān in these lines—probably not. But I plan
to make a comparison between the ruses of al-Wazzān/Leo Africanus and
those of Panurge and of Rabelais.
DC: Don’t actors like these develop a certain sense of skill and craftiness … ?
NZD: Yes, skill and craftiness, but also a sense of play and the use of
tricks for truth-telling. Truth-telling is one of the main roles of the trick-
ster. These are personages who practice mètis, to use the Greek term for
crafty intelligence. I want to compare the games and mètis of Panurge with
those of al-Wazzān over the course of his life, which for me evoke the ruses
of the hero of the maqa−ma−t. I’m hoping to arrive at some cultural affini-
ties, to discern some unity beyond the divisions of the Mediterranean. I
see some ludic parallels here. And there’s Rabelais’s mysticism, the sym-
bolism of wine and the divine bottle in his fifth book. I’d like to put that
next to the maqa−ma−t of “The Wine” by Badī’ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, and
the celebrated mystical poem on wine of Ibn al-Farid, both texts impor-
tant in al-Wazzān’s sensibility.
DC: Even so with Rabelais, wine, from the very start, symbolizes the Bible,
for it’s the Good Book they drink, or that they can finally begin to imbibe after
Encounters 37
a long dry spell when the humanity of the giants suffered from thirst …
NZD: Exactly. Perhaps I should also reflect on Arab script, the fine cal-
ligraphy that was so prized in the Arab world, and other forms of divine
symbolism. In any case, the affinities I’m looking for will be suggested not
just by texts, but by certain shared ideas, certain ways of looking at the
world found in both of these men of the Mediterranean.
DC: In listening to you, I have the impression that the task of analysis
is always a work-in-progress beyond the desire for adventure. Of course,
one could reproach you for also being in that same uncertain spot where
Leo Africanus found himself, and therefore exceeded the limits of what’s
possible. But isn’t it a response to the yearning that always resurfaces to
push you to the very edge of overinterpretation? And then is there over-
interpretation when plumbing the secrets of a person’s inner life? It means
for you to not remain fixated on your object of study, for you must dis-
cover it in a larger, nearly limitless landscape, because the individual in the
Renaissance is a repository of an infinite number of ways of knowing, of
interconnections, of personal possibilities, and possible borrowings again
and again …
NZD: What you say about “the task of analysis as always a work-in-prog-
ress” and about “not remaining fixated on your object of study” are very
interesting, though I don’t see the possibilities of interpretation as limit-
less, neither during the Renaissance nor today. But your idea of continual
movement during a life makes me think of two things.
First is an affirmation from Eugénie Droz, a very learned Swiss
scholar, whom I met in 1960, when she was in her late sixties: “Tout est à
faire et à refaire,” “Everything is to be done and redone.”9 [laughter] Droz
was a tough lady, who worked on precise and intricate questions in the
history of the book, printing, and bibliography; she turned out valuable
articles on the history of religious propaganda in the sixteenth century.
One must always remember “Everything is to be done and redone.” I say
this to myself when I’ve made a mistake or misunderstood something.
The other association that comes to mind concerns my old age.
[laughter] I feel fine on the whole and I don’t have the sense of being old,
and yet I am! Now in the books I’ve read about old age—books written in
the early modern period and today about the stages of life—old age is sup-
posed to be the time when one finds a resolution, intellectual and moral.
38 Chapter 2
One looks at one’s life, one hopes for a sense of satisfaction and happi-
ness, but at the very least there’s a dominant idea of closure. But I’ve been
discovering that my old age isn’t like that at all: it’s full of complications,
questions, mystification, and uncertainties—the books I read didn’t pre-
pare me for this! [laughter] I look at the future as a continuing adventure,
without a tranquil resting place where I could just be settled and feel that
I understood everything. My old age is a reality for me and I accept it, but
though I know much more than when I was young, I still have so many
question marks. So I say to myself, “Fine. I’ll accept this stage of life as an
adventure, with many questions still to ask.” Perhaps I won’t have time to
find the answers, but there we are …
DC: Precisely, to the extent that history is a continual source of adven-
tures, it’s necessary, I think, to take account of what historians of your
era wrote. First to know that, when you arrived in France, you chose not
to embrace the prevailing attempts to realize a totalizing history where
one tried, in the confines of a province for example—Languedoc or the
Beauvaisis—to capture the entire functional or dysfunctional workings of a
social system at the political, cultural, and economic levels. You really had
to rein in the scope of your own technique of analysis …
NZD: When I first came to France, there were no works directly on my
topic.
DC: There were initially very few American historians who were inter-
ested in the history of sixteenth-century France, let alone the history of
Lyon!
NZD: That’s right. But the most unusual thing perhaps was my coming
to the archives, especially the archives of Lyon. Before the Second World
War, most American historians working on France based their studies on
published sources. Some very important work was done, but in most cases
it was not drawn heavily from archives. The medievalist John Mundy,10
who was a decade older than I, went to Toulouse not long after the war
and he had an experience similar to mine: people in Toulouse thought
his presence in the archives was bizarre. I heard the same thing in Lyon:
“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the archives in the United
States?” [laughter]
After having begun my own research, I had read the great work of
Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses mar-
Encounters 39
Which historians have most influenced you, and they needn’t be French?
NZD: I’d begin with the historians who influenced me when I was an un-
dergraduate. I’ll never forget how enthralled I was by Giambattista Vico’s
New Science,23 especially by the way he fit the different parts of a society
together, its forms of expression and values together with its economy
and political structure. About the same time I read Werner Jaeger’s Paid-
eia24 and was struck similarly by how he portrayed connections, here be-
tween the educational aspirations and ideals of the Greeks and other fea-
tures of their city life. Interested in Marxism as I was, I wanted to pursue
such connections in the early modern period, but not in the mechanical
way of those historians who reduced everything to narrow class interest.
Then I read two works that pointed the way: Charles Trinkaus’s Adversity’s
Noblemen,25 which suggested that the precarious social status of the Ital-
ian humanists informed their claims for the importance of humane let-
ters, and Edgar Zilsel’s “Sociological Roots of Modern Science,”26 which
showed the essential contribution of hands-on artisanal observation to
the development of natural science. These delicate and nondeterministic
treatments of “experience” were a real boon for me; they shaped the way
I rethought the relation between social class and religious choice in my
doctoral dissertation later on.
My last two years at Smith, I also started reading in the French
school of historians, especially books in Henri Berr’s great series L’évolution
de l’humanité.27 What a joy of discovery this was—and it climaxed when I
read Marc Bloch’s Société féodale.28 The Smith College Library had the first
edition published just at the beginning of World War II. I loved the book
and I so admired him, his life as a great and learned historian and as a
man engaged in public issues. And he was Jewish, like me.
DC: He would be for you the greatest person, the most attractive … ?
NZD: Well, a very great figure. His Strange Defeat explaining the fall of
France [in June 1940], his recreation of that medieval feudal world, with
all its social and cultural features so linked, and his beautiful style—even
though I wasn’t French, I was charmed by the way he wrote history.29 And
then his heroic end, killed by the Nazis for his role in the Resistance. I read
other French historians at the time, but he was my hero.
A few years later, of course, I came upon the publications of Henri
Hauser, your great-grandfather, who opened the doors to my doctoral
42 Chapter 2
dissertation, especially in his 1898 book Ouvriers du temps passé. I had never
known that such documents existed on journeymen and strikes, and I
realized I could follow them up and make my own study of what he had
called “the Reformation and the popular classes.” Back in the early 1950s,
I shared to some extent his view about the sixteenth century as the be-
ginning of “modernity,” and with my social concerns, I was on his wave-
length. Today my views about modernity are different, but I still have that
feeling of affinity to him that I had when I was young. [laughter] I read
more French historians in the 1960s: Goubert, Le Roy Ladurie, and Agul-
hon, whom I already mentioned, and also Philippe Ariès.30
DC: On death?
NZD: Ariès’s book on death was interesting, but it was his earlier book
on childhood that caught my attention. He was a pioneer in making
children and youth a subject of historical inquiry, but he was also one of
the targets for my essay on charivaris: I really didn’t agree with him that
there were no separate age-categories for children and adolescents before
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These categories existed in the
Middle Ages and sixteenth century—the youth groups I was writing about
in my “Reasons of Misrule” were one of the examples—but they were de-
fined somewhat differently. Still I found his discussion fascinating, even if
I didn’t adopt his overall theory. Later, when I met him personally, I found
him a delightful and generous person. His political culture was on the
right: he was a royalist, but very open in spirit. He liked people for what
they were. As he said, he had “red” friends—and that would include me—
and “white” friends. A few years before he died, he brought us all together
for dinner and fine wine on a boat ride on the Seine.
But why am I not speaking of women? It’s partly because there
weren’t any books by women historians in my fields of interest during the
decades when I was getting started that could play the same role as, say,
Bloch’s Société Féodale. But yes—Eileen Power31 had already published her
innovative studies in medieval social and economic history by the 1920s
and had been an inspiration for Sylvia Thrupp,32 who was coming into
her own in the 1960s. I included both of them in my presidential address
to the American Historical Association years later to pay tribute to them.
My women teachers at Smith College were more important as role models
than for their historical vision. But I’ve always had many women as schol-
arly friends, starting off with Rosalie Colie in the 1950s. Her portrait of
Encounters 43
the very same moment that Edward was looking at its English variant, the
skimmington or rough music. Independently we were examining the very
same subject.
DC: Isn’t this an example of these encounters that work because they
share a thematic interest that you like to cite?
NZD: Yes, a coincidence in the intellectual world of us historians.
Around 1968 or 1969, when I finished my charivari essay, I sent it to Past
and Present, and Edward read it—he must have been on the board of edi-
tors at the time, or one of the editors asked him to review it. He wrote me
about what an astonishing coincidence this was—he was just then writing
his celebrated article on the skimmington ride. My “Reasons of Misrule”
appeared in Past and Present in 1971, his “Charivari Anglais” in the Annales
in 1972. These things happen in our intellectual universe: despite the dis-
tance between us, we simultaneously hit on the same subject. It’s true that
Thompson’s article is more somber than mine. I had stressed the comic
aspect of the charivari, I suppose that’s a typical habit of mine, and his
reading was tougher. For Edward, the English skimmington led primarily
to exclusion, the humiliated persons being ridden out of town; for me the
French charivari led more often to inclusion, the reintegration of the hu-
miliated persons back into the community after they’d paid their penalty.
There are evidently real differences between the two countries, not just
different interpretations.
So often one thinks one is the only person working on a topic, and
then it turns out not to be the case.
DC: But is it only a coincidence? Isn’t it limiting to see this conjuncture
of interests only from this perspective?
NZD: Of course, you’re right—it’s only a seeming coincidence. These
similar questions are connected with big questions or events in the air at
the time: the late 1960s were a period of the carnivalesque turning of the
world upside down of the student movements and the time of resistance
against the Vietnam War. And in the history profession, some of us want-
ed to explore forms of popular action that had not been taken seriously
by earlier scholars of resistance movements, who thought them archaic or
folkloric.
DC: This brings us back to the question of your own personal journey.
Encounters 45
Why the rites of charivari during the late 1960s? What’s most remarkable,
moreover, is that you opened the way on the American side for a powerful
new school interested in the history of sixteenth-century France, since you
had been to some extent the person through whom, in a manner more or
less direct, these interests came to the next generation of scholars, such as
Barbara Diefendorf, Mack P. Holt,46 Philip Benedict47 to only cite the most
well known. This profusion of intellectual talent has contributed so much
to rediscovering the complexities of sixteenth-century France.
NZD: I’m certainly happy to think that I might have played this role and
been of use to such formidable historians as the three you mention. Bar-
bara Diefendorf was actually my doctoral student, and I have been much
impressed by the books she’s written on the religious, social, and political
life of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—giving us a new
understanding of both Catholics and Protestants.
Why the rites of charivari in the late 1960s? I was quite involved in
the antiwar movements of the time, as well as in the efforts to restructure
the university. I had charivaris going on around me. And also I had begun
to read in anthropological literature. I’ve told you about some of the his-
torians who influenced my thinking, but by the late 1960s, anthropolo-
gists were especially important for me—that is, for my understanding of
French history. The first one I read was the old-time ethnographer Arnold
van Gennep.48
DC: Isn’t it somewhat paradoxical to first learn anthropology through
the biases of the author of the Manuel de folklore français,49 when American
anthropology was in full flower?
NZD: That may seem odd, but the Manuel was just what I needed at
the time. I was not flailing around for grand theory, I was trying to make
sense of a specific ritual carried on by Lyon printing workers and other ar-
tisans, a noisy masked demonstration often directed against men beaten
by their wives. “What is going on here?” I kept asking myself. “What does
this mean?” The social history of my day had no answers here: the people
weren’t complaining about their wages or the price of bread or taxes. The
Manuel opened the doors for me, with its ethnographic studies from all
over France and its frequent use of historical documents.
DC: How did you discover Arnold van Gennep?
46 Chapter 2
NZD: I had never heard of him from historians. One day I asked an an-
thropologist friend at the University of Toronto about the charivari, and I
think it was he that told me of Arnold van Gennep. I found the many vol-
umes of the Manuel in the University of Toronto library. What a surprise!
The charivari was a widespread practice going back centuries, performed
by groups of young men in the countryside who used it against marriages
when there was a great disparity of age between the partners and against
other violations of village norms. This was just a start for reading that
took me across Europe and into other uses of the charivari, both for fam-
ily matters and political matters, and into other forms of festive behavior.
I discovered how important age categories were, and stages of life. That
may seem obvious nowadays, but it wasn’t to a historian back then. [laugh-
ter] Van Gennep’s main contribution to theory concerned rites of passage,
and it was relevant to these youth groups or “Misrule Abbeys” (Abbayes de
Maugouvert), as they were called in France.
Then, in fact, I did turn to the American anthropologists and
began to read Victor Turner50 and Clifford Geertz.51 I read Victor Turner’s
Ritual Process after my paper had first appeared in Past and Present, and
immediately added his beautiful insights to a new version of the essay.52
Meanwhile, he had learned of my work and invited me to a colloquium
with anthropologists. It was my first colloquium with anthropologists
and I was thrilled. We each talked of a ritual of inversion, of some form of
the world upside down. I spoke of gender inversion, the paper that became
“Women on Top.”
DC: The rituals of inversion happen in real life when the social order be-
comes disturbed and thus in need of corrective action, right?
NZD: That’s certainly part of it, but they also have wider uses for play-
fulness, social definitions, and changes from one status in life to another.
Turner talked more broadly of the liminal quality in rites of passage and
inversion—he saw the pilgrimage as an example. I was dazzled by his ideas
and by the debates inspired by them.
Another great encounter for me was Clifford Geertz. I read his col-
lection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures, right after they appeared in
1973, and I found them deeply engrossing. (In passing, I’m remembering
the first time I spoke of his work to the historians at the École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales and my listeners asked me “Why is Clifford
Geertz so important?” Later on, they understood …) For me, Geertz’s work
Encounters 47
was essential, not so much for what I was doing on carnivals and festivity,
but for my efforts to interpret religion. I very much liked his perception of
religion as a cultural system—a system that, on the one hand, shapes our
perceptions, experiences, and mentalities, and that, on the other hand, is
also shaped by them. There’s a process of exchange here, which contrasts
with the old one-way Marxist model of the material infrastructure deter-
mining the superstructure of consciousness. With Geertz, there’s always
an exchange between experience and ideas, a principle of back and forth.
Later, when I came to Princeton, I taught a seminar with Clifford Geertz,
and we talked much about the relations between history and anthropol-
ogy. It was a great experience.
But I can’t leave the anthropologists without mentioning Mary
Douglas53 from England. I read her Purity and Danger several times over in
1972 when I was writing my essay “The Rites of Violence.” What she had
to say about the dangers of pollution helped me make sense of the rheto-
ric of violence in the sixteenth-century religious texts and the destructive
and murderous practices of “cleansing” that took place during their reli-
gious riots. Later on, she came to Princeton to teach for a year and I had
the delight of hearing her lecture and talking with her.
I want to stress, though, that as a historian, I never take the ideas
of an anthropologist and just apply them to the historical past. Mary
Douglas’s writings about our sense of the limits of our bodies and of our
selves, about the dangers of pollution and our desire for protection—all
that yields mere possibilities for interpretation, new questions to ask of
the evidence, say, about violence. That last is a topic on which you have
enlarged our field of vision, and I’ve learned much from that, too.
DC: Staying with the vantage point of an approach to history by mining
the suggestive potential that other methods and ways of knowing offer,
which discipline seems to you actually the most dynamic, the most adept
at problem-solving to guide your own reflections? Don’t you find that an-
thropology has today become too narrow and it seeks to devise systems of
explanation less global or encompassing than twenty-five years ago? But
perhaps, before going into this, you might wish to talk about the contribu-
tions of French anthropologists?
NZD: I’ve received much stimulation from the ideas and books of
French anthropologists. I read Claude Lévi-Strauss early along, and had
students read Tristes Tropiques in my courses.54 His structuralism is often
48 Chapter 2
too rigid and abstract for us historians, but there have been times when
he’s offered me real leads for my own research. While I was writing my
book on women on the margins, I was led via Marie de l’Incarnation to
the people she wanted to convert: the Amerindians, especially the Amer-
indian women of seventeenth-century Québec. How could I understand
their ideas and their ways of talking? I was facing a version of the same
problem I had with the peasants in the world of Martin Guerre—how was
I going to get access to the language, the speech of peasants? I wanted to
imagine a possible conversation between Marie de l’Incarnation and one
of the young women she hoped to make a Christian. Now I had avail-
able nineteenth-century collections of Amerindian legends, but I wanted
guidance for the seventeenth century—I wanted some clues as to how an
Amerindian woman of that period might tell a story, especially on a topic
that would be interesting to Marie de l’Incarnation as well. You’re prob-
ably wondering what all this has to do with Claude Lévi-Strauss.
DC: I didn’t say anything!
NZD: Claude Lévi-Strauss gave me the clues I needed. In his Histoire de
lynx and elsewhere, he had systematically examined Amerindian stories
about abduction, specifically, the abduction of a woman by an animal;
among the Iroquoian people, it was often a bear.55 He had described the
different outcomes of the abduction and the woman’s relation with her
husband: you ended up with a “tale-type,” as the folklorists call it, and a
sense of Amerindian style. He also suggested a connection between bear-
abduction stories told to the Amerindians by French fur-traders in the
seventeenth century and those current in parts of France. Well, I knew
that abduction was a theme dear to the heart of Marie de l’Incarnation,
since her cousin had been abducted in France by a noble army officer, and
Marie was worried about the abduction of her converts by non-Christian
husbands. So through Lévi-Strauss’s stories, I saw the path to take. I could
not simply reconstitute a conversation, but I could use some of Marie de
l’Incarnation’s texts and compare them with the Amerindian ones. His
writing gave me possible ways of imagining an exchange.
DC: You thus promote, when all is said and done, an intuitive approach
to history where the variables don’t dictate a particular way to think about
the past and people’s mind-sets, but which instead treats history as a
set of possibilities that sets it along a path not bound by the signposts of
Encounters 49
NZD: For him as for me, the Protestants represented the forces of resis-
tance against the established order. At that period, I still thought about
historical movement in terms of evolutionary schemes, which I have long
since abandoned. Nonetheless, I tried to maintain distance from the two
sides in the religious conflict. This was made all the easier since the Prot-
estants soon developed an establishment of their own.
DC: You had, however, around 1975, a controversy with the Protestant
historian, Janine Garrisson, which actually reflected her sympathetic en-
gagement with respect to Protestant martyrs.66 We very well see in this
controversy how the point of view you defended is a step removed from the
charged emotions and identity politics inherited from the past, and how
Janine Garrisson—and I don’t mean this as a criticism—wished to advance
a set of interpretations closely related to the struggles of the “Protestants
of the Midi” in the sixteenth century out of which emerged an attitude that
could be described as modern.
NZD: Though we disagreed, I want to start by saying how much I ap-
preciate Janine Garrisson’s scholarship. Our debate concerned questions
of violence, the sources and character of the violence of the Saint Bar-
tholomew’s Day massacres and the bloody uprisings that preceded it. In
my view, Garrisson did not attend to the meanings of religion and sym-
bolic action in this violence and diverted the socioreligious dimension of
violence into the familiar socioeconomic one: popular Catholic crowds,
often angry about the high cost of grain, assaulting rich Huguenots. In
contrast, I saw the Catholic fear of pollution by the Huguenot “vermin” as
emerging from the threats to sacred values and the power structures and
identities embedded in them.
By 1972, when I wrote my “Rites of Violence,” I had already put
aside my earlier evolutionary perspective and I wanted very much to under-
stand the horrendous violence from a double point of view: not just to look
at enraged Catholics killing poor Protestant victims, but to examine and
compare the shape of violence on both sides, to make sense of what people
said and why they behaved the way they did. Two things had changed my
views. One was the impact of my reading in anthropology on my under-
standing of religion—not just reading, but also attending different religious
services in Lyon, visiting pilgrimage sites, watching processions, etc. I began
to understand Catholic sensibility and liturgy more clearly and see both
Catholicism and Protestantism in a new light. Rather than a “progressive”
Encounters 55
Notes
1. The Jesuit relations were annual reports that the head of the Order of Jesus in New France
sent back to Paris during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Ursulines are a
Catholic religious order founded by Saint Angela de Merici in 1535; it is devoted to the education
of girls and care for the sick and elderly.
2. Guillaume Postel (1510–81) was a French humanist scholar adept at ancient and Near
Eastern languages who advocated a universal world religion to unite the major faiths.
3. Gilles of Viterbo (1465–1532) was a cardinal of the Catholic Church, famous preacher, and
scholar of the Hebrew language and Kabbala, which he used to support Christian teaching.
4. Alberto III Pio, Prince of Carpi (1472–1530), was a Renaissance Italian prince celebrated
for his promotion of humanism and for his role as diplomat to Rome of the king of France and
Emperor Maximilian.
5. Manuel I, King of Portugal (1469–1521), promoted overseas exploration and commercial
expansion into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the conversion of conquered peoples to
Christianity.
6. Pope Leo X (1475–1521) was a member of the Medici family and the last nonpriest elected
as pope. His efforts to raise money through the sale of indulgences prompted Martin Luther’s
challenge to the church. He was celebrated for his patronage of poets and artists.
7. Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483–1520), better known as Raphael, was an Italian artist and
architect of the High Renaissance.
8. Jean du Bellay (1493–1560) was a French cardinal and diplomat.
9. Eugénie Droz (1893–1976) was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and was a graduate of
the École des Hautes Études in Paris. She opened the publishing house Librairie Droz in Paris in
1924, which she transferred to Geneva and ran until 1963. She founded the journal Humanisme
et Renaissance in 1934. Her own numerous publications deal with fifteenth-century literature, the
French Renaissance and Reformation, and typography.
10. John H. Mundy (1917–2004) was a prominent medieval historian. The book emerging from
his postwar doctoral studies in Toulouse was Liberty and Political Power in Toulouse, 1150–1230 (1954).
11. Richard Gascon (1913–82) was a French economic and social historian. His two-volume
study on commerce and urban life in sixteenth-century Lyon came out in 1971.
12. Max Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly
reshaped the social sciences through his study of reason and religion as well as the rise of the state
and capitalism.
Encounters 59
13. Karl Marx (1818–83) was a German philosopher and political economist whose ideas
established the foundations of modern revolutionary communism.
14. Henri Hauser (1866–1946) was a French economic historian and author, among many
works, of Ouvriers des temps passés [Workers from Past Times] (1898).
15. Pierre Goubert (1915–) is a pioneering French social historian of the Annales school and
author of many books, including Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730: Contribution à l’histoire sociale
de la France du XVIIe siècle [Beauvais and Its Region from 1600 to 1730: A Contribution to the Social
History of France in the Seventeenth Century] (1958) mentioned here.
16. The book mentioned here came out in 1966.
17. Émile Coornaert (1886–1980) was a French economic historian, early member of the
Annales school, and member of the French Resistance during World War II. The book mentioned
here is Corporations en France avant 1789 [Guilds in France before 1789] (1941).
18. Vichy France or the Vichy regime refers to the government under Marshal Philippe Pétain
between July 1940 and August 1944 that collaborated with Nazi Germany to rule those portions of
France not under direct German Occupation following the French defeat in June 1940.
19. Maurice Agulhon (1926– ) is a French social historian noted for his work on eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century republicanism. The full title of the book mentioned here is La sociabilité
méridionale: Confréries et associations dans la vie collective en Provence orientale à la fin du XVIIIe siècle
[Southern Sociability: Religious Fraternities and Associations in Communities in Eastern Provence
at the End of the Eighteenth Century] (1966).
20. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was an innovative Russian philosopher, literary scholar, and
theoretician of culture. He wrote the work mentioned here as a dissertation during World War II. It
was not published until 1965, however.
21. Barbara Diefendorf (1946–) is a historian of early modern France. Her most recent book is
From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (2006). The book alluded
to here is Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (1991).
22. Yves-Marie Bercé (1936–) is a French historian of the early modern period best known for
his work on popular revolts. See in particular his Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An
Essay on the History of Political Violence (1987).
23. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was an Italian philosopher, historian, and scholar of rhetoric.
In his most important work, The New Science (1725), he developed a new way of conceptualizing the
philosophy of history and described the different ages of humankind, with each age marked by
different forms of reasoning, laws, poetry and expression, and government.
24. Werner Jaeger (1888–1961) was a German classicist who emigrated to the United States in
1936. The full title of the three-volume study mentioned here is Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture
(1933–47).
25. Charles Trinkaus (1912–99) was a historian of Renaissance Italy. His books include
Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (1966) and In Our Image and Likeness:
Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (1970).
26. Edgar Zilsel (1891–1944) was an Austrian historian and philosopher of science who
emigrated to the United States after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. This essay
originally appeared in The American Journal of Sociolog y 47 (1942): 544–62.
27. Henri Berr (1963–54) was a French philosopher and historian who founded the influential
journal Revue du synthèse in 1900. The book mentioned here was published in Paris in 1920.
28. Marc Bloch (1886–1944) was a prominent French medieval historian who founded, along
with Lucien Febvre, the Annales school. His book was a two-volume study originally published in
Paris in 1939 and 1940. It appeared in English as Feudal Society (1964).
29. Bloch composed his memoir in September 1940 but it only appeared posthumously after
the war in 1946 as Étrange défaite and a subsequent English translation, Strange Defeat: A Statement
of Evidence Written in 1940 (1949).
30. Philippe Ariès (1914–84) was a French demographer and historian of the family and
childhood. His major works include Centuries of Childhood (1962) and The Hour of Our Death (1981).
31. Eileen Power (1889–1940) was a British medievalist and economic historian. Among her
60 Chapter 2
most important books are Medieval People (1924) and The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941).
32. Sylvia Thrupp (1903–97) was a medieval historian who wrote A Short History of the Worshipful
Company of Bakers of London (1933) and The Merchant Class of Medieval London (1948). In 1958, she
founded the interdisciplinary journal Comparative Studies in Society and History.
33. Nancy L. Roelker (1915–93) was a distinguished historian of early modern France who
wrote Queen of Navarre: Jean d’Albret (1968) and One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the
Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (1996).
34. This book is entitled The Paris of Henry of Navarre as Seen by Pierre de l’Estoile (1958).
35. Elizabeth Armstrong (1917–2002) was a scholar of sixteenth-century literature and a
historian of the book at Somerville College, Oxford. Among her books is Robert Estienne, Royal
Printer: An Historical Study of the Elder Stephanus (1954; 2nd edition, 1986).
36. Françoise Weil (1922–) is a scholar of eighteenth-century French letters, book-history,
and censorship, and has been director of research libraries in Dijon and Paris. She has published
L’interdiction du roman et la librairie 1728–1750 (1986).
37. Michelle Perrot (1928–) is a major French historian and feminist. Her many books include
Les ouvriers en grève, France 1871–1890 (1974), translated into English as Workers on Strike 1871–1890
(1987), and Les femmes ou les silences de l’histoire [Women or the Silences of History] (1998). Together
with the late Georges Duby, she edited the many volumes of A History of Women in the West (1992–
1994).
38. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (1936–) is an innovative historian of women and the family
who focuses on the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in France and Italy. Among her works are
Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (1985) and, together with the late David Herlihy,
Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (1985). She served as editor of
volume 2 of A History of Women in the West.
39. Jill Ker Conway (1934–) has been an important figure in the study of the history of women
and in women’s education in North America. Among her publications are The Female Experience
in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (1982), The
First Generation of American Women Graduates (1989), and her best-selling memoir Road from Coorain
(1989). In 1975 she became the first woman president of Smith College.
40. Carlo Ginzburg (1939–) is a noted historian and pioneer of microhistory best known for
his groundbreaking work The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (1976;
English ed., 1980). Giovanni Levi (1939–) is a social and economic historian, and founder of the
Italian journal Microhistoria.
41. Bronislaw Geremek (1932–2008) was a Polish social historian and politician. The book
referred to here is The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (1987).
42. Solidarność is an independent Polish trade union federation led by Lech Walesa that
opposed the Communist government in the 1980s and helped usher in the first post-Communist
regime in 1989 when Walesa was elected president.
43. Keith Thomas (1933–) is a Welsh historian best known for his books Religion and the Decline
of Magic (1971) and Man and the Natural World (1984). The article referenced here appeared in History
of Ideas 20, no. 2 (April 1959): 195–216.
44. Peter Burke (1937–) is a prolific British historian who specializes in social and cultural
history.
45. Edward P. Thompson (1924–93) was a British historian and political activist who specialized
in the history of British radical movements. The landmark book referred to here appeared in 1963.
46. Mack P. Holt (1949–) is a specialist of early modern France whose books include The French
Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd edition (2005), and The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during
the Wars of Religion (1986).
47. Philip Benedict (1949–) is a leading expert on early modern Calvinism. Among his books
are Rouen during the Wars of Religion (1981), Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of
Calvinism (2002), and, most recently, Graphic History: The “Wars, Massacres and Troubles” of Tortorel
and Perrissin (2008).
48. Arnold van Gennep (1873–1957) was a French ethnographer and folklorist famous for his
Encounters 61
study, The Rites of Passage (1909), which examined the rituals that mark significant transitions in
human lives.
49. The full title of the journal is Le Manuel de folklore français contemporain (1937–58).
50. Victor Turner (1920–83) was a cultural anthropologist best known for his work on
symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. Among his many books are The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-Structure (1969) and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974).
51. Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was an anthropologist and ethnographer known for his
innovative work in symbolic anthropology and the study of meaning. His many books include The
Religion of Java (1960), Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968), Negara:
The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980), as well as collections of essays, such as the widely
read Interpretation of Cultures (1973).
52. The version of this essay appeared in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, chapter 4.
53. Mary Douglas (1921–2007) was a British cultural anthropologist known for her work
on symbolism as articulated in many books such as Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of
Pollution and Taboo (1966) and Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (1992).
54. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who
became a central figure in the structuralist school of thought that posited the existence of common
patterns underlying all forms of human symbolization. Tristes Tropiques (1955) appeared in an
English translation as A World on the Wane in 1973.
55. An English translation appeared in 1996. Histoire de lynx was first published in 1991.
56. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist, who brought a
new approach to the study of religion, sacrifice, and forms of exchange. His influential Essai sur le
don was published in 1925, and is available in English as The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange
in Archaic Societies (1990).
57. Maurice Godelier (1934–) is a French anthropologist who specializes in the societies of
Oceania.
58. Jacques Le Goff (1924–) is a French medieval historian who headed the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales from 1972 to 1977 and whose many books reshaped medieval social
and cultural history.
59. Jean-Claude Schmitt (1946–) is a French medieval historian known for his use of anthropo-
logical and art historical methods in his research. Among his books is Le saint lévrier: Guinefort, guéris-
seur d’enfants depuis le 13e siècle (1979), translated into English as The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer
of Children since the Thirteenth Century (1983).
60. Godelier’s “Charivari chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guinée (le 6 octobre 1968)” appeared in
the conference proceedings edited by Le Goff and Schmitt entitled Le charivari (1981), pp. 347–51.
Godelier was director of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales at the time.
61. Jacques Berque (1910–95) was a French historical sociologist and scholar of Islam, the
Arab world, and North Africa, writing both about the past and the period of decolonization.
62. Renato Rosaldo (1941–) is an anthropologist writing both about the Philippines and the
practice of anthropology. The reference here is to his book, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883–1974: A Study
in History and Society (1980).
63. Michel de Certeau (1925–86) was a French Jesuit and scholar whose work combined history,
psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as commentary on contemporary
politics and culture. His books include The Possession at Loudun (2000; French edition, 1970), The
Practice of Everyday Life (1984; French edition, 1980), and The Mystic Fable (1992; French edition,
1982).
64. Edith Piaf (1915–63) was a popular French cabaret singer and cultural icon. The song is
known as “No Regrets“ in English and was recorded by Piaf in 1960.
65. Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) was a renowned French historian best known for his role in
founding, together with Marc Bloch, the French Annales school of historical interpretation. His
book, Martin Luther: Un destin (1928), appeared in English translation in 1929.
66. Janine Garrisson (1932–) is a specialist of early modern French Protestantism. The
exchange with Natalie Zemon Davis can be found in Past and Present 67 (1975): 127–35.
62 Chapter 2
67. John Bossy (1933–) is a specialist of early modern England and European Catholicism
and is the author, among other studies, of The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (1975) and
Christianity and the West, 1400–1700 (1985), which are being referred to here.
68. Leon Modena (1571–1648) was a learned and eloquent rabbi of Venice, author of numerous
works in Hebrew and an Italian description of the rites and customs of the Jews, translated after his
death into English as The History of the Rites, Customes, and Manner of Life of the Present Jews, Throughout
the World (1650).
69. Mark R. Cohen, ed., The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s
Life of Judah (1988).
70. Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, and
astrologer. An English translation of his autobiography appeared as The Book of My Life (2002).
71. Eschatology investigates the theological nature of what are believed will be the final
events in the history of the world. Millenarianism is the Christian belief in an imminent major
transformation of the world resulting from the second coming of Christ.
Chapter 3
Fashionings
DC: Let’s leave off for the time being the various characters you encoun-
tered and shift our discussion now to a related dimension in this history
of your life as a historian. I would briefly like to return to this impulse to
direct your historical writing to consider how the horrors of the twentieth
century, in effect, represented a rejection of history as well as fed your inter-
est in confessional violence in Lyon from the early 1540s to the Saint Bar-
tholomew’s Day Massacre in Lyon. Were you recalling, when you worked
on the Holocaust, all the heartbreaking tragedies that gave it such poignan-
cy, and don’t we touch here on the beginning of your own self-fashioning?
NZD: Ah, yes …
DC: But at the same time—and I believe it’s the power of this kind of
analysis—we don’t immediately see that you write with these memories in
the back of your mind. It’s up to the reader, again, to intuit it in your writ-
ing and even realize that danger, for you, is not unique to the tragedies of
the twentieth century but is rather also latent in other historical periods
when societies fell prey to the most horrible slaughter. Surely, you write
history as a way to search for hope.
NZD: It is certain, even many decades afterward, that the Holocaust,
the mass murders, and extraordinary violence of the 1930s and 1940s in-
fluenced me. The Holocaust has always been at the back of my mind, and
it was there when in 1970 to 1971, I began the reflection that led to “The
Rites of Violence.” But, curiously enough, I’d stress the back of my mind,
for the events up front that aroused most immediately my thinking about
religious violence in the sixteenth century were those of the 1960s and
early 1970s. There was the Vietnam War, with all its horrors, the resistance
63
64 Chapter 3
against that war, in which I participated, and the debates within the Left
and opposition movements. I was troubled by the violence, including even
that sometimes unleashed in our own demonstrations. I kept asking my-
self, “What does this mean?” And that opened the path for me to thinking
about the character of violence during the Holocaust …
DC Your analysis of sixteenth-century religious sedition has led you to
signal the importance of the crowd which, according to you, sometimes
appropriated the state’s rites of punishment to legitimate to the broader
public its own aggression and desire to eliminate the “pollution” caused
by its adversaries in order to restore the world to its lost pristine purity.
However, these are not the same techniques as those used in the Holo-
caust where the vast bulk of the violence was the work of machines within
the closed confines of the camps, nowhere more than in the enclosures
of the gas chambers … In Lyon or in Paris around 1562, the Protestants
died in public in a ritualistic spectacle in words and images that formed a
language to explain why, in the minds of the torturers, it was necessary to
put them to death so theatrically and also why they lacked humanity and
thus worth.
NZD: Of course, there are many differences between the ideology and
practices of the Nazis and those of violent religious crowds in the six-
teenth century: among others, the technological and bureaucratic charac-
ter of Nazi extermination in the gas chambers is different from the mul-
tiple forms of destruction, assault, and murder carried out by Protestant
and Catholic rioters. But there are what you might call structural simi-
larities, forms of ritual and symbolic behavior, that seem to appear when-
ever we humans engage in extreme violence connected with deep issues
of boundaries and identity. The repetitive practices in the concentration
camps—the queues, the removal of all clothes, and the rest—are not just
bureaucratic routine; they have a ritual quality, dehumanizing the Jews
and the political enemies of Nazism and investing the murderers with
power. In the Nazi films, Jews are “rats”; in the Catholic tracts, Protestant
heretics are “vermin” (albeit “vermin” who can return to humanity by con-
version). In some places in Eastern Europe, the villagers executed their
Jewish neighbors themselves, accompanying them with rituals of humili-
ation, as Huguenots did to priests before killing them.
Right after I wrote this essay, I had the students read it in one of
my undergraduate classes at Berkeley. We had quite a debate in class—
Fashionings 65
and its theme is still a current one today, with all that’s going on around
al-Qaeda … I had wanted to propose an explanation for violence: not a
pardon or justification, but a social and cultural explanation for such ex-
treme forms of aggression. I did not want to attribute them to a demonic
force lying in human beings, and that was very important to me. I recall
that one of my students—she was Jewish like me—was very bitter about
the Nazi murders, for which she saw Zionism as the only solution. She an-
nounced, “The purely demonic acts in history, without any explanation.
There are evil people, people possessed.” For me the idea that the final
explanation for an event is absolute evil is unacceptable.
DC: This anecdote raises the question of knowing whether the demonic
can be reduced simply to irrationality and if irrationality can actually be
considered a causal factor in history, especially of reason unhinged by our
own desire for rationality …
NZD: Irrationality can be a way of finding an explanation, for example,
by having recourse to psychoanalysis. There is an explanatory role for the
irrational in history. But the affirmation of the demonic, the claim that
there are some people simply possessed by evil, constitutes for me a path
toward exclusion and genocide. It is too cruel to prejudge that there are
people so possessed. History is full of atrocious actions, but they are per-
petrated by people born (as Pico della Mirandola1 said five hundred years
ago) with the potentiality for good or for evil. The historian seeks either
some way to explain that choice or some way to narrate it.
DC: Finally, I would tend to think that the concept of evil shouldn’t be
invoked in history except with a great deal of prudence. Victims as well
as everyone else are caught up—involuntarily for the former, voluntarily
for the latter—in the sociocultural dynamics of panic, that history is quite
rightly a sad pursuit because of this terrible logic that requires, in certain
situations, that everything be overturned by the desire for exclusion. There
are moments that go beyond all normality because individuals suffer and
express their suffering of who they are and wish to be by slipping into
violence, by destroying everything that might increase their sense of help-
lessness and anguish or could be the cause of their suffering, for the time
being and in the immediate future. Sadly, evil forms part of a whole logic.
That’s why when I worked, after you, on sedition during the French Ref-
ormation, I underscored the importance of eschatology as a factor. There
66 Chapter 3
seemed to me to be a kind of cycle under way from the 1480s to the 1520s
in which the Last Judgment appeared extremely close at hand. Every Chris-
tian had to live in tense expectation of an event that would bring history
to an end, pursuing penitence and self-improvement with the feeling that
at any moment he could find himself face-to-face with God who would
excuse no fault, no sin, or any residue of doubt. This sense of guilt arose
and drew strength from preaching as well as the circulation of astrologi-
cal leaflets. Ira dei super nos.2 To a degree more or less conscious, a sense
of disquietude upset people’s imaginations and led Christians to doubt
themselves and their capacity to live up to the demands of a wrathful God.
Evangelical reform powerfully responded to this anguish by assuaging it.
I hypothesized that those persons who refused to become mired in this
sense of guilt found in Calvinism an outlet, an inner place free of anguish
because the return to evangelical purity was finally at hand after so many
centuries of darkness and neglect of the Truth, because the destruction of
papal Babylon was imminent. I further hypothesized that the individuals
who remained in the grips of this panic over the end times became even
more obsessed with it the more they saw those they called Lutherans as
false prophets of the Apocalypse whom God commanded them to chase
and destroy. Moreover, those who remained faithful to traditional reli-
gion became set on edge by the image of the eschatological monstrous-
ness of the “heretic,” so much that they hardly hesitated to eradicate and
annihilate them to appease a wrathful God, whereas those who joined
the evangelical faith aimed to bring down the Roman Church, to wipe out
all those tonsured heads, the priests. Each side sought confrontation as
the moment of God’s supreme test … Wasn’t there in this historical case
a demonstration of how history sometimes becomes caught up in an an-
tagonism’s very logic that arises out of a sense of anguish, the reduction
or assuagement of which is the motor force of history itself, a force all the
stronger because it encourages the very conditions for the total negation
of another person. Apparently not that violence should play a necessary
role because history is absolutely contingent, but rather to underscore
the emergence of a state of breaking norms, of transgression that might
convert horrible acts into expressions of liberation, to contend that after
a certain moment misfortune can loom up in history to animate people
like marionettes. In point of fact, misfortune is simultaneously a common
fear of history and a desire shared with history … Anyway, a “human” his-
tory—rather than a “humanist” one, a hackneyed term for sure—mustn’t it
Fashionings 67
tortured them. You show it very well: there’s a seductive quality about hor-
ror that must come into play in order to cut down an adversary and those
who share his faith. It’s for that reason that I thought about a “history of
misfortune”: these journeymen printers whom you saw in the 1550s and
1560s as Calvinists and who all truly shared a hope in the coming at last
of a godly kingdom on earth after a long period of blindness under the
Roman Church. Later we rediscover these same men, at least those who
didn’t choose the path of exile, in the 1580s and 1590s back in the bosom
of the church, just as if violence had succeeded in turning them away from
their dreams, to the point where they next fell prey to similar fantasies
such as the eschatology of the Catholic League.3 It’s quite striking to see
how history can be not only a great leveler of dreams, but also a form of
discourse that notes the irony of events and sets of beliefs.
NZD: This is true of all movements for historical transformation. You
can see this in connection with revolutions, and even in connection with
a simple change in government. One hopes for, even expects all kinds of
improvement, even on the morrow of an ordinary election … and then one
perceives how difficult it is to change the order of things. The moment of
hope, the happy sense of full possibility, lasts for about two hours. [laugh-
ter] But we must rejoice in those two hours, savor and remember the feel-
ing of possibility. The vision is never fulfilled; things never work out in the
grand manner; the future is full of difficulty and sometimes terrible con-
sequences and disappointments. But without the memory of the dream,
nothing hoped for would happen at all.
People respond to such disappointment in different ways—an iron-
ic stance, as you say, but there are other possibilities. I’ve often thought
it would be interesting for someone to make a systematic study of French
Protestants who abjured their faith and returned to Catholicism in the
last part of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. As far as I know,
this hasn’t been done. I wonder what one would find if one looked at pat-
terns of marriage, networks, friendships, and sensibilities; I should think
that the Protestant years would have left their mark. I’m not thinking so
much of Jansenism, which has been much discussed, but of what such
people may have brought to the various Catholic positions of the time.
Interesting studies have been made of Jews converted to Catholicism and
Protestantism in Europe, marriage patterns, associations, and the like.4
There’s been speculation about the extent to which earlier Jewish tradition
Fashionings 69
may have influenced some of these converts. Teresa of Avila,5 for example:
could there have been any influence from the Jewish past of her family on
her mystic sensibility? What’s been done for these Jewish converts—even
those who stayed within the Christian fold—could be done for the French
Protestants returning to the Mother Church.
DC: Some have tried to make this kind of analysis for the former members
of the Catholic League by examining how, in the early seventeenth century,
they reinvested their involvement with a sacrificial faith in the practice of
pious foundations. There again, it seems, the dominant impression would
be that of extremely varied and variable experiences that merge together
but can never be fully explained in isolation from each other.
NZD: That shows the care one must use in making generalizations.
DC: At the same time, there exists on both sides a desire not to remain
in a state of lifelessness, to not be erased away … To return to the Prot-
estants, there’s one character about whom you’ve written sublimely by
endowing him with such personal complexity. It’s Jean de Coras. I had
the impression that with Jean de Coras you had touched upon what con-
stitutes the core of Protestant subjectivity or the embrace of Protestant-
ism, in other words an approach to a crisis of identity, of the reality an
individual can give himself and others, during a precise time in which the
immediate aspects of one’s self-image disintegrate. Where is the reality
of the self? That’s the question that Jean de Coras, a convert to the new
thinking, seems to confront when staring at the Janus-faced man with two
potential identities, Arnaud du Tilh/Martin Guerre. A past, repudiated
identity and another stolen and assumed. Couldn’t you have gone further,
in the end, by asking if the Reformation offered a response to the desire
to cut free from one’s sense of self, a subjectivity yearning toward a dream
of escape? In your book on gifts, you explain very well how Calvin created
a destructive critique of the whole system of reciprocity upon which, in
society, identity operates but only insofar as it’s a social identity.
NZD: You ask me a complex question there. I don’t think the Reforma-
tion offered a response to the desire to be cut free from one’s sense of
self, but rather offered ways to change that sense and relieve the self from
endless anxiety and obligation. You’ll notice I’m using “self” and “sense
of self” here rather than “identity”: “identity” is a later word and when we
use it for the sixteenth century, I think we should confine it to external
70 Chapter 3
his or her pastors or preachers for guidance, but finally holds the doors of
the subjective self open only to God. We have two different models of the
boundaries of the self here, and in both religions, they would have different
implications for men and for women in the sixteenth century.
DC: Yet when all is said and done, if you were to offer an explanation for
the religious split in the sixteenth century, would you first see it in existen-
tial terms? Is self-fashioning, as you describe it, the need to fashion a sense
of self already in crisis, one that suggests or is open to suggesting in that
moment alternative paths with respect to the one earlier taken?
NZD: I would rather save the phrase “self-fashioning” for the social re-
lations people had, especially those associated with geographical or social
mobility, and use more collectively infused language to talk about religious
change and the negotiations concerning the soul. I suppose you can call a
conversion experience or joining the Jesuit or Ursuline orders a kind of self-
fashioning, but these changes are so guided by rules for performance that
it’s probably better not to put them all under the same rubric.
I’ve described a possible existential or psychological source for the
religious split and alternate solutions to a crisis of the self. Let me say a
word about the social side of the same story: at the heart of the split are the
privileged position of the Catholic clergy and the theology of merit, works,
and the possibility of perfect sanctification associated with it, including the
possibility of celibacy and the full control of sexuality. This is a world where
the socioemotional axis of clergy and laity is as important as the socioeco-
nomic one of noble and commoner, and where political power is tied up
in both sets of relations. Pressures built up across the clergy/laity axis, due
among other things to the exorbitant demands of the clergy for exclusive
obedience from the laity (perhaps connected with associated demands from
parents on their children—but that would have to be researched); extrava-
gant demands that some individual Christians placed on their bodies and
sentiments; and, of course, the aspirations of kings and other political au-
thorities. And the gulf opened between what the ecclesiastical authorities
were requiring be put into practice—say, in regard to the way charity was
expressed in Christian life—and what the faithful could see was being done.
At this juncture (and I return to the image of overdetermination, all these
pressures and perceptions at once), you have a real crisis of credibility. (The
credibility gap reminds me of what we saw in 1989, with the fall of the Com-
munist regimes, especially in the Soviet Union.)
72 Chapter 3
some language accompanying gift presentation and the quest for favor
hypocritical. But even more, he doesn’t want his conscience to be caught
in the unceasing obligations of gratitude and honor that come when one
receives a gift. “I’d rather buy a [royal] office than be given one, for buying
it, I just give money. In the other case, I give myself.” He’d rather be throt-
tled by a notary than by his own conscience. Though Montaigne himself
went right ahead in the world of gifting, he put his finger on a major
danger of his time.
DC: Yes. I find that, for historians, Montaigne is an extremely difficult
writer to decipher, even more than Erasmus.7 He’s in fact the most difficult
when writing about the history of subjectivity because his interior life was
so complex it could not be readily articulated in thought or words.
NZD: He’s an extraordinary figure.
DC: Because he goes right to the edge, to the crisis point of the con-
tradictory, often quite negative tensions that had been worked out and
reflected upon in the Christian West since the 1490s, first in Italy then
France, the Holy Roman Empire, and England. Montaigne succeeded in
“domesticating” these tensions through a sort of experimental method of
self-definition, even in the use of paradox or recourse to what resembles,
without truly being it, a mode of skepticism. He goes far beyond Calvin
and Rabelais in his invention of a conscious reflexivity, always in flux, al-
ways in search of its own displacement. Forming identity in the sixteenth
century was analogous to the process used in developing a photograph.
A person’s subjectivity needed some kind of fixing agent. Some found it in
the different religious faiths, while others strove to create their own per-
sonal systems of belief.
NZD: That’s what’s so prodigious about him: you think at one moment
that you’ve got completely hold of his thought, and then a minute later, as
you read on, he’s slipped away and turned the argument on its head. But
I think Rabelais is close to his achievement, while choosing another form
of fashioning, that is, the comic mode—also elusive but endlessly rich. Be-
tween the two of them, the reader is constantly led into new vistas.
DC: There are chameleons who certainly write different chronologies,
but who play with this sense of mobility, resorting to techniques where the
senses and subjects shift back and forth to better lose the reader in the
74 Chapter 3
labyrinth of their writing, who cast a spell over their imaginations, in order
to make a person better understand the need to avoid, no matter what,
the tyranny of firmly held beliefs.
NZD: I respect them as superb observers of their own times, differing in
some ways, alike in others. Whenever I have an idea about something hap-
pening in sixteenth-century France, or an interpretation of some event or
expression, I run it by Rabelais and Montaigne. Usually I find some sign of
what I’m looking for. If I get no whiff of it from them, I’ll rethink and re-
check what I’m doing—between them, they hardly miss a thing. Since I’m
interested in the history of women, I’ve also put Marguerite de Navarre
in that category of privileged witness to her times, not only as a woman
observer (albeit highly placed as the sister of King François I8), but also
as author of a genre in which you hear women and men in discussion.
In the Heptameron, each story is told by one of her well-born travelers,
caught as they are by floods in the Pyrénées. But then each tale is followed
by a conversation between the women and men about what they’ve just
heard. They’re not in agreement—including the women, who argue among
themselves even on such matters as unfaithful husbands. Such debates are
not found in Boccaccio’s Decameron9 or other earlier collections of tales;
Marguerite was the innovator here. She’s a terrific witness for the range of
attitudes in her day.
DC: This brings us back to the fact that, in the whole history of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, which is basically a long shift from unity
to division as well as the erection of confessional communities to which
men and women end up belonging for better or worse, the historian is al-
most led to the individual, to a model inherently biographical. From Mar-
tin Guerre to the lives of three Women on the Margin and Leo Africanus, the
individual is there. But is he only there as an animating device because it’s
easier, in terms of documentation, to recreate a unique experience? Or be-
cause, for you, it’s an ideal way to reconnoiter a society, its tensions, and
its dreams, to investigate those particular places where it’s most vivid and
establishes a sense of control?
NZD: I do savor the individual persons I write about, but I’m probably
more interested in the way the individual life is an opening toward the society
around him or her. Even while trying to make everything I’ve learned about
them work for my story, I never have the feeling that I’m writing a biography.
Fashionings 75
DC: Don’t you write what I would call reticent biographies in the sense
that you only look at your subject from a certain angle, rather than re-
search it in all its fullness and linearity?
NZD: I have enormous respect for the life of my subjects, but my inter-
est in them is always triggered by some prior question that I think I can
fathom better through their lives. In a “pure” biography, I believe there’s a
quest for exhaustiveness, with the stages of life itself the central narrative
thread. Even in my Women on the Margins, where I tried to find everything
about the women’s lives from birth to death, I was using the lives to il-
lustrate varieties of women’s experience and adventure. With Judge Jean
de Coras, I put what I discovered about him—his intellectual precocity,
his movement into the world of ennobled judges, his attraction to Protes-
tantism, and his affectionate relations with his wife—to work for matters
of identity: that is, the possibility of his drawing some resonance from
the imposture of the talented peasant Arnaud du Tilh and Arnaud’s inti-
macy with Bertrande de Rols for his own self-fashioning. As for al-Wazzān,
whom I’m writing about right now, any scrap I find about his life is pre-
cious, but it and the extensive manuscripts I have located are especially
being used to explore how a person moves between cultural worlds.
DC: But shouldn’t we turn the problem around? Wouldn’t “true” biogra-
phy disclaim to be totalizing, that it would instead strive to be abiographical
in the sense that it would eschew any linear or integrative goal?
NZD: I’m not one to pronounce on a single correct form for writing a
life. The classic biography itself ordinarily has an interpretive edge, and it
is surely better when it’s acknowledged. The main thing is to encourage a
range of writing about lives and to welcome new forms.
DC: Why then have you gone outside the French framework?
NZD: It was my work on the Amerindians of Québec, whom Marie de
l’Incarnation wanted to convert, and the African and Indian slaves of Su-
riname, whom Maria Sibylla Merian used as her helpers and informants
in her search for insects and plants, that set me off in this direction. At the
same time I was writing that book, I was reading scholars in postcolonial
countries, especially India. They were pointing out that the new national
histories being written there remained “European,” even though their cast
of characters were Indians and the narrative thread was the quest for and
76 Chapter 3
can no longer put our heads in the sand. Aren’t the multiple methods of
understanding identity from a historical standpoint that you call for a by-
product of this same Western historiography due to its inherently critical
stance? Wouldn’t this all in the end simply be a hermeneutical illusion?
NZD: Of course, Western historiography has changed in many direc-
tions, and I’m not in any sense speaking against the central rules of my
craft or its potential for continuing growth in research strategies and nar-
rative expressiveness. And, of course, non-Western scholars have learned
from our schools of historical scholarship, in some cases while receiving
their doctoral training in Europe or North America. Chakrabarty express-
es his gratitude to David Hume,13 Hegel,14 and Heidegger,15 along with
Marx. But some of the transformations in Western historiography have
come precisely through the experience of conquest and the histories of
colonized peoples, and from contact with non-Western traditions and
scholars from non-Western countries. The exchange of “tools to unlock
mysteries” is two-way.
DC: It’s always been cross-fertilized. Xenophon16 and Thucydides17 al-
ways exercised a powerful influence over Roman history, and this cross-
fertilization in Greco-Roman history has, in turn, influenced the writing of
history in the Renaissance …
NZD: Cultural mixture, intellectual métissage, has a long history behind
it. In recent decades, there was a period where this side of encounters be-
tween colonized people and the colonizers or between conquered peoples
and their conquerors was downplayed in favor of theories of incompre-
hensibility and opacity. One focused on violence and resistance, but not
exchange or crossovers. And yet violence itself is a form of communica-
tion. Ideas, objects, languages, customs get picked up, adapted, and trans-
formed, even in the most tragic of circumstances. The historian should be
attentive to relations of power and relations of exchange both.
Chakrabarty makes one critique of universal theories that I don’t
think is fruitful for cross-fertilization in historical practice. It has to do
with systems of proof in Western historiography: he challenges the uni-
versal application of “scientific” and “rational” methods of proof, and ar-
gues for the coexistence of “rational” and “magical” paths to proof. Now
as choice for personal life, let it happen; I’m not addressing that here. As
a path to establishing truth for, say, healers, from shamanic to psycho-
80 Chapter 3
Middle Passage through an old man talking in his sleep. After World War
II, the Afro-American poet Robert Hayden23 interspersed poems about the
Holocaust with those about the Middle Passage.
So here we have an important body of sources, including dreams
and dance, that can be explicated to understand the impact of slavery,
traces of the past, and expressions of sensibility. We use them as such.
DC: It’s what poets known as the grands rhétoriqueurs did at the end of
the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. They told a story by turning
it into a dream. For example, a funeral lament for the Constable de Bour-
bon24 became thus recast after his death before the walls of Rome for his
sister, the Duchess of Lorraine.25 As the story went, the chronicler, while
dozing in his bed (evidently, it’s a convenient fiction), dreamed that the
recently deceased constable came to him covered with luminous, brilliant
jewels. One dream arises out of another, since the chronicler’s own dream
enabled him to enter into the supposedly “real” dream about the life and
afterlife of the dead hero. Life returns and everything happens in such a
way that what the constable couldn’t express while alive now becomes
distinct the moment he ceased to exist. The Constable de Bourbon tells
the chronicler, in effect, that after his death he was led away by Mercury,
the symbol of reason and language, to hell. But this hell is not the hell
of Virgil26 or Dante27 but rather a succession of desolate places with hid-
eous old women who represent worldly sins, such as envy, avarice, and so
on. Charles III of Bourbon descends all the way to the cave of Pluto, king
of the underworld. It’s there that the literary strategy of the false dream
becomes interesting. In reality, Bourbon presents here his description of
François I’s court, a place of vice and passion. His dream is a huge allegory
about why he left the court and why he refused to remain obedient to his
king and instead joined the service of Charles V.28 He wanted to become
the man who refused to submit to passion, the pure man who resisted all
compromises in order to obey God. Next, after his journey to these dark,
dank, and noisy reaches ended, he came to the Island of the Fortunate in
the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where he was welcomed by the Famous
Lady who promoted him to become her lieutenant for all eternity. The
dream allowed the poet to make sense of a make-believe purity that would
have ruled the constable’s life, to almost make live again the truth of a
person’s inner self haunted by the search for an honor that derived from
the will to obey God, to accomplish his designs. But this inner self would
Fashionings 83
or clothing and the like led me to critical dissent. But here I was speaking
of the impact of a larger experience: that of being Jewish in a community
that was primarily Christian and with which I did not see eye-to-eye. This
kind of experience prepares the way for a different perception from that of
Foucault, who, except perhaps in his last work on sexuality in antiquity, fo-
cused so on the principle of domination that he lost sight in his writing—if
not in his actual life—of the facts of resistance, of a refusal ever to bend.
DC: In these acts of resistance, these refusals of the conscience, you
seem to distinguish two forms: first a theatrical one that is open, violent,
collective, and another made up of processes revolving around symbols,
which can go from a burning desire to write to adopting alienated yet
highly singular modes of behavior …
NZD: Yes, I make the distinction between outer social forms of resis-
tance and those that are interior or particular to the individual life. And
thinking of the interior life, I’d make the same suggestion about it as I
have about historical periods. Rather than always looking for the way
power and domination are reinscribed in the individual consciousness the
way Foucault does, I think we should look for subjective conflicts. Because
we certainly have subjective conflicts. [laughter] Rather than seeking the
overall unity in a life, we can see it as marked by interior conflict—some-
times unresolved until death. Surely that’s the drama in the lives of great
spiritual figures.
DC: They remain almost attached to the self. Even among those who ap-
pear to have realized a way of living that gives them the greatest stability,
the greatest assurance. Calvin would attest to it, for the reformer com-
pared himself to a vigilant sentinel watching to prevent the faithful from
succumbing to the repeated assaults of Satan, ceaselessly denouncing the
sins that could return in them, speaking and writing ferociously against
vice. Calvin thus lived a life of obsessive struggle, committed before God
never to bend, never to stop speaking out. Calvin was almost tragically
forced to surrender every moment of his life, from early morning to late at
night, to the apostolic mission he knew God had willed for him, to never
interrupt his watch. Calvin, who seemed intensely strong, exclusive, even
totalitarian—if I may use that anachronistic term—and who hid his im-
mense fragility, his anxiety that became all the more tragic because it con-
cerned not only his own salvation, but that of the new children of Israel
Fashionings 87
eure on the Rue d’Ulm is over the top—when we look at it today—in its en-
thusiasm for history. It’s history that will save the world from its difficulties,
horrors, and conflicts. And when he founded the Cahiers d’histoire mondiale in
1953, which seemed like the beginning of a new idea of history, the notion
that guides him is still that of humanity’s future reconciliation …
NZD: Whereas in 1940, following his military service, Bloch wrote Strange
Defeat (L’Étrange Défaite)—a work oriented toward practice and action, a re-
alistic analysis of why France had lost so easily to the Germans.
DC: While Febvre never literally spoke of defeat, he spoke about mis-
fortunes that were shattering and tragic. Wouldn’t he have assumed an
Erasmian stance in order to avoid talking about what really happened?
NZD: Erasmus himself wrote directly on political matters: think of his
writing on peace and the satire of his Praise of Folly. Febvre was certainly
very interested in current politics, but it is not centered in his writing,
even in his correspondence. In his book on Rabelais, Febvre praised the
prudence of the Erasmians of the 1550s, who knew how to be quiet when
necessary and, when possible, expressed critical ideas in ways that could
get by the censors. I think that’s what he thought he was doing during the
Occupation.
DC: At the same time, the Cahiers d’histoire mondiale became conceived as
a laboratory that could create the conditions for peace among the people
of the world, which thus elevated history into a discourse about peace …
NZD: In that sense Febvre was following an Erasmian hope, but he never
had Erasmus’s sense of humor.
DC: That’s why we must, in the end, read and re-read Febvre more than
one does today. You’ve shown the reasons why, in his case, we must avoid
the risks of overstatement. He can serve for us as a transition point insofar
as he was the sort of individual historian who assumes the identity of the
past he studies and writes about when, say, dealing with Erasmus or Ra-
belais, and because he confronted the demands of his own times by using
these historical figures as his models. He understood them so much better
because he leaned on them when analyzing them.
Fashionings 91
Notes
1. Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) was an Italian Renaissance philosopher best known for the
work referenced here, The Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486).
2. “God’s wrath is upon us.”
3. The Catholic Holy League was a major faction in the French Wars of Religion (1561–98)
formed by Duke Henry of Guise (1550–88) in 1576 to oppose the spread of Calvinism in France.
4. For example, Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (1990);
Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1700 (2001); and Deborah
Hertz, How Jews Became Germans (2007).
5. Teresa of Avila (1515–82), born into a Jewish converso family, was a prominent Spanish
mystic and reformer of the Carmelite Order. Author of the widely read autobiography, Libro de la
Vida, she was canonized as a saint in 1622.
6. Étienne de La Boétie (1530–63) was a French judge and political philosopher who wrote the
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude in the early 1550s, but it did not appear in print until 1576.
7. Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536) was born in the Netherlands and became the greatest
figure in Christian humanism in the sixteenth century, writing on religious reform and doctrine,
literature and language, moral conduct, peace and social welfare among other contributions.
8. François I (1494–1547) is considered France’s first Renaissance king. He patronized the arts,
initiated new building projects across the kingdom, and challenged the Hapsburgs for domination
in western Europe.
9. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) was an early Italian Renaissance humanist and writer whose
works include the Decameron, a collection of tales completed around 1353.
10. Dipesh Chakrabarty (1948–) is a historian, born in Bengal and now teaching in the United
States, who has made major contributions to the field of postcolonial studies. Subaltern theory
developed in the 1970s and focuses on the historical experiences and perceptions of persons who
are politically, culturally, and geographically outside the dominant power structures.
11. Molière was the stage name for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73). He was a French
playwright and actor best known for his satirical comedies performed in Paris and other French
cities and at the court of Louis XIV.
12. John L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru, eds., Edo and Paris: Urban Life and
the State in the Early Modern Era (1997).
13. David Hume (1711–76) was a Scottish philosopher and major figure in the Enlightenment
who expressed profound skepticism about the power of reason to provide knowledge about human
experience.
14. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a prominent German philosopher and
one of the creators of German Idealism who developed a comprehensive philosophical system
predicated on the notion of dialectical change.
15. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was an influential German philosopher known for
revisionist work on the question of being (ontology) and phenomenology.
16. Xenophon (430–354 bce) was a soldier and admirer of Socrates who composed histories of
his own time based on his personal experiences.
17. Thucydides (460–395 bce) was an Athenian general and pioneering historian who wrote
History of the Peloponnesian War.
18. Steven Shapin (1943–) is a historian and sociologist of science. His works include A Social
History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994) and The Scientific Life: A Moral
History of a Late Modern Vocation (2008).
19. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an anti-Semitic literary forgery that first appeared in
print in Russia in 1903 and purported to present a Jewish plan to take over the world.
20. Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was a learned Islamic scholar and jurist, whose most important
work was a world history entitled The Book of Examples. Its opening volume is the Muqaddimah
(known as the Prolegomenon in the West).
21. Toni Morrison (1931–) is a major American writer and professor who won the Nobel Prize
92 Chapter 3
in Literature in 1993. Her book Beloved was published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
22. George Lamming (1927–) is a novelist and poet from Barbados who has lived in England
and the United States. In the Castle of My Skin was the first of the seven books he wrote.
23. Robert Hayden (1913–80) was an American poet, essayist, and educator named Poet
Laureate by Congress in 1976. His poem “Middle Passage” was inspired by the events surrounding
the United States v. The Amistad affair in 1841. Among his most prominent poems on the Holocaust
is “From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes” (Poems 46).
24. Charles III, Duke of Bourbon (1490–1527), was appointed constable by King François I in
1515 but later defied the king by entering the service of his enemy, Emperor Charles V. See Denis
Crouzet, Charles de Bourbon, connétable de France (2003), and Vincent J. Pitt, The Man Who Sacked
Rome: Charles de Bourbon, Constable of France (1994).
25. His sister was actually Louise, Duchess of Montpensier (1482–1561).
26. Publius Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70–19 bce) was a classical Roman poet best known for
his works the Ecologues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid. Virgil describes hell in book 6 of the Aeneid.
27. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was an Italian poet of the Middle Ages known best for his
Divine Comedy, book 1 of which is the Inferno.
28. Charles V (1500–58) was the leader of the Hapsburg dynasty, ruling the Holy Roman
Empire from 1519 and the Spanish realms from 1516 until his abdication in 1556.
29. Michel Foucault (1926–84) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and historian known for
his critical studies of social institutions, such as hospitals and prisons, as forms of knowledge and
control, and the history of sexuality. His theory of the episteme is developed in Les mots et les choses
(1966), translated into English as The Order of Things: An Archaeolog y of the Human Sciences (1970).
30. Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) was trained as a physicist and became a leading historian of
science. His argument that science undergoes periodic revolutions or paradigm shifts is set forth
in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
31. Anatole de Monzie (1876–1947) was a French politician and scholar involved in education
reform. He served as minister of education from 1932 to 1938, and had a controversial role during
the Vichy government of the early 1940s.
32. Febvre and Monzie began work on the Encyclopédie française in 1932. It eventually appeared
in print in twenty volumes between 1935 and 1966.
33. An English translation appeared as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The
Religion of Rabelais (1985).
34. Lucie Varga (1904–41) was a historian and ethnographer. Born in Austria into a Jewish
family, she took refuge in France in the mid-1930s as anti-Semitism rose. She worked on the rise of
National Socialism in Germany and Austria, and was the first woman to be published in the journal
Annales. The full title of Febvre’s book is Autour de l’Heptaméron: Amour sacré, amour profane (1944).
Febvre’s wife was Suzanne Dognon, a former student he met as a young instructor in Strasbourg.
They married in 1921. See Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women and the World of the Annales,” History
Workshop Journal 33 (1992): 121–37.
Chapter 4
Memories
DC: You earlier emphasized that your familial, religious, and social ori-
gins have all shaped the course of your intellectual life, and you’ve said you
remain quite attached to all of them. Does your past explain for you why
you look at history in certain ways? Can you now reconstruct your fam-
ily tree, beyond what personal memories and what others have told you,
because I’ve read that secrets were hidden from you during your child-
hood? Your mother spoke Yiddish so you couldn’t understand her.
NZD: I come from a family of immigrants. I belong to the third, or in
one instance, the fourth generation. Mine is a typically North American
story. The grandparents and parents don’t speak of their past, or if they
do, it’s only among themselves, not to the next generation. Letters arrive
from Europe written in Cyrillic or Hebrew characters, which the children
couldn’t read … In my family, there was no tradition of telling stories about
their past in the old country or even about the first years of their arrival
in the United States. Today, when so many families are seeking roots, that
may no longer be the case. But for my own generation and that right after
mine, when the Holocaust complicated everything, one often had to seek
the family’s past or pasts by oneself.
DC: Wouldn’t the mystery of this past have directed you toward the
historical profession and have given you this method of questioning that
always seeks to unlock other enigmas?
NZD: My turn to history may have been partly due to the sense of being
deprived of a concrete past. My ancestors arrived in America in the nine-
teenth century, one branch in the middle of the century, the rest toward
the end. And because we were Jews, the history of America that I learned
93
94 Chapter 4
said to my aunt (who later laughed about it with me), “That girl reads too
much for her own good.”
So Mary Goldman married David Zemon, who went on to do very
well in business in Detroit. To start off, he had a small factory, manufac-
turing cloaks and suits. He was quite an admirer of Henry Ford, who was
starting his automobile manufacture at the same time—ironic when you
think of how anti-Semitic Ford later became. According to my father, what
led David Zemon to turn away from manufacture were the demands of his
workers—what a story for me, on the left! He sold his factory and went
into real estate, where he prospered—not a great fortune, but wealthy.
DC: Did they always live in Detroit?
NZD: Yes, they did. David Zemon was very active in the Jewish commu-
nity there. He was a pillar of his synagogue, Shaarey Zedek, a Conservative
synagogue. (You don’t have the same organization of Jewish congregations
in France as we do in the U.S. We have three—the Orthodox, the Conserva-
tive, and the Reformed.) He was a major figure in a Detroit organization
that you’ll recognize from its Christian variants: the Hebrew Free Loan,
which made loans without interest to Jewish immigrants to help them get
started. A Jewish Mons Pietatis.1 [laughter] He and my grandmother also
loved American technology. They were the first in their neighborhood to
have automobiles, he one with gas fuel, she an electric car. I even have an
electric machine that my grandmother used to make milk shakes, one of
the earliest manufactured.
That’s the family of my father, Julian Zemon. He went to the Uni-
versity of Michigan just after World War I. His sister, many years younger
than he, went there as well in the 1930s, the first woman in the family to
attend university. My father also wanted to go into the theatre: it was his
dream. He even went to Harvard for a year to study Shakespeare under
the great George Lyman Kittredge.2 I think he would have really loved to
become one of those Jews who wrote Broadway musicals, like his contem-
poraries Rodgers and Hart.3 He did write some songs—but perhaps he
didn’t have their talent …
DC: There was thus, prior to you and your passion for history, an aspi-
ration to write in your family. Do you feel any connection with him, espe-
cially because you’ve sometimes had a theatrical idea about reconstituting
the stories from the past that you’ve analyzed, for example with the letters
Memories 97
of pardon?
NZD: Yes, I do feel a connection. But let me comment further on his
dream: for him it was a Jewish dream. First there was Irving Berlin4 and
all his songs, and then George and Ira Gershwin.5 All these Jews who as-
similated to America through the world of music and theatre and also
contributed to the transformative ferment of those years.
DC: And in exalting and recasting the great American myths?
NZD: For sure. Just think of Porgy and Bess, which the Gershwins wrote
together with DuBose Heyward, and what it meant for the Afro-American
story and presence on the American stage.6 As for my father, he became
a businessman in the wholesale textile firm of my mother’s family, but
he always kept his attachment to the theatre as an avocation. He wrote,
directed, and acted in popular revues for the clubs he belonged to, like
the Rotary Club and his country club. During the Second World War, he
had a United Services Organization troupe, which performed his plays
and reviews for American soldiers still based in the States. I remember his
typewriter clacking away and his excitement about the performances. His
dream surely marked me.
DC: On several occasions, you’ve said you finally realized that cinema
was a tool, that it was a means of making history. As you’ve explained it,
does a trace of your father’s own aspirations resurface here?
NZD: Probably. When I was an undergraduate, my initial hope was to
make documentary films. I followed the path of becoming a university pro-
fessor, mostly because I married Chandler—but it’s also true that I tried
twice to become an apprentice with documentary film companies, once as
an undergraduate, and once just before I entered graduate school, and was
not accepted. And as far as I knew at the time—the late 1940s—there weren’t
good film schools. So it was years before I could return to that interest.
DC: And your mother?
NZD: I want to add a last detail on my father’s experience, since I think it’s
typical of his generation of American Jews born in the U.S. My father, like
his brother and my mother’s brother, was very good at tennis. They were all
champions. (I have good tennis genes, or at least I ought to have them; un-
fortunately, my game was just middling.) One of my family’s stories concerns
98 Chapter 4
NZD: Nathan was born in Navahrudak, but his father had been a rabbi
in Nesvizh and other relatives spoke of Minsk and Slutsk. These places are
very near each other, and not far from the Lithuanian birthplaces of the
Zemons and the Polish birthplaces of the Goldmans. Nathan Lamport
had been a Jewish wunderkind, a young genius rabbi in the old country,
and continued his sermons and even circumcising among the peddlers’
families in the New World. My mother said to me one day with some in-
dignation: “But there were never shoemakers in our family!” And I asked
myself, “What did she mean by that?” I think this must have been a kind
of adage, a way of saying we’re above the artisanal status—as there were
certainly shoemakers among the Jews. My mother must have heard this
said to her in Yiddish.
I’ve tried to learn about the family of my maternal grandmoth-
er, Ethel Herzog, who also came from Belarus. I heard nothing from my
mother, who perhaps knew very little—she was born in Burlington—or at
least she didn’t pass on to me what she knew. As for my grandmother, she
spoke English very poorly. Despite all those decades in the United States,
she preferred Yiddish, and then for some years (and I’ll come back to this),
she lived in Palestine.
When I visited Israel for the first time, in 1976, I met one of my Her-
zog cousins, Naftali Herzog, who was then quite elderly. Naftali showed
Chandler and me family photographs and told us something of the fam-
ily’s past. The pattern was typical of Jews in the Russian Empire: one
branch departed for Palestine, one branch stayed in Belarus, one branch
came to America. Naftali had taken the first path, studying engineering in
Berlin before going to Palestine. He told me about a nineteenth-century
ancestor celebrated in the family, Alexander Sender Herzog, a merchant of
peat from Nesvizh—“the tsar of peat,” Naftali called him—who was also a
fiery preacher. He carried both bricks of peat and Talmuds on his travels
and preached from his cart. Chandler wrote a lovely poem after that about
my roots, my mixed origins: he contrasted me with Alexander Sender Her-
zog, “a giant with an archangelic beard, / selling his Talmuds from his
horse-drawn cart. / A mitzvah. You’ve harked back and deeply known / his
old faith. But you know it more than are it. / It kindlier shines through
your eyes than his own.”
DC: Did you pursue this research into the question of origins because
you were a historian, because you didn’t want to lose the history of your
100 Chapter 4
ancestors, because you knew better than anyone else the French women
and men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Or was it because you
felt a more personal need, for yourself, to rediscover these traces of lives
far removed, quite different and distant from your own, but by the light
of which you hoped to try to understand or appreciate a piece of yourself,
about why you made your choices, your refusals, and your commitments?
NZD: It was a combination of personal and historical curiosity, aroused
in me rather late in life. When I find a crossover between the Ojibwe of
Michigan with which my ancestor had dealings and the Algonquins of
Marie de l’Incarnation, I’m tickled pink, as I mentioned. Sometimes it’s
just interesting for a historian to see how families work, that is, to see
how my relatives express patterns found among Ashkenazic Jews.8 For in-
stance, my cousin from Belarus is Naftali, I’m Natalie from Detroit, both
of us linked to some deceased Nathan.
But to get back to my mother’s family—the Lamports installed
themselves in Burlington. My grandparents Moses and Ethel had eight
children, five boys and three girls, some born in Belarus, some in Vermont.
My mother, Helen, was the youngest, born in 1904. The five sons all went
to university; the three daughters, all very intelligent, did not. My grand-
mother thought her daughters should help with the family business, to
which she herself was very committed. A little like Glikl Hamel, [laughter]
but unfortunately, she didn’t leave any memoirs the way Glikl did.
DC: It is exactly what I would ask you: weren’t there written biographical
testimonials that helped you in your investigation?
NZD: No, everything passed by oral transmission, and between her and
her children, the language was Yiddish. Of the three daughters, my aunt
Anna was the most learned in Jewish matters; she was a businesswoman,
and when she wasn’t at the family store, she was at the synagogue, and
when she wasn’t at the synagogue, she was at a Zionist meeting. And she
was managing her Jewish household as well. If I had role models for female
activity in the world when I was growing up, they were my aunt Gertrude
Zemon, who went to the University of Michigan in the 1930s, and my
aunt Anna, who was so politically engaged: she even took her children to
visit Palestine in the ’30s. Though my politics went in a different direction
from hers, including in regard to Zionism, her activity impressed me.
DC: Can you say some words about your maternal grandmother?
Memories 101
especially supplied the Detroit auto industry. My parents did not live in
the Jewish neighborhoods in Detroit. They had a very strong sentiment of
being Jews, to be sure, but they decided to move to a newer part of town.
Very few Jews were in my grade school in the 1930s, and it was the same at
my high school in the early 1940s. A source for my sense of difference! For
high school, my parents decided to send me to Kingswood School, Cran-
brook, a private school on the outskirts of the city, where most of the girls
came from wealthy families. The buildings and grounds were beautiful—
the school had been designed by the great Finnish architect Saarinen9—
and the teaching was really excellent. I loved my courses in literature and
Latin and history, and I still remember all my teachers and classes. I espe-
cially recall Miss Manchester, who taught European history and who was
rather conservative in her politics. She had a different take from mine on
the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but that didn’t matter to
me. Her argumentative style appealed to me. I was completely fascinated
with history.
DC: Were there history books in your house? Did you read history be-
fore receiving this training?
NZD: Our house was full of books, but not many, if any, history books.
My father owned lots of theatre books, Shakespeare and Ibsen and many
more, and interesting novels. I remember seeing James Joyce’s Ulysses in a
beautiful edition on our library shelf, published sometime after the pro-
hibition of the book had been lifted in the U.S.10 I held it in my hands
because the binding was so special, but I was much too young to read it.
As for my mother, she especially read women’s magazines and the Reader’s
Digest, which I sometimes read myself as a girl.11
DC: I’m struck by how much the move to the New World seems to be ac-
companied by a sort of break with history, and how, to the contrary, your
own commitment as a historian has consisted of trying to return to the past,
to find again the lost threads of history, the threads that reconnect you,
however indirectly, with your grandparents and great-grandparents …
NZD: That break was true in many families. I recall only one relative
actually recounting to me something of her past life while I was growing
up: a relative of my grandfather Zemon, whom he helped bring over with
her husband from Bialystok as the dangerous years began: she told me
with considerable pride of her years of study at the Lyceum in Bialystok.
Memories 103
She really thought it better than anything her son was getting in America.
Still, my desire to connect with the past began first with my search for a
cultural and political path with which I could identify—already in high
school—and the quest for family links came only years later.
DC: After the war, when the horrors of the Nazi extermination camps
became known, did anyone in your family talk about it or, even at that
time, was there silence?
NZD: I was in my last year of high school when the first news and pictures
of the concentration camps appeared, and I recall discussing it in my cur-
rent events class at Kingswood. It’s odd that I have no memory of discuss-
ing it within my family. There was certainly talk of the dangers of Hitler in
the preceding years. I wrote a poem for my Sunday School—“Fellow Jews in
foreign lands / whose lives are in a monster’s hands,” it began—and I recall
that my family was proud of me for that. I certainly read the newspapers
that came into my house, so I had access to news if not dinner-table discus-
sion about it. I left for Smith College in September 1945, and most of my
political discussion, which was very extensive, took place there.
DC: Why do you think there was so little discussion of the Holocaust
within your family?
NZD: During the war itself, they may have wanted to protect my brother
and me from frightening news. Earlier, in connection with the outbreak of
the war in Europe, I remember seeing a huge headline in The Detroit News
and running screaming “war” to my mother, who then tried to calm me
down. I certainly was afraid that Hitler was going to come and get us Jews
in the United States, but I don’t think I ever told my parents about this fear.
This lack of discussion may go back to the habit I mentioned from the ear-
lier generation—about not describing troubles in the old country, because
now we were living in a “land of hope.” And then, there was discussion of
Palestine and Zionism, especially when my aunt Anna was around.
Oddly enough, my daughter Hannah told me not long ago that I
hardly ever discussed the Holocaust with her when she was growing up,
that I would simply bite my lip and look troubled. It was very difficult
to believe this when she told me, as Nazism and the murder of Jews and
millions of others in Europe were ever on my mind, there were books on
the subject all over our house, and we talked about politics all the time.
But she may well be right: Chandler and I took the burdens of the past
104 Chapter 4
on ourselves when the children were young, and wanted them to see other
possibilities in the future.
DC: However, you’ve said it, there were letters from members of the
family who remained in Eastern Europe … Did you ever find out what hap-
pened to them?
NZD: Of the letters my grandfather Zemon received, only one came into
our hands and that one only much later, in the 1970s. It was written by his
niece in 1916, in response to the postcards sent to his mother, brother, and
sisters during World War I trying to find out where they were. His brother,
Moses Ziman, went to Palestine in the 1920s; but these sisters and their
children, living then in Petrograd and Vilnius and Minsk, may have all been
lost in the Holocaust if not before. Grandpa Zemon himself died in 1943,
and our link to his European relatives was gone. His brother once wrote my
father from Palestine and reproached him for not knowing Hebrew (now
that I’ve learned that Moses was a founder of the Hebrew Lyceum in Bialys-
tok, I can see why he was so shocked by his American nephew).
These are not the only kinds of secrets kept from the young in my
family. There was one Lamport who did not immigrate to Vermont with
his various cousins, but stayed in Belarus in the late nineteenth century.
His son Leo Lamport came to New York with his young wife sometime in
the 1920s and then in 1934 decided to go back to the Soviet Union “to
build socialism.” He stayed there all through the Stalin years, living as a
journalist and especially as a translator into English of Russian books on
Marxist philosophy and socialism and equality and the like. His name was
never mentioned in the Lamport family, never. To paraphrase my moth-
er’s exclamation, “We’ve never had Marxists in our family.” [laughter] We
learned of him only from an article that appeared in the New York Times
in the 1980s: his son, who had been taken over to the Soviet Union when
he was only four, appealed to Ronald Reagan to be readmitted into the
United States. By then Leo was dead. I wish my family had told me about
him: Chandler and I could have looked him up when I attended the Inter-
national Congress of Historical Sciences in Moscow in 1970. Of course, he
might have been fearful of meeting with us as foreigners.
These questions of family secrets are fascinating. Some families
tell all, others keep secrets. This is a great subject for historians to look at
in the past.
Memories 105
DC: Finally, you have unearthed several bits and pieces of this family
memory that operated in secret. There again, we often have the feeling
that, in your books, when you take on a subject and gradually lift the veil,
however thick, that covers it, you avenge all these silences, all these things
forgotten. Isn’t history, for you, a form of compensation for the wordless
history of this family that you so love, but with which you’ve never spoken,
which remains mute, which can’t respond to your desire to learn its story?
Haven’t you ever been inclined, as a result, to adopt a strategy that aims
to make the people of the past speak despite themselves, even in spite of
the mysteries found in the records they’ve left? Does your predilection for
popular culture, for victims, the excluded and silent people, find its im-
pulse in the unease created by this protective, reassuring culture of what’s
left unsaid, the culture of your parents and grandparents? For example, in
your analysis of letters of pardon, there’s speech on the one hand, in all its
rawness, its repetitions, and then, on the other hand, beneath its simple
literalness, you focus on the almost-hidden message of the speech, what’s
left unsaid and all that which recovers social and gestural codes.
NZD: Possibly there’s a compensatory mechanism at work here, though
I’ve never felt it in that way. My interest in working people, in people
outside of the usually defined centers of power, was connected with my
youthful politics, and that was certainly reinforced during the Red hunt.
My experience of being part of what was then an out-group, of a Jewish
immigrant family, may have played some role. Their stories, if they were to
be told at all, would not be told by the standard political history, but only
by a new social history. Perhaps, too, it’s relevant that I no longer believed
in a supernatural God by the time I was in university: these unmarked
lives were not going to get their recognition in another world. Only histo-
ry and memory were there to try to give them their due. I had the sense—
and still have it very intensely—that these lives counted for something,
that they made a difference. 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. I wouldn’t want to draw on an exclusive maternal image
here, because this is something men might and do feel as well—but at the
time I started writing the way I did, it may have been professionally easier
for a woman historian to embark upon some of these quests.
On the matter of family secrecy itself, I’d add one thing. When I
began working on French family account-book/journals—what were called
106 Chapter 4
livres de raison—and memoirs, and later when I was concerned with the au-
tobiographies of Glikl and Marie de l’Incarnation, I noticed that they con-
tained omissions, that is, topics that you’d expect them to elaborate upon or
events that I knew had happened from independent evidence, but were not
treated in these texts. And these journals and memoirs were usually written
first and foremost for children, to pass on the family’s past or the parent’s
life and wisdom, whatever other audience they might have expected.
Reading these texts led me to thinking about the matter of se-
crecy, and I used it as an organizing concept in the essay I wrote about
the autobiography of Leon of Modena, the rabbi of Venice, whom I men-
tioned earlier: “Fame and Secrecy” was my title. The “fame” part was
connected with what he was happy to broadcast to the world, Jews and
Gentiles alike: all the books he’d written, all the people who wanted to
meet him or sought his opinion, the crowds that flocked to his sermons,
including even Christians. The “secrecy” part was double: what he wanted
to withhold from Christians and what he wanted to withhold from Jews,
including those close to him. His Hebrew autobiography, written for his
male descendants and his Jewish pupils in the ghetto of Venice, is full
of lively quarrels, complaints, and troubles—including the dire economic
predicaments brought on by his own gambling habits. When he came to
describe the Jewish world to Christians in his Italian Rites and Customs of
the Jews, this living world is cleaned up in favor of liturgy, orderly laws, and
charitable practices.12 Games of chance aren’t mentioned even in connec-
tion with the few holidays, like Hanukkah, when they were licit and even
part of the festivity. These were Jewish secrets. But there were also secrets
that Leon did not want to pass on to progeny or pupils, especially one con-
cerning his son who was in some kind of liaison, presumably homoerotic,
with two different men. Here there is only an allusive reference and the
exclamation, “miseries of my heart.”
I’ve been using this idea of secrecy in examining other texts, in-
cluding right now in connection with slave narratives—who says what to
whom? I always thought that my notion of secrets in my own family came
from applying my historian’s insights into my family past, but maybe it
was the other way around.
DC: The more I listen to you, the more I’m struck by the fact that we
cannot detach—as becomes evident for many historians the moment they
write their own biographies—this familial past from your work, or rather
Memories 107
Notes
1. A Mons Pietatis is a Catholic charitable institution going back to medieval times that lends
money at little or no interest at all.
2. George Lyman Kittredge (1860–1941) was an American scholar of English literature and an
influential literary critic in the early twentieth century.
3. Richard Rodgers (1902–79) and Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) were prominent American songwrit-
ers who composed twenty-five stage musicals and over five hundred songs between 1919 and 1943.
4. Irving Berlin (1888–1989) was a prolific and popular American composer and lyricist who
wrote an estimated 1,500 songs during his long career.
5. George Gershwin (1898–1937) was an American composer and pianist and Ira Gershwin
(1896–1983), his brother, was a lyricist. Together they created music for dozens of Broadway shows
and films, as well as for ensemble performance across the genres of jazz, classical, and popular
music.
6. Porg y and Bess premiered on Broadway in New York in 1935. DuBose Heyward (1885–1940)
wrote the libretto.
7. The Order of Knights of Pythias is an international, nonsectarian fraternal order
established first in Washington, DC, in 1864.
8. Ashkenazic Jews are those Jews living in central and eastern Europe and Russia. Their language
of communication was Yiddish, and they developed distinctive liturgical and festive customs.
9. Eero Saarinen (1910–61) was a Finnish-American architect and product designer who
stressed the principles of simplicity and functionality.
10. James Joyce (1882–1941) was an influential Irish writer and poet known for his experimental
works, particularly the landmark modernist novel Ulysses (1922). Banned in the United States as
obscene, it could not be published there until 1933.
11. Reader’s Digest is a monthly general-interest family magazine founded in 1922.
12. The book appeared in Paris in 1637 as Historia de gli riti hebraici and in Venice in 1638 as
Historia de’ riti hebraici.
13. The bimah is the platform from which the Torah is read and prayers are led during services.
Chapter 5
Women
DC: This image of your mother will serve for us, however brusquely but
not altogether illogically, as a transition point. When did you begin to be-
come interested in women’s history?
NZD: Later in my career. Let me explain. When I was a student at Smith,
I took marvelous courses in the Renaissance and Reformation and the
English and French Revolutions. My professor, Leona Gabel, was a wom-
an, like most of my Smith professors, but we did not talk about women
in the courses. Maybe some of the Sforza women were mentioned when
she lectured on the Italian Renaissance, but I have no memory of it.1 Mary
Ritter Beard’s Woman as a Force in History was published while I was an un-
dergraduate, a pioneering work, and if I had read it then (and I don’t recall
that I did), I would have thought “My, that’s interesting.”2 But I would not
have been disposed to follow up that subject ahead of my senior thesis on
the radical Renaissance philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi.3
What was essential for me at that time was that I had a woman as
a professor—not a scholarly topic or fancy methodology about women. I
was at a women’s college where women were taken seriously as students;
I had exceptional women as teachers; I could see the possibility of being a
historian, of having a career.
Then while I was doing my doctoral studies at the University of
Michigan, I took a seminar with a professor, Palmer Throop, toward whom
I feel considerable gratitude—indeed, I feel it more now than I did at the
time.4 Professor Throop had a sociological vision of history and he had
us read Baldassar Castiglione’s Courtier side by side with Theodore New-
comb’s brand new text, Experimental Social Psychology.5 It was very fruit-
ful, very avant-garde for a Renaissance history seminar in 1951. Throop
109
110 Chapter 5
was linked to major issues of culture, social structure, and historical change.
In the next few years, I started writing essays in the history of women, and
Jill and I decided to teach a course together.
The first essay I wrote was on the Protestant women of Lyon in the
sixteenth century. I had already written on the attraction of Protestantism
to men in Lyon, especially in the printing industry and other artisanal
trades. I asked myself, “Why not do the same thing for women?” I already
had information on the wives of the Protestant men in all occupations
in Lyon and on some well-known women. I went back to the archives to
find women’s wills and other evidence—and rapidly made the same dis-
covery that I had years before when people had claimed one couldn’t find
anything about the lives of working people in the archives: that wasn’t
true at all, there was loads of material on women if you looked widely. In
fact, I loved the challenge of finding sources and I loved seeing where the
women’s story paralleled or differed from that of the men.
The other essay I wrote in those first years concerned women as
historical writers in late medieval and early modern Europe. Hardly any-
thing was then known on this subject; scholars thought of women as po-
ets and writers of romances and novels, but as unlikely producers of his-
tory books. And women faced many obstacles: they were not thought to
have an appropriate voice for the grand themes of history, they couldn’t
get ready access to the kinds of documents available to men of the law
or diplomats who wrote historical accounts, and so on. So how did the
women manage to write history, I wondered. It turned out that Christine
de Pizan herself had been commissioned in 1404 to write a history of the
life of King Charles V, whom her father had known from his days at court
and whose former servants she could still interview. She scoured chroni-
cles about his deeds just as she did for women for her City of Ladies, which
she wrote not long after. Then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries, you find examples of women writing histories of their husbands and
families—a seemly topic for a good wife—but because they were married
to major political actors, the histories widen out readily into histories of
the events of their own time. The Protestant Charlotte Arbaleste9 accom-
plished this in her life of her husband Philippe du Plessis-Mornay,10 one of
the most important figures of the French religious wars and a close associ-
ate of Henri IV.11 And Margaret Lucas did the same in the Life of her hus-
band William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, who was a Royalist general
in the English Civil War.12 By the eighteenth century, Catharine Sawbridge
Women 113
of women, one of the earliest in North America: I did the first half on early
modern Europe and she continued with women in colonial America and
the United States. We called the course Society and the Sexes and I kept the
title in later years, when I taught the early modern section of the course on
my own, first at Berkeley, then at Princeton.
DC: In your career as a teacher and researcher, weren’t these years of
extreme intensity also the most important years?
NZD: I don’t know that they were the most important years—working on
Martin Guerre, film and book, was another turning point for me—but it
was an amazing time. Oh, the excitement around the history of women—at
Toronto, at Berkeley, in New York, across North America. We were all rush-
ing around to find primary sources. I fished out all my notes on Christine de
Pizan and opened my course with the City of Ladies. There was not a paper-
back of the book then, so I made copies for my students from the Renais-
sance English translation. I haunted rare book rooms, including medical
rare book libraries, legal collections, and collections of religious books and
sermons. I developed a bibliography of primary and secondary sources
on women in western Europe—especially in France and England—mim-
eographed it, and sent it by mail to anyone who asked for it. We also cir-
culated our course syllabus for Society and the Sexes. I was able to assign
Glikl’s Autobiography from the beginning, because it did exist in English
translation, and I helped get word of her to many others beyond the Yid-
dish specialists to whom she was then known.15 Other people were doing
similar searching for their fields and were spreading word of their discov-
eries. I’ll never forget the meeting of the second Berkshire Conference on
the History of Women held at Radcliffe in 1974: a few hundred people
were expected, well over a thousand attended, women and men as well.16
DC: Female students must have certainly been quite attracted to your
course at Berkeley, but what about male students?
NZD: There were always some men who took the courses, but they were
a minority—although a very smart and imaginative minority. Still we al-
ways regretted that there weren’t more men, because from the beginning,
Jill and I and younger colleagues like Joan Scott17 and Louise Tilly saw the
history of women as a history of relations between men and women and
the social and economic significance of these relations; a history of what
it was to be a man as well as of what it was to be a women—these can’t be
Women 115
NZD: Empirical certainly, but important also for advancing our un-
derstanding of historical structures and historical change. For example,
nowadays it is no longer possible to understand the establishment of
sovereign power during the early modern period in Europe without tak-
ing into consideration royal policy toward families and the attitude of
families toward the state; without noting the diverse roles of women in
the political sphere, from grain rioters to queens; and without examin-
ing the implications of gender symbolism and prescriptions in the law,
political writings, and public festivities. It is no longer possible to analyze
economic transformations in the early modern period without looking at
the different positions women had in the production, distribution, and
consumption of objects and services, and the ways in which women were
represented in the debates and policies concerning luxury and poverty. As
for the religious transformations of the early modern period, including
the religious aspects of European expansion, the role of women and the
importance of the issues of sexuality, gender definitions, and marriage
have been demonstrated in many studies.
DC: If we were to characterize your position, could we say that the his-
tory of women definitely has its own dialectic, its own particular way to
ask questions, its own claims to disciplinary autonomy, even though at the
same time it shouldn’t be seen in isolation, that it should instead be fully
considered a way to understand the whole of history better, an analytical
tool just as useful as labor history or cultural history? That doesn’t mean
we need to declare that gender history has a political aspect that pits mod-
erates against radicals. But, to put it more concisely, haven’t you conceived
of it, beyond its obvious ties with personal experiences and family memo-
ries, as a tool that always opens up more room to pursue this pleasure or
this feeling about the mysteries of the past that we touched upon at the
beginning of our conversation? Perhaps it’s even a means of conducting a
form of self-analysis that otherwise you wouldn’t dare to broach?
NZD: “Disciplinary autonomy” would be too strong a term for me. I
don’t think of the history of women and gender as a separate discipline
any more than I do the history of the Jews or the history of Christianity
or peasant history or urban history. These subjects are all part of the his-
torian’s inquiry (which, to me, can draw on several disciplines). But yes,
there are a distinctive set of questions, perspectives, and modes of analysis
that one draws upon while concentrating on women and gender. And yes,
Women 117
these must always be linked to other features of the historical landscape and
period, both to describe them better—and I’ve just given you some examples
of that—and to be enriched and renewed by them. It’s a two-way process:
the history of women contributes to history more generally, and questions
generated elsewhere should modify the formulations regarding sameness
and difference that overdetermine too much of women’s history.
As for your second question, I don’t see my inquiries about wom-
en and gender relations in the past as a form of self-analysis. Insights from
the past can always turn out to have relevance to our own persons, but I
experience this study as an expansion beyond myself, sometimes having a
familiar ring, but often going beyond anything I’ve ever known or suspect-
ed. And I’ve found the study of gender a great enhancement of pleasure,
as you suggest: the persons I’ve learned about, the books I’ve been led
to, the conversations with students—just fascinating over the years. Right
now I’m on the trail of two slave women in eighteenth-century Suriname,
trying desperately to understand them, to find a way to catch their voices
and hopes …
DC: The women you’ve studied are women who have found a certain mea-
sure of happiness in their lives, even if they knew, like Maria Sibylla Merian,
that catastrophes lay on the horizon. But they created a relative kind of hap-
piness in what might be called symbolic strategies—strategies involved in
their writings, in their work, in their religious activism, in their collections of
insect drawings, and so on. A sense of happiness or rather equilibrium that
differs from men’s and accepted social mores. It’s a very optimistic history,
which suits you well, I believe, because a woman sees you recognize in her a
capacity to circumvent the selfish world of politically dominant men, to cast
off their supposed fragility. In that way, history as you write it is never taken
in a single sense or as immediately obvious. But don’t you believe that this
optimism can lead you astray?
NZD: I’d much prefer to use the word “fulfillment” or “satisfaction” for
the women I write about rather than “happiness,” and for myself “a history
of hope” rather than “optimistic history.” I have always shied away from
constructing women as mere victims or as remarkable heroines—though
sometimes a life is marked by intense suffering or admirable courage. The
people I research and write about, women and men both, more often fol-
low a middle path of trying to cope, of trying to manage somehow in dif-
ficult situations that come along. I’m struck by their ingenuity, the craft by
118 Chapter 5
to truth. Can’t the historian dream, if only for a brief while, of intermixing,
reintroducing, and reshaping some part of this strangeness of the past and
those who live in it? Isn’t the past always prologue to the future, with infinite
possibilities that all virtually coexist until one of them finally takes shape in
the historian’s mind, giving us at least the illusion that the historian can pen-
etrate individual as well as collective imaginations from the past?
NZD: Yes and no. The historian seeks to find and communicate the
strangeness and the familiar in the past. In doing so, she may end up with
a new understanding of the strange and the familiar both. For me, “sub-
jectivity” isn’t just a philosophical question—though the history of that
term, currently being explored by Lorraine Daston26 and Peter Galison,27
is very interesting—subjectivity is also a daily practice. I want to push my
research as far as I can in order to discover and understand the mental and
affective worlds of persons and communities of the past. In approaching
the traces and texts that they’ve left me, I’m simultaneously helped and
constrained by my own subjectivity and abilities. I want to hold on to that
tension. The historian’s work finally goes on in her head, but I want to
always remember the existence outside of me of those traces from people
of the past. I want to be a storyteller, not a cannibal.
DC: If you were to define present prospects for the history of women,
which would you consider the most important?
NZD: Thinking now of the United States and Canada, I would want
to distinguish between undergraduate programs and advanced research
and graduate teaching. On the undergraduate level, there is a continuing
need for the classic introductory history-of-women courses, enriched by
comparative material drawn from non-Western countries and other new
materials. In our big cities, many of our students have been born into im-
migrant families or have themselves been born abroad. Most of them have
attended high schools where themes on the history of women have a scant
place in the curriculum. For women undergraduates, these courses are
really important. The students attend them in large numbers; they enjoy
them and get perspectives helpful for other courses and their own lives.
For advanced research and graduate teaching, I think it’s important
to prevent ghettoization. When we started programs or departments in the
history of women and gender, the idea always was that they would have po-
rous boundaries and be in close dialogue with different disciplines. When
Women 123
that’s not present, there’s the danger of recycling the same set of questions
and theories, and getting predictable answers. The study of gender groups
routinely opens with locating the women and locating the men and asking
about likeness and difference. Superb books have emerged from this ap-
proach, some of them models for the comparative study of other groups
(like ethnicities) as well. But new directions are opened when the gender
axis, the axis male/female, is not the central issue at the beginning: you start
with an important issue of another kind and gender can show up in a fresh
way, along with other findings.
I urge my own students interested in women in history to vary
their themes, sometimes focusing around a gender question, other times
on something quite different—but keeping their eyes open for places where
male/female matters enter into the story. And I’ve certainly found this in
my own work. I centered Women on the Margins around gender, and hoped
it would also be useful in thinking about margins more generally. With
Pardon Tales and The Gift, I started with another theme, and was delighted
by the moments when contrasts between the practices or sensibilities of
sixteenth-century men and women suddenly emerged.
DC: But hasn’t there been a movement among historians of women,
especially in North America, to ask new kinds of questions?
NZD: Of the first generation of historians of women in North America,
some of them have redirected their interest toward the history of the colo-
nies, postcolonial studies, the history of ethnicities and immigration. The
more classic histories of women have been sustained, both by younger
scholars and by some of the pioneers as well. But some of the most inter-
esting insights into questions of power and difference have emerged from
postcolonial studies.
DC: And slavery?
NZD: Slavery has been one of the most important areas of scholarship
in the last twenty years, and matters of gender and sexuality have been cast
in a new light in that context. And while we’re talking of the recentering
of historical inquiry, we should not forget all the writing on the history
of sexuality, especially gay and lesbian sexuality—by now, I should say the
history of sexualities. In North America, one talks of “queer theory.” Is
this discussed in France?
124 Chapter 5
DC: Yes, but they haven’t met with the same startling enthusiasm that
greeted them in the United States, or at least not yet. Whether that’s a
good or a bad thing, I won’t say.
NZD: Queer theory takes French post-structuralism and deconstruction
as important ancestors, so it should have French echoes! Queer theory
goes well beyond earlier approaches to the history of sexuality, in which
sexual practices and identities were thought of as partly constructed over
time and related to different historical milieux. The main debates in the
1970s and 1980s concerned the amount of construction: how much input
was there from biology? Was there an identifiable current of, say, homo-
erotic culture in the West from antiquity on? But whatever the fluidity in
sexual practices and identities, the binary of heterosexuality/homosexual-
ity was the main frame.
Queer theory effaces that binary. It argues for no “natural” or bio-
logically determined sexuality. One’s DNA has no necessary consequences
for one’s identity or one’s sexual preference or practices. I’m not sure how
psychoanalytic theory plays into queer theory, but you can see that it ar-
gues for particularity and particular choices. To me, it seems a reaction in
gay studies to the kind of routine repeating of questions and approaches
that I mentioned as a danger in the history of women and gender. In that
sense, queer theory has cleared the air and challenged historiographical
categories, and it has prompted some interesting writing in philosophical
and literary criticism. But it’s hard to see how its radical and individualist
particularity can be a practical guide to historians, who really do need to
look at the play of culture and social experience in defining possibilities
in a particular period. And some recent work by geneticists and specialists
on infant physiology is showing a whole new way to think of the nature/
nurture binary—much more porousness and interchange between genetic
codes and life experience than believed before.
DC: I would like to ask you the following question: In France, despite
the big projects to which you’ve contributed, such as the Histoire des
femmes, directed by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, there doesn’t ex-
ist as strong a commitment to the history of women, perhaps because of
certain methodological shortcomings.28 Take, for example, the awkward
translation of “gender” as genre. There have been noteworthy works for
sure, but—perhaps because French university life has been and remains
more or less secretly misogynistic—there still hasn’t been a truly original
Women 125
work, properly speaking, for the early modern period. We could cite Éliane
Viennot’s book, but it remains very much a classic in the sense you spoke
of earlier, because it treated Queen Margot…
NZD: A very good book!
DC: Certainly, but it’s worth pointing out that it’s a work of a historian
of literature. Tell me precisely what you see it contributes, if anything, in
terms of methodology.
NZD: Methodological shortcomings of the history of women? I don’t
think that’s the issue in France, for there are, as I’ve just tried to suggest,
several ways in which the history of women and gender can be practiced.
I think it has more to do with the different settings in the two countries.
In France, the first wave of feminist criticism after World War II was domi-
nated by literary and philosophical thinkers—Simone de Beauvoir29 first,
then Luce Irigary30 and Hélène Cixous31 (Julia Kristeva32 in the next gen-
eration). Beauvoir had a historical chapter in her Second Sex, but it was just
one long refrain of women’s subordination. In the United States, the first
wave was less infused with high literary/philosophical theory. (The con-
trast between Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of 196333 and Beauvoir’s
Second Sex of 1949 is fascinating, and is not just a matter of generation.)
Important though the French school was, there was more space open in
the U.S. for pioneering critical thought in other fields. A second difference
was the greater commitment in France to the primacy of social class as the
exclusive category of analysis, and the sense that categories like “women”
and “men” were just a diversion. I felt that this was the issue in the reluc-
tant and tardy interest of some of my Annales friends in the study of gen-
der. Resistance to the history of women and gender in the United States
existed, but it was less likely to hinge on that, partly because “class” had
fallen into disrepute as a mainstream term during the cold war (“social
stratification” was preferred). The main quarrels I recall on that subject
were among us on the left: there was a famous debate in Paris, where Joan
Scott, Louise Tilly, and I took on Edward P. Thompson—we wanted gen-
der to be part of the story along with class, and we felt we won the day.34
Another contrast is in the more decentralized structure of Ameri-
can universities compared to France. In France, decisions about curriculum
and examination subjects were made by central bodies. In the United States,
it was easier to get courses and research projects going in universities, and
126 Chapter 5
skeptical colleagues had the chance to see what the possibilities were for
gender history.
In any case, one of the most exciting places intellectually in France
that I knew during the 1970s was the seminar—we might even call it the
“salon”—that Michelle Perrot organized at Jussieu for historians and other
scholars to talk about research methods and topics concerning women.35
I used to attend whenever I was in Paris, and marvel at Michelle’s role of
leadership, great historian as she was of the working class in the nineteenth
century. Out of this ferment was born a whole network of historians of
women and gender. Michelle Perrot and Georges Duby drew together the
team that did the collective volumes of A History of Women in the West,
published in several languages. A periodical was founded, Clio: Histoire,
femmes et sociétés, now in its fourteenth year, which includes outstanding
historians such as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber and Gabrielle Houbre36 on
its board of editors. And as for innovative writings and methodologies
in the late medieval and early modern period, you can hardly do better
than Klapisch-Zuber’s books and essays on family, kinship, and wives in
late medieval Florence and Arlette Farge’s studies of women as part of
the world of protest, public expression, and criminality in eighteenth-
century Paris.37 Éliane Viennot is in some ways the Michelle Perrot of her
generation, as she’s been the leading figure in founding the new Inter-
national Society for the Study of Women of the Old Regime (SIEFAR in
French), which has an enthusiastic following. Every week my email brings
news from SIEFAR of activities and publications.38 And what’s interesting
about Éliane Viennot’s study of Queen Margot is not just the queen’s life
and career within the political universe of the late sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth century, it’s her long study of the myth of the Queen Margot.
DC: France, whatever else it might be, has never succeeded in becoming
fully attuned to American research approaches to the history of women.
There don’t exist, as far as I know, in the great Parisian universities any
professorial chairs in the history of women.
NZD: American research approaches are not the relevant criterion. It
would be helpful to have a chair or two in France focused on the study of
women and gender, and maybe that will come in the not-too-distant future.
But the more important thing is that the history of gender became part of
the teaching of history more generally. And that’s happening. Catherine
Coquéry-Vidrovitch,39 celebrated Africanist in France and worldwide, has
Women 127
Notes
1. Leona C. Gabel (1895–1980) was a scholar of the later Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance
and published an important edition of the Commentaries of Pius II (1957). The Sforza family ruled
Milan in the fifteenth century, and Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), the natural daughter of the duke,
played a role in contemporary politics.
2. Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958) was a historian who played a major role in the women’s
suffrage and labor movements. In addition to assisting her husband, the historian Charles Beard,
she published pioneering books on women’s role in history, including On Understanding Women
(1931), America Through Women’s Eyes (1933), and Woman as a Force in History: A Study in Traditions and
Realities (1946).
3. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) was a major Aristotelian philosopher of the sixteenth
century and known for his controversial Tractatus de immortalitate animae (Treatise on the Immortality
of the Soul). There, following the two-truth theory of Averroës, he argued that one could believe in
the immortality of the soul by faith, but by reason, one must follow Aristotle’s argument that the
soul was mortal.
4. Palmer Throop (1900–1986) was a specialist of the Crusades and medieval papacy, and
published Criticism of the Crusade: A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda (1940).
5. Baldassar Castiglione (1478–1529) was a churchman, diplomat, and author of the influential
manual of courtly etiquette, Il cortigiano (The Courtier), published in 1528. Theodore M. Newcomb
(1903–84) was an American social psychologist interested in the area of interpersonal attraction.
His book referenced here first appeared in 1937.
6. Louise Tilly (1930–) is a pioneer in using sociological and statistical methods in the
historical study of women, labor, and family life in modern Europe. Her works include Women,
Work and Family (with Joan W. Scott; 1978) and Politics and Class in Milan, 1884–1901 (1992). She was
elected president of the American Historical Association in 1993.
7. Germaine Warkentin (1933–) is a specialist of Renaissance English literature, Canadian
literature of exploration, and the history of the book. She served as director of the Centre for
Reformation and Renissance Studies at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1990.
8. Alison Prentice (1934–) is an expert on the history of nineteenth-century education and,
more recently, gender and the teaching profession and the history of women and higher education
in Canada. She was a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and founder of
the Ontario Women’s History Network.
9. Charlotte Arbaleste de la Borde (1548–1606) began composing the memoir of her husband’s
128 Chapter 5
life in 1595 as her son was leaving home for the first time. It was not published until 1624, the year
after her husband died, as Mémoires de Messire Philippe de Mornay, Seigneur du Plessis.
10. Philippe du Plessis-Mornay (1549–1623) was a noted French Protestant leader and writer
best known for his works on political theory and theology.
11. Henri IV (1553–1610) was the first ruler of the Bourbon dynasty. On his life, see Vincent
Pitts, Henry IV (2008), and Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power, and Religious
Belief in Early Modern France (1993).
12. Margaret Lucas (1623–73), Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne, was a prolific English author of
poetry and plays, and also composed an early form of science fiction. Her biography of her husband
was published in 1667 as The Life of the Thrice noble, high and puissant Prince, William Cavendish.
13. Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay (1731–91) was an English historian and political pam-
phleteer, supporting freedom of the press and wider suffrage, among other causes. Her History of
England was published in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783.
14. Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) was a prolific writer, literary critic, and
commentator on public affairs during the revolutionary era. The book referenced here first appeared
in 1818 and can be found in English translation as Considerations on the Principal Events of the French
Revolution (2008).
15. The Life of Glückel of Hameln 1646–1724 was translated by Beth-Zion Abrahams and
published in 1963. See above on pp. 118–19 for the history of this translation.
16. The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians began in the 1930s, while the Berkshire
Conference on the History of Women began meeting in the early 1970s. The papers presented at the
conferences can be found in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women
in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
17. Joan Wallach Scott (1941–) is a historian of France and a major innovator in the cultural
and political study of gender. Her works include Gender and the Politics of History (1998), Only
Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), and The Politics of the Veil (2007).
18. Olwen Hufton (1938–) is a historian of early modern Europe and a pioneer in social history
and the history of women. The book referenced here is The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (1974).
19. Primo Levi (1919–87) was a Jewish-Italian chemist, Holocaust survivor, and author of
memoirs, short stories, poems, essays, and novels. His Survival at Auschwitz first appeared in Italian
in 1947 as Se questo è uno uomo (If This Be a Man) and was subsequently translated into English in
1958 by Stuart Woolf. The passage referenced here appears in chapter 11.
20. Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549) was a noted patron of humanists and religious reformers,
and sister of King François I and queen consort to King Henri II of Navarre. Along with her works
of spiritual poetry and theatre, she composed novellas modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron. These
stories were collected together and edited by Claude Gruget for a posthumous 1559 publication
entitled the Heptameron.
21. Chava Turniansky (1937–) is an Israeli scholar of Old Yiddish. The work referenced here is
her essay, “Literary Sources in the Memoirs of Glikl Hamel” [in Hebrew], in Studies in Jewish Culture
in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, edited by Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (1993).
In 2006, Turniansky published a critical edition of Glikl’s memoirs in Hebrew.
22. Gabriele Jancke (1958–) is a German historian specializing in the cultural study of gender
and autobiography in the early modern era. The essay referenced is “Die Sichronot (Memoiren)
der jüdischen Kauffrau Glückel von Hameln zwischen Autobiographie, Geschichtsschreibung und
religiösem Lehrtext. Geschlecht, Religion und Ich in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Autobiographien von
Frauen: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, edited by Magdalene Heuser (1996).
23. Alfred Feilchenfeld (1860–1923) was a German schoolteacher and author of several
books on Jewish history. His abridged edition of the memoir translated into German appeared as
Denkwürdigkeiten der Glückel von Hameln (1913).
24. Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) was an Austrian-Jewish feminist, a social pioneer, and
the founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women). Her translation is entitled Die
Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln (1910).
25. The German translation was entitled Mary Wollstonecraft—Eine Verteidigung der Rechte der
Women 129
Frau (1899). Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher,
and major feminist thinker. Pappenheim translated into German the Maase-Buch, a well-known
medieval collection of Yiddish tales, drawn from the Talmud and folk traditions, much reprinted
in the early modern period and especially directed to women readers, as Allerei Geschichten, Maase-
Buch (1929).
26. Lorraine Daston (1951–) is an American historian of science, currently director of the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her books include Classical Probability and the
Enlightenment (1988) and, together with Peter Galison, Objectivity (2007).
27. Peter Galison (1955–) is an American historian of science and physics. In addition to
Objectivy (2007) coauthored with Lorraine Daston, his books include How Experiments End (1987)
and Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (2003).
28. Georges Duby (1919–96) was a French medieval historian and prominent public
intellectual in France. The full reference of the books cited is Histoire des femmes en Occident, 5
volumes (1991–92). Among his many books is The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (1980; French
edition, 1978).
29. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was a French writer, existentialist philosopher, feminist,
and social theorist best known for the work mentioned above. Her celebrated book Le deuxième sexe
(1949) first appeared in English translation in 1952.
30. Luce Irigary (1932–) is a Belgian feminist philosopher and cultural theorist best known
for her works Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977).
31. Hélène Cixous (1937–) is a French feminist writer, literary critic, and academician. Among
her major works is Laugh of the Medusa (1975).
32. Julia Kristeva (1941–) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, critic, and feminist. She is
a prolific writer across many fields, beginning with her first book, Desire in Language: A Semiotic
Approach to Literature and Art (1969).
33. Betty Friedan (1921–2006) was an American feminist writer and activist who cofounded
and was first president of the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966. Her Feminine
Mystique of 1963 first appeared in French translation in 1964.
34. Edward P. Thompson (1924–93) was a British historian and public intellectual, who took
Marxist historical writing in new directions after World War II. His 1963 The Making of the English
Working Class had great impact on the writing of social history and the concept of class.
35. Jussieu refers to the campus in Paris where the Université de Paris 6 and 7 are located.
Michelle Perrot was for many years professor of history at Université de Paris 7.
36. Gabrielle Houbre (1962–) is a French historian who specializes in the history of gender,
sexuality, the body, and education, especially in regard to gender issues. She has published La
discipline de l’amour: L’éducation sentimentale des filles et des garçons à l’âge du romanticisme (1997).
37. Arlette Farge (1941–) is a French social and cultural historian of the eighteenth century.
Among her many works is the one referenced here, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-
Century France (1995). Together with Natalie Zemon Davis, she coedited Renaissance and Enlightenment
Paradoxes (1993), volume 3 of A History of Women in the West.
38. See www.siefar.org/?lang=fr.
39. Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch (1935–) is a French historian of modern Africa from
precolonial to modern times. Among her major works are The History of African Cities South of the
Sahara (2005) and the one mentioned here, African Women: A Modern History (1997).
40. The Collège de France was founded in the sixteenth century and remains one of France’s
premier institutions of higher learning.
41. Françoise Héritier (1933–) is a French anthropologist of African societies and author of
Masculin/feminine: La pensée de différence (1996) and Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropolog y of
Incest (1999).
42. Mireille Delmas-Marty (1941–) is a French professor of legal studies and international law.
43. The book is The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage (1994).
44. Daniel Roche (1935–) is French social and cultural historian of eighteenth-century France.
The book referred to is The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime (1994).
Chapter 6
Commitments
DC: Let’s now return to your life story. Let’s go beyond your involvement
in investigating the history of women in relation to the whole of history
to the larger question of your commitments. Your family, in terms of its
politics, was for the Democrats, no?
NZD: Yes. Except for the 1936 election, when he bizarrely voted for the
Republican Alfred Landon, my father was a firm Democrat.1 I don’t know
my mother’s political views; I don’t remember her ever talking to me about
them.
DC: But as for you, during your youth, which political camp did you iden-
tify with?
NZD: In 1940, my father subscribed to PM, a new liberal-left periodical,
which I read faithfully the minute I got home from school.2 I especially
followed Max Lerner3 and I. F. Stone.4 But even earlier in my grade-school
years, I recall being concerned about questions of justice. This was linked
with my being a Jew in a neighborhood with few Jewish families and in
a world where anti-Semitic expressions were common, from the virulent
sermons of Father Coughlin in nearby Dearborn to Hitler’s hysterical
harangues that we’d hear about on the radio.5 I reacted in two ways. At
Christmastime, when all the houses around our dark one were decked
with lights, I hoped that the true messiah would come soon and tell the
neighbors of their mistake, and also save us all from Hitler. As I grew a bit
older, I began to have the sentiment—more enduring and important—that
Jews, as a minority people, had a special mission to struggle for justice. If
you wish, this was a social version of the idea of the chosen people, but
one born from my personal experience rather than from formal teaching.
130
Commitments 131
when I arrived at Smith College in 1945. The political life there was very
active in those years right after the war, with all the shades of opinion. I
had friends of all different views, but I directed myself toward the little
group on the left, of socialists and Marxists.
DC: Did you discover Marxism because you shared the intellectual affini-
ties of your friends or by directly reading Marx?
NZD: A bit of both. I still remember how enthralled I was when I first
read The Communist Manifesto in a history class.8 I could see how the forms
of competition that I had found so troubling were embedded in a whole
capitalistic system with its profit motive. The idea of a world of equality,
where everyone could have access to what they needed to live, where learn-
ing and the arts would be open to everyone captivated me. This utopian
world charmed me.
DC: Wasn’t this a sort of symbolic transfer of the image of the new Jeru-
salem or the overdue reclaiming of a Jewish hope that enabled Marxism to
give history a purpose for you?
NZD: In a way, but not via the channel of Zionism. My knowledge of
that movement did not come from my aunt Anna, who, though a devoted
Zionist, did not discuss it with me, and in any case her brand of Zionism
had no connection with socialist or left Zionism. A boyfriend from my
high-school days told me about the Zionist founder Theodor Herzl.9 I
read some of his writings and about his life; I was interested, but not per-
suaded. My turning to the socialist ideal was rather a secularization of the
messianic hopes of my girlhood, nourished by my reading and my history
studies and my conversations with Smith friends.
DC: What kind of reading did you do?
NZD: I read some of the Marxist classics—parts of Capital; Plekhanov’s es-
say on the materialist concept of history,10 which did not impress me; Lenin’s
State and Revolution,11 which was fun to read while I was studying revolu-
tions; Engels’s Origin of the Family.12 These Marxist perspectives were always
seasoned by other reading, for at the same time I was deep into Vico’s New
Science and Max Weber’s works. Thinking back, I especially enjoyed the cul-
tural criticism of British and European Marxist intellectuals: Christopher
Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality13 and Georg Lukács’s writings on the novel.14
They suggested ways to fit literary creations together with social life.
Commitments 133
DC: Didn’t the time at which you were reading these authors coincide
with a certain hardening of your own political commitments?
NZD: Hardening? I don’t know that “hardening” is the word I’d use. Ac-
quiring political commitments might be more like it. We were busy handing
out pamphlets against racism, including in everyday matters. Any time we
got onto a bus, we would always try to find a seat next to a black person.
(By “we,” I’m speaking here of the white progressives at Smith, though
we did have one woman of color among us.) We campaigned against the
atom bomb and for the international control of atomic energy. We spoke
out against the Marshall Plan—that will seem to you really strange today,
since the plan worked to rebuild Europe and was also so much more be-
nign than America’s other foreign adventures over the years. We were not
at all hostile to foreign aid to help Europe, but at the time, the cold war
was beginning, and we campaigned for the granting of such aid through
the United Nations. Now I see that period with a more realistic eye, more
cognizant of both Soviet and U.S. hidden agendas. A few years ago, when I
was working on my book on The Gift, I was very struck by how your French
Georges Bataille15 interpreted the “gifts” of the U.S. Marshall plan when
it was first being developed: he was glad of the cold-war opposition of the
Soviet Union because it would keep the American gifts coming, but at
the same time prevent them from being overly “warped in the direction
of American interest.” A very shrewd point. But as for us in those days, we
wanted the world to be united to reconstruct Europe.
DC: Did these militant groups attract a lot of students or only a small
number?
NZD: We were only a handful on the Marxist or “progressive left,” as it
was called then. There were one or two Trotskyists in our class. The liberal
or social democratic group was larger—I had friends in all these camps.16
As for me, I was doing my usual number of being active in two arenas: at
the center, serving on some of the student government councils, and on
the margins in leftist activities. I also wrote the words for a number of col-
lege songs while I was there.
DC: Much like the so-called Lutherans between 1530 and 1550, with their
“spiritual songs” that denounced the pope as a corrupt man who offended
God, Satan’s agent to pervert the faith, and that sang about the glory of
God by appropriating secular melodies. The Calvinists did the same thing in
134 Chapter 6
the 1550s when they poked fun at the Roman Church in their satires. Isn’t it
curious to note that you lived through comparable experiences before you
took up the study of these militant decades of the French Reformation?
NZD: The songs we lefties sang in those days were from the time of the
Spanish Civil War, such as “Los cuatro generales,” and from the 1930s
U.S. labor movement, “Joe Hill” and “Solidarity Forever,” and the “Peat-
bog Soldiers Song” from the refugees from the Nazis.17 And I surely did
remember this when I came upon the printing workers of Lyon in the
1550s brazenly singing the Psalms in French in the streets so that all the
priests could hear.
But the songs I myself wrote were of a different kind—class songs,
college songs. One that I wrote for our annual Rally Day became some-
thing of a college favorite over the years, despite its problematic words
for the later feminist movement. I wrote it to the music of “You Can’t Get
a Man with a Gun,” a well-known song from the Broadway musical An-
nie Get Your Gun.18 Mine was a takeoff: “You Can’t Get a Man with Your
Brains.” It was really quite funny, and I even snuck in some of my political
ideas in one of the verses: “You know the futility / Of marginal utility /
That our enterprise is free / But that’s all irrespective / For love’s a thing
collective, / Oh you can’t get a man with your brains.” I really have to
laugh that I wrote that song not too long before I met my husband. And
to think of me, the feminist, writing this song sung by generations of
Smith students. [laughter] And yet the song was ironic about the relations
between men and women, and I think there was something true about the
line “you can’t cram for a man / as you can an exam.” Bookish relations
are quite different from human relations.
DC: You introduce us here to one of the key dates in your biography,
when you met Chandler Davis, an encounter that seems well to symbolize,
yet again, this mix of rigor and romanticism, of the serious and the joyful
that so characterizes both you and your work. Did you meet at Harvard?
NZD: Yes. At the end of my third year at Smith, I went to Harvard summer
school to take a course in the history of science, a topic not then covered
at Smith. It was the summer of 1948, the summer before the presidential
elections. I had been active at Smith in support of the new third party, the
Progressive Party, which put up Henry Wallace, the former vice president, as
its candidate.19 Of course, I attended the Students for Wallace meetings at
Commitments 135
NZD: Not that we were planning to marry. One of Chan’s cousins and
her husband were our witnesses. Chan’s parents took the news in stride.
They had lived in Greenwich Village for a time when they were young and
had somewhat bohemian friends in their circle of acquaintances. They
were very warm and welcoming.
But it was quite otherwise with my parents, especially with my
mother. I may not even have been the first member of her family to marry
a goy; I think there was another family secret hidden away here. My mother
was beside herself when she learned of our marriage; my father was up-
set, but less so, and he got over it fairly soon. In retrospect, I’ve wondered
whether the strength of my mother’s reaction may not have been partly
fueled by her guilt toward her own mother for having stopped keeping a
kosher household. It was my father’s initiative, but she did it. And then I
went farther yet …
DC: What happened with your mother? Did she refuse to see you? Could
you tell me a bit more about your relationship with her?
NZD: My mother did not want to see me or even talk to me on the phone
for several years. My marriage was so sudden for her. I was only nineteen,
Chandler had just turned twenty-two. She didn’t like the idea of my being
married to a future professor—she wished for a businessman or a lawyer
or a physician. She did not approve of my having a professional career:
had her family come to America so that women would have to work? But
the most serious thing was a marriage with a non-Jew, a profound rupture
and act of disobedience. All this was very difficult for me—and most assur-
edly for her as well. My father and my brother, who was then a college stu-
dent, continued to see us, as did my aunt Gertrude, my father’s sister, who
was preparing her doctorate, and even one of my cousins on the Lamport
side. My mother finally came to visit me some weeks before the birth of
our first child. During the next few years, she became involved in trying
to market a silverware caddy that she’d designed—so she entered the busi-
ness world after all. And she was pleased, I think, when my first book was
published, but we never came to understand each other very well. Later
when I came to write about clandestine marriages in sixteenth-century
France and the family quarrels and state intervention that they aroused, I
thought back to my own experience. Later still, I was able to tell my aunt
Anna that I was writing about Jewish Glikl Hamel. “Such a pious lady,”
she commented.
Commitments 137
DC: A pamphlet dated six months earlier … Tell me, what do you now
think about this imputation of communism? What did you and Chandler
feel at the time? What was so disturbing or radical about Operation Mind?
NZD: In fact, I was not a Communist, but we felt a solidarity with the
men and women who were being attacked—Communists and non-Com-
munists—in the witch hunt, and we were very troubled by the mood in
the universities and across America: fear, suspicion, self-censorship, the
shrinking of vision and thought. Operation Mind showed that the ques-
tions being posed by HUAC to the subpoenaed witnesses had nothing
to do with the supposed charge of the committee, which was to uncover
a plot to overthrow the government of the United States by force and
violence. In the sessions with the Hollywood filmmakers and screenwrit-
ers, the questions put to them concerned the themes of their movies, the
representation of the rich and the poor, for example, and had nothing
to do with any illegal act they’d committed. The pamphlet pointed out
the range of the people accused: many distinguished professors, including
recipients of the Nobel Prize, rabbis, pastors—that is, people of diverse
political views, ordinarily on the left but not necessarily Communists. We
talked of the consequences for the employment and the lives of the peo-
ple attacked—their pictures plastered all over the newspapers, fired from
their jobs, and so on. And we insisted on the importance for teaching of
an open atmosphere, as we put it in the pamphlet: “There is no area of
human endeavor which needs more the assurance of freedom from fear
and intimidation than the instruction of young people in the pursuit of
knowledge.” A very troublesome idea for the members of HUAC!
DC: I imagine this was the beginning of a very upsetting time for you.
NZD: I felt very sad about the loss of my passport. I was without it for
eight years. I finally got it back in 1960—I might have retrieved it if I’d
tried the year before. What a frustration for a historian so oriented toward
the French archives! I’d collected quite a lot in Lyon, but I’d been there
only six months. I had been counting on a second research trip and now I
had to give it up. The positive side to all this was that I turned toward the
riches of the American rare book collections.
DC: All printed documents?
NZD: Yes, sixteenth-century books printed at Lyon. Publications from
142 Chapter 6
DC: Whatever might be said, there was cowardice on the part of your
colleagues, and it’s very important to see here that the university world
can very quickly become divided, lose all sense of unity because academics,
while apparently always very proud of their training, are often more easily
frightened and cowed than others.
NZD: Let me describe in more detail what happened. The HUAC agents
met privately with the president of the university, Harlan Hatcher,31 and
presented him with a list of fifteen persons they planned to subpoena,
most of them professors. Hatcher himself decided which ones he wanted
to protect and which ones he would get rid of—because they were young
or otherwise dispensable. Chan was the youngest of the professors; he was
then twenty-seven and without tenure; he was very brilliant and had pub-
lications, but he was early in his career. Hatcher selected four professors
who he was sure would not cooperate with HUAC and whom he promised
to fire after their testimony. Chan was one, the other three were older: a
distinguished mathematician and two brilliant physiologists. For the oth-
ers, special arrangements were made, testimony in camera where they may
have been “friendly witnesses” or some other accommodation.
I tell this story because even though Chandler got a warning
ahead of time from President Hatcher or the vice president that he would
be fired, I didn’t assimilate that at the time. I didn’t want to think of
our fate, of the outcome of our difficulties, as predetermined at a private
meeting of three or four individuals. I wanted to think about it the way I
thought about historical events, as the product of social movements and
with diverse causes. I was waiting for the resistance from our colleagues
and the students. I wanted to see us as in a situation that had not been
determined, subject to the contingent, the possible.
DC: You thus don’t separate your experience even from history, the small
incident of Chan’s appearance before a congressional committee, from the
way in which you then conducted your close analysis of history? You have this
sense of certainty, shared among historians, that an event is not reducible to
the individual actions of particular people, but to a congeries of structural
factors, long-term and medium range, that intervene more or less clearly.
NZD: I think that the individual actions of particular people have conse-
quence, but always in conjunction with other movements and variables. That’s
the way I’ve viewed the past in my decades of pursuing the historian’s craft.
Commitments 145
For example, I’ve never accepted the explanation of the Saint Bartholomew’s
Day Massacre as simply the result of the decision of Catherine de Médicis,
Charles IX, and their counselors. Their decision had a role, but more inter-
esting to me were all the variables, all the feelings, beliefs, sensibilities, ritu-
als of violence (to go back to my own essay), which came together in Paris in
the events of the night of August 24, 1572, and in other towns in the next
days. The Holocaust has aroused the same debate. Was it simply Hitler’s
project? Did it take place following exactly his plan? Were there other real
possibilities—expulsion rather than mass murder? Was improvisation part
of the story? How essential was the initiative of local people? And so on. My
preference in interpretation would be for complexity. There was Hitler, but
also more than Hitler.
I want to make a chronological jump for a moment here in my
own story. In 1989, a group of undergraduates at the University of Michi-
gan decided to make a film about the professors who were fired in 1954
after the HUAC hearings.32 In fact, only two of the four were finally fired,
Chan and Mark Nickerson,33 one of the physiologists; the older math-
ematician34 was so very ill that he was able to avoid the HUAC hearings,
the other physiologist was kept on partly because of faculty and student
resistance—so we had a victory of a kind. The former president, Harlan
Hatcher, was still alive in 1989—ninety years old or more; so was the vice
president. The students interviewed the actors on all sides. Watching the
film, I was shocked in listening to Harlan Hatcher, still very righteous
about his actions: he had decided that we would be excluded. He had made a
decision about us, a decision that affected us deeply. I was very unsettled,
but I laughed and made fun of myself: “Natalie Davis, you’ve always been
dismissive or at least suspicious of conspiracy theories in history as inad-
equate. You’ve always thought of history as complex. And now it turns out
that the fix was in—you and especially Chandler were simply living out a
decision already made by a few people behind closed doors.”
This experience has not profoundly modified my practice as a his-
torian, but I’ve chuckled over the irony—that a single person could seem
to have such an impact on our lives. As I thought about it, I realized how
impersonal it was for Hatcher. He hardly knew Chandler; Chandler was
just available for being disposed of. And Hatcher did not get everything
his way. He was finally prevented from firing one of the professors. And
as for us, he didn’t ruin us as scholars. Chan got huge support from his
mathematical colleagues at the time and in later decades was invited back
146 Chapter 6
from an action they took only under extreme duress. The entire problem
arose from the loss of control around seven or eight o’clock in the morn-
ing when the massacre escalated into a huge orgy of sacral violence that
killed at least two or three thousand Huguenots and pushed the crown, in
order not to lose total control of the panic-stricken capital, to cast about
for justification. But the original crime began in effect as a conspiracy, a
“ploy” [pratique] to use contemporary parlance, cunningly improvised by a
small group of counselors who set it in motion … Men who were probably
then responsible for the sudden disjointed explanation that left open any
number of possible histories, that better rendered history ever malleable
and subject to change due to the unstable course of destiny …
What I’d like to say here about events from the sixteenth century
is that we must always be careful and modest in our claims. When his-
tory eludes our ability to analyze it with any assurance or sense of control,
it isn’t by chance. It rather reflects a political culture that fashioned the
present—in a world marked by transience, the uncertainty of individuals,
dissimulation or duplicity, or both—as a moment open to any number of
possibilities. In this way, history can ceaselessly be shaped and reshaped.
If we don’t truly know what happened on the night of August 23 to 24,
it’s also because the idea and practice of history by the groups involved
wanted a level of uncertainty to persist, or rather these uncertainties per-
sisted even beyond the words that were spoken.
But I stray from our conversation. I only went off on this tangent
when hearing you describe the insight that came to you that actual life and
the theory of history don’t necessarily coincide, that what we can person-
ally realize from history becomes revealed as a result of other possibilities
or scenarios than the ones we plan for the past lives of other people.
After Chan was expelled, how did you live since he was without
work? Did it take you long to find alternative solutions?
NZD: There was more at stake than his firing from the University of
Michigan. Chandler had decided in his testimony before HUAC to plead
the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and not the Fifth. The Fifth
Amendment allows silence only because you fear a criminal charge might
ensue. The First Amendment forbids Congress to interfere with freedom
of expression. So by pleading it, as had the Hollywood Ten years before,
Chandler was inviting once again a test case of HUAC. He was then duly
indicted by the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress, but don’t
148 Chapter 6
feel sorry for us because of that—he had sought the test case and we were
in agreement on it. But the case dragged on for years …
DC: You must have had the impression that it would never finish, didn’t
you?
NZD: Yes, he was subpoenaed in 1953, testified before HUAC, and was
fired in 1954, and then his First-Amendment case was in the courts till the
end of 1959. It went up to the Supreme Court. After Chan’s appearance
before HUAC, a friend of ours—a professor of psychology at Vassar—read
his testimony and decided to take the same position when he was sub-
poenaed, and his test case happened to get to the Supreme Court before
Chan’s.35 The Court denied his appeal in a split decision. When Chan’s
similar appeal came up not long afterward in late 1959, the Court de-
clined to hear it—though even then two judges, Justices Black36 and Doug-
las,37 would have liked to hear argument. So in January 1960, Chandler
went off to prison to serve his sentence for a misdemeanor.
DC: How long did he spend in prison?
NZD: Five months. He was sentenced to six months, but given one month
off for good behavior.
DC: Which prison was it?
NZD: Danbury Federal Correctional Institution—a relatively “privi-
leged” prison. Men who have been incarcerated elsewhere, but have been
good prisoners, get transferred there for the last years of their sentence.
U.S. Senators and wealthy people convicted of corruption serve their time
there. An amusing irony—J. Parnell Thomas,38 the head of HUAC during
the days of Hollywood Ten,39 was convicted of corruption and was impris-
oned at Danbury a few years before Chan walked through its gates. [laugh-
ter] Chan was a fellow-con with businessmen who had cheated on their
business accounts … If the Enron directors are ever convicted, no doubt
they’ll go to a prison like Danbury.40
DC: But Chan was a bit of an odd duck among this set of distinguished
prisoners!
NZD: The prison population at Danbury was much more varied than
that. Two other First-Amendments challengers were there, our friend from
Vassar and another professor, and also one or two men who had passed
Commitments 149
secrets to the Soviet Union. Apart from the white businessmen and small-
scale traders, there were many black people and Hispanics who had been
involved, say, in stealing government checks. They were impressed when
Chan said he was in for contempt of Congress, which sounded like a big
deal, and also congratulated him on exercising with the weights after all
those years of exercising his brain. One Saturday toward the end of his
time, he was listening to the allowed jazz program from New York on the
prison radio when it was suddenly preempted by live coverage of the huge
demonstration against HUAC in San Francisco. He knew it was the begin-
ning of the end for HUAC—and he was right!
As for the six years in the 1950s while his case was in the courts,
Chan’s situation was unstable. To keep our heads above water financially,
he worked for about two years for an advertising agency in New York, which
for its own reasons wanted to have a mathematician with a doctorate on
its staff. He kept doing mathematics and publishing, but he couldn’t get a
regular university post: each time a mathematics department recommend-
ed his being hired, the FBI and/or someone in the administration would
intervene and the offer would be dropped. He did give courses at the School
of General Studies at Columbia and also at the New School, which had re-
ceived so many refugees from Germany and France in the 1930s—and they
deserve credit for being willing to give him something. Then the American
Mathematical Society came to his aid, and invited him to be one of the edi-
tors for its reviewing journal in Providence, Rhode Island.
DC: How did you put up with all this?
NZD: Let me say first of all that there were wonderful things in those
years: our three children. Our son Aaron was born in 1953, several months
after our passports were lifted, and Chan was subpoenaed later that year.
Then in 1954 and 1957 we had our daughters, Hannah and Simone. The
children were a total joy, completely overshadowing the challenges with
Chan’s case. And then I was working on my dissertation, using the marvel-
ous libraries in New York, especially the New York Public Library and Co-
lumbia, and doing the other research I mentioned. I even taught a night
course one term at Columbia’s School of General Studies. So we survived,
though we didn’t have much of a social life.
DC: Was this the time when people you knew stopped wanting to see
you due to these same political reasons?
150 Chapter 6
NZD: Yes, there were some who did not want to see us. We were a little
bit pariahs. But, you know, I was already somewhat hardened to this be-
cause of the conflict with my mother over our marriage. And my father
and brother continued to visit us and some other dear friends. I went
to history conferences to try to stay in touch. I especially remember one
of the early meetings of the new Society for French Historical Studies.
Two people whom I had known and cared about brushed by and would
scarcely greet me. I was sitting by myself in dismay, when Father Moody—
Monsignor Joseph Moody, a stalwart of the society—came up and started
chatting with me.41 I never forgot his kindness, and have taken him as a
model when I go to professional meetings.
So there were times when I did feel alone. But I had the presence
of the people from the past, whose history I was studying. And one or
two friends: Rosalie Colie, then teaching literature at Barnard, would give
me supper before I taught my night school classes. My friendship and
correspondence about French history with Nancy Roelker was precious.
And Chandler and I had the children and each other. I said to myself af-
ter those years that if we’d had a more normal path, we might have had
other kinds of anxieties: “Am I going to get tenure at my university? Am I
as important as the other assistant professors? Have I published enough?
Am I doing the kind of scholarship that will get me promoted?” I would
have been submitted to the pressure and the competitive system that I had
found disagreeable since my girlhood. I might have been worried about
what people would say if I went in new directions with my work, I might
have been less willing to take risks. As it was, I was somewhat isolated, but
at least I was not in the “success” struggle.
DC: How do you feel today? You have, despite everything, managed to
overcome these difficulties, but don’t you still feel some indignation about
it all?
NZD: I decided long ago that it wasn’t worth the trouble to be bitter
about what happened. I won’t say I pardoned everyone—I certainly felt an-
gry at Harlan Hatcher when I heard him telling his story with such pride
in the students’ film—but on the whole I look back at that period without
resentment. 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 in Germany or
to the Gulag.
Commitments 151
DC: Was the decision to leave the United States to go live in Canada a
political act, a kind of temporary rejection of the United States that arose
from a sense of injustice?
NZD: No, not at all.
DC: Was it fate yet again? Was it against your will?
NZD: Colleagues at the University of Toronto were very ready to hire
Chan. We would not have thought of turning to Canada while his case
was still in the U.S. courts. The initiative to bring him to Toronto was
taken by a very great mathematician, Donald Coxeter,42 a remarkable man,
who has just passed away at ninety-five years of age. Chandler went to the
University of Toronto in 1962, and that’s been the base for his profession-
al life ever since. There have been times when he’s disagreed strongly with
some university policy, but it’s always been within the limits of a “loyal
opposition.” The University of Toronto is his university—it welcomed him
when he could not get a university post in the United States; he cares a
great deal about it. But he was not rejecting the United States as such and
has been very active in both the professional and political life there over
the decades.
DC: When did you receive your PhD? Was it before you left for Canada?
NZD: I finished my dissertation on “Protestantism and the Printing
Workers of Lyon” in 1959, and mailed it to the University of Michigan
from Providence, Rhode Island, where we were then living. My daughter
Simone was two years old. Several months later Chan got a leave from his
job as mathematical editor and went off to Danbury federal prison to serve
his sentence. As for me, I taught for three years at Brown University, where
I had students I much enjoyed. I’m still in touch with some of them. I gave
courses on the Reformation and participated in the introductory history
courses, one of them organized around primary texts and quite experimen-
tal and interesting. Barbara Lewalski,43 just beginning the career that was
to make her one of our greatest Miltonists, was a very special friend, as was
her husband, the historian Kenneth Lewalski.44 They were staunch friends,
as were others in Providence as well, when my husband was in prison. And
there was the John Carter Brown Library, one of the great libraries of the
world for travel and geographical literature; that’s where I first came upon
the beautiful 1556 French edition of Leo Africanus’s Description de l’Afrique.
152 Chapter 6
So the social and cultural resources of the place one happens to live can
turn one in new directions.
In 1962, I followed Chandler to Toronto. There were some years
where I had difficulty in getting a regular post in a history department.
For a year I taught in a Great Books course in humanities at the recently
founded York University, and finally became part of the Political Economy
Department at the University of Toronto. This was a very interesting de-
partment, which put together politics, economics, and economic history—
really in the grand tradition of the early twentieth century. For several
years I taught economic history, rather like your great-grandfather Henri
Hauser. I’m glad I had this chance. My publications from that period on
“A Trade Union in Sixteenth-Century France” and on welfare reform in
Lyon didn’t just grow out of my doctoral dissertation, they were nourished
by this milieu. And in my undergraduate lectures I was able to introduce
material on women’s work and early trade unions into the traditional nar-
rative of the Industrial Revolution. But the field of economic history was
starting to become very mathematical. That was not my direction—I was
moving toward the anthropological and the cultural—and I knew I’d never
have graduate students in economics wanting to work with me.
DC: What happened then and who decided upon this new course?
NZD: I was invited to Berkeley to be a visiting professor of history in
1968. When the Department of History at the University of Toronto
learned that Berkeley was interested in me and took seriously my publica-
tions, they decided to offer me a post. After my months in California, I
taught three years in the UT history department. I had some very exciting
graduate students—we read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization together
and Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood and various Annales historians and lots
of sixteenth-century sources—and Jill Conway and I started our course
in Society and the Sexes. Then Berkeley invited me to join the Depart-
ment of History as a tenured professor. Chan and I talked it over for quite
some time: his job was in Toronto and, if Aaron and Hannah were already
in their midteens, Simone still had high school ahead of her. In January
1972, I started teaching at Berkeley …
DC: Did you actually participate in the great sit-ins in Berkeley, in the
demonstrations, and did all this give you some sense of what the seditions
and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century must have been like?
Commitments 153
NZD: The great Free Speech sit-ins at Berkeley were back in 1964, but
the anti–Vietnam War movement was going strong when I visited there in
1968.45 I took part in a number of demonstrations; at one point I felt my
graduate seminar was meeting on antiwar marches. [laughter] One of my
sharpest memories is of witnessing David Harris,46 then the husband of
Joan Baez,47 burn his draft card in front of the Oakland Army Induction
Center. We had all gathered very early in the morning, before sunrise. I im-
mediately thought of the Protestant artisan in Lyon, imprisoned in 1534
for having distributed heretical works and who from his prison cell had
mocked the great cathedral of Saint Jean: “It’s only a piece of stone. Heav-
en is our church.” Though I know history never repeats itself exactly, I had
this sense of connection: our little band of demonstrators, this man with
his draft card burst into flames, and the severe stone military building.
DC: Wasn’t your commitment to opposing the Vietnam War linked to
your long-standing pacifism, to your long-standing hostility to American
interventionism?
NZD: I considered the Vietnam War an unjust war. I have never been an
absolute pacifist. My strong preferences have always been for diplomatic
solutions, solutions through negotiation, arbitration, compromise when
possible. But despite the war crimes committed by all parties along the
way (the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, the British bombing of Ham-
burg and Dresden, the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki),
despite that, World War II was a just war to stop the Nazi murders, the
German conquest of Europe, and Japanese aggression. In Vietnam, no, the
U.S. invasion of Vietnam was not a just war.
DC: You rediscover here the rhetoric of the sixteenth century and the
debates over just and unjust war, for war could not be just for a number
of Erasmian humanists, for example, unless it was a war of self-defense
against a foreign invader.
NZD: True. And, of course, this reflection has surfaced once again in debate
over the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and now the invasion of Iraq.
Notes
1. Alf Landon (1897–1987) was the Republican governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 who lost
the 1936 presidential election to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
2. PM ran from 1940 to 1948 and was a pioneer in photojournalism as well as an early venue
for cartoons by Dr. Seuss. See Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948 (1997).
154 Chapter 6
3. Max Lerner (1902–92) was an American journalist who wrote for The Nation in the 1930s
and then had a syndicated column the New York Post after the closing of PM.
4. I[sidor] F[einstein] Stone (1909–87) was an American investigative journalist known for his
outspoken and independent left-wing views. He wrote for many newspapers and magazines, and
then, blacklisted during the McCarthyism of the 1950s, founded his own I. F. Stone Weekly Reader,
which kept his critical voice alive for decades.
5. Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979) was a Roman Catholic priest who early on used the
radio to reach a mass audience. After initially supporting the New Deal in 1932, he turned to views
sympathetic to the social policies and violent anti-Semitism of the Nazis. See Donald Warren, Radio
Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio (1996).
6. Norman Thomas (1884–1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time
candidate for president of the United States. See Ralph F. Gregory, Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter
(2008).
7. The Detroit Race Riot broke out in June 1943 and lasted three days. Thirty-four people were
killed before federal troops restored order.
8. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first appeared in 1848.
9. Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and founder of modern
political Zionism. In 1896, he published The Jewish State, calling for a state in “a portion of the
globe” (Palestine or elsewhere) to which European Jews who wished to would move; in 1902, he
published a utopian novel, Old-New Land, in which he imagined a multilingual, open Jewish polity
in Palestine, without an army.
10. Georgi Plekhanov (1857–1918) was a Russian revolutionary and Marxian theoretician. His
book The Materialist Conception of History appeared in 1891.
11. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and became leader
of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the first head of the new U.S.S.R. The State and
Revolution came out in 1917 and presented his views on the role of the state in society and the
necessity of a proletarian revolution.
12. The full title of this work is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884).
13. Christopher Caudwell is the pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg (1907–37). He was
a British Marxist writer, thinker, and poet whose works appeared posthumously, beginning with
Illusion and Reality (1937).
14. Georg Lukács (1885–1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic.
Among his many books were Theory of the Novel (1920), History and Class Consciousness (1923), and The
Historical Novel (1937).
15. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was an avant-garde French novelist, cultural critic, and phi-
losopher who, influenced by the writing of Marcel Mauss on the gift and sacrifice, developed a theory
of a general economy in the universe: all energy, erotic and economic, was somehow expressed or
exchanged. His reference to the Marshall Plan in this regard appeared in the last chapter of volume
1 of The Accursed Share (1947).
16. Trotskyists were followers of Leon Trotsky’s teachings that socialism in one country,
as practiced by the Soviet Communist party, was impossible and that the Stalinist regime was
a deformation of communism. One of the Trotskyist youth groups in the 1940s was YPSL, the
Young People’s Socialist League. The social democrats were various groups of European socialists
who opposed the Communist notion of a vanguard party. The social democratic student group at
Smith College in the late 1940s was SDA, Students for Democratic Action. The progressive student
groups at Smith College at that time were AYD, American Youth for Democracy, and the Marxist
Discussion Group.
17. “Los Cuatro Generales” is a song from the Spanish Civil War that uses the Andalusian
tune “Los Quatro Muleros.” The four generals are Francisco Franco, Emilio Mola, José Varela, and
Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. Joe Hill (1879–1915) was a songwriter and labor activist or “Wobbly”
in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). His execution in Utah stirred great controversy
and inspired “Solidarity Forever,” written by fellow Wobbly Ralph Chaplin in 1916, and the song
“Joe Hill,” originally composed as a poem by Alfred Hayes around 1930 and set to music by Earl
Commitments 155
Robinson in 1936. The “Peatbog Soldiers Song” was composed by German prisoners in an early
concentration camp in 1933 and written down by Hanns Eisler in 1935.
18. Annie Get Your Gun is a musical with lyrics and music written by Irving Berlin that
premiered on Broadway in 1946.
19. The United States Progressive Party of 1948 was a loose coalition of leftist parties formed
after World War II. Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) was the thirty-third vice president of the United
States (1941–45). The student group formed at Smith College in 1948 was entitled Students for
Wallace.
20. The Hallowell ancestors of Chandler Davis settled in Pennsylvania, where the Quaker
merchant Morris Longstreth Hallowell and his wife, Hannah Penrose, were parents of Norwood
Penrose Hallowell (1839–1910). Norwood Penrose Hallowell and his two brothers were staunch
abolitionists and served as colonels of Massachusetts black infantry troops during the Civil War.
John T. Galvin, “The Hallowells: Fighting Quakers,” Proceeding of the Massachusetts Historical Society
104 (1992): 42–54. Reference courtesy of Hannah Davis Taïeb.
21. Aaron Bancroft (1779–1839) was educated at Harvard University and came to reject the
Calvinist theology of his forebears in favor of Unitarian teachings and spiritual liberty. Jesus Christ
was perceived as a morally perfect human, and God’s nature was unitary rather than trinitarian, a
view that won him much opprobrium for a time from other Christian ministers. In 1786, with like-
minded believers, he founded the Second Congregational Church in Worcester, Massachusetts,
and in 1825 became president of the newly formed American Unitarian Association. He was
married to Lucretia Chandler, and their daughter Eliza became the wife of Governor John Davis
of Massachusetts.
22. Hull House was a community center or settlement house established by Jane Addams (1860–
1935) in 1889 in Chicago, Illinois, in which active women provided social and cultural service to
working families. Addams was the second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931.
23. The Haggadah is the Jewish religious text that sets out the order of the Passover seder.
24. Winchevsky Centre and the Morris Winchevsky School were established in 1928 and are
affiliated with the United Jewish People’s Order of Canada, a progressive group founded in 1926. Its
mission is to strengthen ties to Jewish culture and heritage within a secular humanist framework.
25. Myron Gilmore (1910–78) was a Renaissance specialist and the author of The World of
Renaissance Humanism, 1453–1517 (1952) and Humanists and Jurists (1963), among other works.
26. W[ilber] K[itchner] Jordan (1902–80) was a historian of early modern Britain best known
for his four-volume The Development of Religious Toleration in England (1932–40) and his Philanthropy in
England 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Pattern of English Social Aspirations (1959). He was president
of Radcliffe College from 1943 to 1960.
27. On the Norfolk Rising, see Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCullough, Tudor Rebellions
(5th ed., 2008).
28. The House Un-American Activities Committee existed from 1938 to 1975. It was originally
created to investigate German-American involvement in Ku Klux Klan and Nazi activity. It soon
added and then largely focused on suspected Communist subversive and propaganda activities,
especially during the Red Scare of the 1950s associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy.
29. Elizabeth Douvan (1926–2002) went on to become a distinguished professor of psychology
at the University of Michigan, where she also helped to found the program in women’s studies. Her
1966 The Adolescent Experience became a classic.
30. The full title is Operation Mind: A Brief Documentary Account of the House Committee on Un-
American Activities, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions
and Civil Liberties Committee of the University of Michigan (1952). For a firsthand account of
these events, see Chandler Davis, “The Purge,” in A Century of Mathematics in America, edited by Peter
Duren, part 1, pp. 413–28 (1989).
31. Harlan Hatcher (1899–1998) was a professor of American literature at the University of
Michigan, specializing in the novel and in the history of the Great Lakes, and served as president
of the University of Michigan between 1951 and 1967.
32. Keeping in Mind: The McCarthy Era at the University of Michigan was produced by Adam Kulakow
156 Chapter 6
and debuted on campus on April 9, 1989. In November 1990, the University of Michigan also
instituted the Chandler Davis, Clement Markert, and Mark Nickerson Lecture Series on Academic
and Intellectual Freedom. Clement Markert (1917–99) was a professor of zoology. Though he
continued to teach at the University of Michigan, his promotion to associate professor, previously
approved, was delayed for a year or two; after it came through, he left for Yale University. He later
served as president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.
33. Mark Nickerson (1916–98) was a prominent pharmacologist who, after his dismissal from
Michigan, joined the faculties at the University of Manitoba and McGill University in Canada. He
later became president of both the Pharmacological Society of Canada and the American Society
of Pharmacology.
34. Nathaniel Coburn (1910–71) was an applied mathematician who made important contri-
butions to fluid mechanics, and an associate professor at the University of Michigan. When he was
called to testify by HUAC, he stayed away on his physician’s orders as he was suffering from serious
multiple sclerosis. Though the committee read his name publicly, the United States Congress did not
cite him for contempt and the university did not move against him.
35. This was Lloyd Barenblatt. The case was Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U.S. 109 (1959), in
which the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling that HUAC’s action to force Barenblatt
to testify did not violate the First Amendment and thus upheld his conviction for contempt to
Congress.
36. Justice Hugo Black (1886–1971) was a Democratic senator from Alabama before joining
the Supreme Court in 1937, where he served until his death. He dissented in the Barenblatt v. United
States decision.
37. Justice William O. Douglas (1898–1980) was a law professor at Yale who joined the Supreme
Court in 1939 where he served until his resignation in 1976. He concurred with Justice Black’s dissent,
as did Chief Justice Earl Warren.
38. J. Parnell Thomas (1895–1970) was a Republican congressman from New Jersey. He chaired
the HUAC from 1947 until his conviction for fraud in 1950. He spent eighteen months in prison.
39. The Hollywood Ten was a group of screenwriters, producers, and directors from among many
entertainment professionals summoned in 1947 to testify before HUAC about their real or suspected
political beliefs and associations. The ten who refused on the grounds of the First Amendment were
convicted for contempt to Congress and imprisoned. Two of them, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr.,
were actually at the Danbury correctional facility when Thomas served his term.
40. The Enron scandal began in October 2001 and resulted in the bankruptcy of Enron, an
energy company, and its auditing agency and consultancy partner, Arthur Andersen. Convictions
for obstruction of justice and defrauding investors were eventually handed down for a number of
Enron’s top officials, most of whom now are serving sentences in federal penitentiaries in Colorado
and Texas. Chandler Davis described his experience at Danbury Correctional Institution in “So
You’re Going to Prison!” The Nation (December 3, 1960): 435–37.
41. Monsignor Joseph N. Moody (1905–94) was a specialist of Catholicism in modern France
and taught at the Catholic University of America for most of his career. His books include Church
and State: Catholic Social and Political Movements, 1789–1950 (1953), The Church as Enemy: Anticlericalism
in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (1968), and French Education since Napoleon (1978).
42. Harold Scott MacDonald “Donald” Coxeter (1907–2003) was a major geometer of the
twentieth century and professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto.
43. Barbara K. Lewalski (1931–) is a professor of English literature and history at Harvard
University. Her books include Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1985) and
The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2002).
44. Kenneth Lewalski (1926–2007) was a professor of history at Rhode Island College and a
specialist in French and Polish history and culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
45. The Free Speech Movement occurred at Berkeley in 1964 to 1965 as students protested
university restrictions on their political activities and speech. It marked a pivotal moment in the
civil rights movement as well as rising student activism against the Vietnam War. See Robert Cohen
and Reginald Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s (2002).
Commitments 157
46. David Harris (1946–) is an American journalist and writer. His books include Our War: What
We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (1996). He was married to Joan Baez from 1968 to 1973.
47. Joan Baez (1941–) is a renowned folk singer and songwriter known for her commitment to
nonviolence and civil rights. She was an important figure in the protest against the Vietnam War.
Chapter 7
Hopes
DC: Let’s go further into your involvement in the events of this tumultuous
era. Your appointment at Berkeley brought you an ever-growing number of
students, right?
NZD: The idea of becoming a professor at Berkeley attracted me not only
to train more graduate students, but especially because it was then a larger
intellectual world than what I had at Toronto and more open to the new
directions in which I was moving. Right away I got to know anthropologists
working on peasant studies and folklorists. I had contacts in the literature
departments, and especially with the young Stephen Greenblatt: over lunch
we would talk of ideas from my essays in Society and Culture and approaches
he would take in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. With Svetlana Alpers,1 histo-
rian of art, I began our lifelong friendship of discussion, gossip, and argu-
ment; she was then writing her pathbreaking book The Art of Describing. And
in the history department I had spectacular colleagues in the early modern
period: William Bouwsma,2 Randolph Starn,3 and Gene Brucker.4 What
conversations we had about our courses and our scholarly projects! There
was only one other woman teaching in the large department when I arrived,
but with the help of some male colleagues, we finally brought in terrific
young women, Lynn Hunt5 in eighteenth-century French history and the
U.S. historian Paula Fass.6 The political ambiance of the 1970s was exciting
in Berkeley; there were coffeehouses for discussion all around the campus.
It was a time of intellectual exuberance, an adventure.
DC: Why then move again, as if after a certain moment you needed a
change of scene to avoid the routine of the same faces and conversations,
as if you wanted a new life, you who set for yourself a mission to restore
158
Hopes 159
much laughter. Ruth Rosen,8 one of my students who went on to write ter-
rific books in U.S. women’s history, gave me a hug of forgiveness.
So I went to Princeton in 1978, stayed there for eighteen years till
my retirement, and never regretted my decision. Chan and I worked out
the commute quite well, taking turns to fly to one of our two homes al-
most every weekend, and spending long summers, holidays, and sabbatical
years together in one place; we worked out Davis’s Rules for Commuting
Couples and stuck to them. And once again I had changed my intellectual
community, a very different universe, or so it seemed when I first arrived.
California was very open, expansive, outdoorsy—we all did lots of sports
and mountain climbing—brilliant sun once the fog dissipated. Princeton
was very pretty as well, but small, intense, civilized, a culture of conversation
around dining room tables. I rejoiced in my colleagues. Lawrence Stone was
directing the Shelby Cullom Davis Center,9 with its weekly seminars full of
debate and new ideas. Bob Darnton10 and I compared notes on the history
of the book. The young Tony Grafton11 was already enlivening every con-
versation with the sparks of his wondrous erudition. Carl Schorske12 had
founded a program in European Cultural Studies, which offered a broad
model for teaching to the department. Bob Darnton and Clifford Geertz
started their course on history and anthropology within this ECS frame,
and once or twice I taught the course with them. When, in the wake of my
Martin Guerre adventures, I wanted to start a seminar on History and Film,
it was welcomed by ECS. Though I first had the idea of trying to turn the
Martin Guerre story into a film while I was at Berkeley, I think I would never
have followed through on it if I had not come to Princeton.
Meanwhile there was our “woman question.” Princeton had be-
come coed in the fall of 1969, and when I arrived in 1978, I think we
had only about eight tenured women on the entire faculty. But we were a
very determined group, we met and met, agitated and coaxed, and finally
things began to change.
DC: You thus feel you’ve taken part, certainly within limits but with no
lack of will, in a history that saw women begin a long journey to promote
their rights. You’ve lived this history with exuberance, joy, and a total com-
mitment similar to the ones we see in your own historical work, haven’t
you?
I believe, at this point in our conversation, we should shift to con-
sider the historian’s conscience as you confront history; no longer the history
Hopes 161
that motivated you in your essays to reclaim past experiences or even lives,
but henceforth the history that you’ve actually witnessed and to which you
often seek to attest in your books through a kind of appeal to dialogue
between past and present: an appeal that quietly grows in the framework
of your analyses, which isn’t apparent but which the reader must suspect
is there. How would you describe this relationship to an immediate mo-
ment, more or less proximate, that certainly serves as an anchor point
from which you strive to develop or modify your outlook and questions?
NZD: Let me begin with a remark about my general state of mind in
regard to current politics. If there were any vestiges of my youthful uto-
pianism still left in my spirit, they have been erased by events of the past
years. Bitter war and cruel rape in so many places. Ethnic cleansing in the
Balkans and parts of Africa.13 The United States with its triumphal and
aggressive military power in Afghanistan and now Iraq, Islamicist merci-
less violence put to such wrongful ends. Think of the protest mounted
in so many parts of the world this past spring against Bush’s invasion of
Iraq. Huge marches in so many cities, an avalanche of protest, and yet no
effect. So many situations proving so difficult to resolve or to change.
DC: Did you become disenchanted or rather, more specifically, did you
gradually become more realistic after a long and growing series of disillu-
sionments and disappointments that in the end just wore you out?
NZD: More realistic, yes, but not worn out. My realism is still accom-
panied by hope. There are moments in recent times infused with hope:
1989, when the Berlin Wall came down; 1990, when apartheid laws were
repealed in South Africa and Mandela14 was released from prison. The un-
expected can still happen. I think back to 1949, when I had just graduated
from Smith. What Chandler and I most feared as a possibility at that time
was nuclear war. Now that didn’t happen—or at least it hasn’t happened
yet—but we didn’t dream of the possibility of a new worldwide plague of
AIDS or the resurgence of such extreme ethnic hatred and violent reli-
gious fundamentalism as we have seen. What we might have hoped for as
discovery was the exploration of outer space—Chan had even published
science fiction stories about that—but we would not have imagined the
electronic revolution of our time. So hope is nourished by the element of
surprise, even though often the surprise is very bad news.
And hope can be nourished by a chastened realism. I long ago gave
162 Chapter 7
within a tradition about how to relate to the sacred has more going for it
than we have understood. Anyway, the call to the defense of justice against
wrongful power and to the unmasking of false idols, including those of
land and blood, is one of the Jewish traditions, and that’s the one I identify
with. At Toronto, I support a group, organized initially by Jewish women,
that draws together Jews and others, too, each Friday for a vigil before the
Israeli Consulate, with signs saying “End the Occupation,” “We Refuse to
Be Enemies.” The vigil has gone on for some years, always in the hope of a
change for the better and of getting passersby to think about the question.
But in Israel itself, I see this tradition sustained through the ac-
tions and courage of those who resist the politics of exclusion, expansion,
theocracy, and cruelty. I think of my friend and political ally at Smith
College, Judith Blanc,23 who already fifty years ago was circulating mim-
eographed news about “the other Israel” and has worked for decades with
Palestinian women toward a viable solution. I think of Gadi Algazi,24 a
superb historian of medieval and early modern cultural history, who did
prison time for refusing military service in the Territories and was one of
the founders of Ta’ayush,25 an organization of Jewish and Arab citizens
of Israel who bring help to besieged Palestinian communities. I think of
the insightful writings of Sidra Ezrahi26 on the Israeli poets and novelists,
who hold on to a sense of exile and distance even while living in the land
of Israel—a distance that leaves room for moral questioning. I think of the
Israelis and Palestinians who—in opposition to both their authorities—
have just negotiated the Geneva Accord27 for two neighboring states; I
think of a few other voices there who have proposed the establishment of
a binational secular state (an idea already bruited about by some cultural
Zionists in the 1920s). These are positions difficult to reconcile, but they
open the way to fruitful communication and negotiation, in contrast with
the repetitious and belligerent arguments you usually hear.
So that’s my current stance, using the Israel-Palestine case as an
example. I try to have a realistic understanding of the comedies and trag-
edies of history and the present-day world; but it’s a realism informed
by a passionate interest in human activities and by hope—I’d like to say
a belief—that there will always be some persons who will speak against
injustice, indifference, cruelty, and oppression.
DC: You say you’ve recently experienced this displacement, or at least
you’ve in some way theorized or assimilated it for yourself. But haven’t the
Hopes 165
have even more oil and to change the rest of the world according to its
own image.
DC: Messianically?
NZD: Absolutely, a sort of messianism of the Right.
DC: But then why do you think that right now there’s this equally strong
resurgence of providential beliefs allied with a sense of universalism that
runs to the highest levels of power in the White House? Why does this re-
surgence show up now, at the moment when we notice that other cultural
or religious systems are similarly affected, from Islam to Hinduism and
Judaism? Who can explain this shift towards exclusivity among the great
world religions, a shift that bears an obvious resemblance to confessional
trends in the sixteenth century?
In Christian Europe from 1500 to 1650, we can argue there came
into play, along with the hope to return to a faith purified of abuses and
pollutants, a faith similar to that preached at the time of the early church,
an anguish toward death heightened by the foreboding that the Last Judg-
ment was at hand, an anguish sustained since the last decades of the fif-
teenth century by the assurance that the world was more rife with sin than
ever before, that it was old and near its end, and that it was going to
be subjected to the awesome justice of a jealous God. The emergence of
alternative beliefs, then the process of building rival confessions within
which the Roman Church reached its own sense of completion, can all
be understood as related modes of response to eschatological distress.
Be it a response by means of interiorizing this apocalyptical eschatology
and then by imagining the redemptive involvement in the battle during the
end times against evil. It’s the response of German spiritual radicalism,
with Karlstadt33 or Müntzer,34 the Anabaptists in Frisia or Westphalia,35 or
the Catholic faithful in France during the Wars of Religion. The certainty
to participate in the last battle against Satan’s minions, the assurance to
realize or advance one’s salvation through violence and exclusion made
it possible to quiet the conscience, to overcome distress or to sublimate
it. Be it the response that came with the shift toward an imagination not
haunted by such fears of salvation, with for example Calvin’s ideas that
overcame the dread of the Last Judgment and that instead enabled Chris-
tians to rediscover, by breaking with the papacy, a serenity in the convic-
tion to live one’s daily life to advance the triumph of the Reformed religion
168 Chapter 7
DC: A tension that’s long since disappeared. We are both very far from
but also still close to Max Weber who, faced with a world that he considered
disenchanted as a result of the shift from the spiritual to a mechanistic or
cold objectivity, faced with modern societies devoted to the cult of materi-
alism and the search to control knowledge, reintroduced eschatology as a
possibility in the future, after the time of the Entzauberung [demystification].
But in a dramatic sense of dread. It seemed possible to him that rational-
ization, once it had purged all “final and sublime values,” could one day
bring about its own critical fate in the time of the “iron cage.” It was as if
Max Weber were haunted by the coming of a time marked by an unspoken,
unapparent nihilism in which sense and points of reference became lost. He
talked about, building upon Nietzsche,38 the “depersonalization,” the “loss
of the soul,” and the “dehumanization” of modern humanity. It seems that
this collision between the cult of worldly things and the Bible that you’ve de-
scribed to us comes from a calibrated accommodation in which rationality
and irrationality, the preoccupation with plenty and the belief in a final end
become dependent on each other, in which that which is the same becomes
other, in which all borders disappear.
NZD: In the evangelical sects in the United States, there are still some
walls between the self, religion, and the world, for example in the areas of
alcohol and sexuality. George W. Bush had a serious drinking problem
till he was forty; through religious conversion, he decided he was a sinner,
broke with alcohol, and began to perceive himself as a Christian to whom
God had entrusted a mission. Before 9/11 there were also “lesser demons”
that the evangelical movement wanted to crush, like homosexuality, for-
nication, and abortion. After the destruction of the World Trade Center,
there was the great anti-Christian Satan and the “axis of evil” against
America. Now Bush could have the Christian certitude that he was in a
position to remake the world.
DC: Does Judaism in this context reflect a resurgence and serve as a re-
minder of this belief in the end times?
NZD: With the Jews, the eschatological spirit has a different character
in different places. The Jewish advisors, the Neocons39 so influential in
the circle around Bush, are not to my knowledge part of orthodox move-
ments. Rather they are admirers of the philosophy of power known as
“decisionism” [Dezisionismus], associated with the German philosopher
170 Chapter 7
for inspiring the Muslim holy warriors of our own day—and in particular
Osama bin Laden and his disciples. It’s interesting that the eschatology of
Osama bin Laden, like the right-wing eschatology of George W. Bush and
company, accepts and uses the world capitalist economy and private or fam-
ily property, even while fulminating against the materialism of the West.
DC: If I follow you, there would be both similarity and a distance in the
rapid expansion of these worldviews today.
NZD: These various holy warriors on the different sides draw examples
from the past to support their aspirations for the seizure of power and the
wealth of the golden age. Along with the eschatological metaphors, they
choose the model eras that they’d like to restore. For example, there were
the many articles in the American press citing Condoleezza Rice,44 secu-
rity advisor to George W. Bush, before the invasion of Iraq. In her view, the
U.S. must relive in Iraq the inspiring events after World War II, when the
polities of Germany and Japan were restructured under the aegis of the
United States. But historians specializing in the study of international re-
lations and of the Middle East have pointed out—including in the popular
press—how different these situations and periods are, and have recalled
the failures of British policies in Iraq after the First World War. But to
no avail. And even the historians are not in accord: one or two of them,
dazzled by proximity to power, have given Bush their approbation.
DC: It’s therefore the myth that history repeats itself that, for you, ap-
pears to pose another risk in our contemporary world. But doesn’t it seem
here that there would be a basic problem of discrepancy between the his-
torical awareness of historians and the type of awareness of those engaged
in political action?
NZD: Of course there’s a difference, but this doesn’t mean the historian
has nothing of use to say. Since the nineteenth century, no historian would
advance the thesis that there are exact repetitions in history: even if Con-
doleezza Rice had found a good analogy between the past and the present,
unexpected events, contingencies, and surprises would end up complicating
matters. When a historian responds to projects and declarations of public
figures and political leaders—which can be a very good idea—he or she must
do so in the spirit of a responsible scholar with public commitment, not in
the spirit of an astrologer who flatters a prince or sultan.
172 Chapter 7
DC: I remain attached to the principle that historical research need not
be connected to contemporary affairs. Shouldn’t this principle shape the
past that the historian studies as a discrete period in time so it becomes
but an artificial world, a virtual reality certainly based on the sources, but
one virtual reality among many, whose claim to uniqueness rests on a
combination of historical logic, documents, and the lack of any internal
contradictions? Even if, as you said earlier, it’s possible to offer the reader
mirrors that can aid understanding present-day facts through historical
ones, wouldn’t the one lesson to learn from the past be distrust of all ap-
peals to logic? Wouldn’t it rather be a sense of historical irony that always
comes undone whenever anyone has tried to think of it as a total world
that can be articulated so it becomes consciously immediate? Wouldn’t
the one lesson to learn from history be that history is haphazard, uncon-
trollable, indeterminable, wanton, and pointless—even maddening—such
as it was understood after Boethius45 by people in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance in the image of Fortuna turning her wheel in ways absurd
rather than comprehensible? To such a point as to render the historian’s
work a matter of chance, hypothetical, or inwardly self-critical!
It seems to me that historical writing must be built around struc-
tures and conditions that suggest facts; that it’s a kind of mind game that
works in terms of possibilities and variables, a game of artificial constructs
meant to lead to a predetermined image. For me, it’s all a game. If we
concede that research into the past ends up as some kind of game, it’s
a game in which the historian tries to travel back to a time not his or her
own. It’s time indelibly inscribed by a “gap,” in the linguistic sense of the
term, that obviously forces us to accept that history can’t help us under-
stand the present or the future. Historical analysis also relies on proof that
can’t but be dependent on suggestive influences from the present, even as
it condemns using the past to advance an agenda. This doesn’t imply that
we pursue history simply for its own sake, for when it’s all said and done,
making history is a way to affirm freedom. It affirms and models a way of
life that questions the status quo and the very modalities of understanding
or reading the past. It’s a kind of history that becomes a stylistic exercise
that artfully couches its appeal as a call for freedom of thought based
upon a critical consideration of the sources. But all of this must recognize
that a particular historical analysis is just one possibility among many oth-
ers … Thus beyond any didactic purpose …
Hopes 173
NZD: I think your doubts are leading you too far. One of the lessons of
history is, in a celebrated phrase of Max Weber as reworked by the won-
derful late Robert Merton,46 “the unintended consequences of purposive
social action.” [laughter] This notion leaves a place for the contingent and
the planned, for chance and coherence, for the mysterious and the expli-
cable in history. The links between the past and the present are inevitable
in our work as historians, and in the best of cases—when one is conscious
of and conscientious in regard to this back and forth—desirable, as Marc
Bloch maintained long ago. The past can deepen our understanding of
the present—our own personal present and our public and political life—
by its differences and by its approximate similarities. History offers us no
well-defined or precise projects for improvement, but offers us many possi-
bilities—fascinating for the play of our intellect, offering us irony, delight,
indignation, but also helpful for our look at our own society.
DC: Doesn’t historical analysis, to the extent it detects or recognizes the
possibilities of history, which it studies, recounts, and even accepts, come
close to becoming a work of literature? History is a close cousin of po-
etry, where a sudden passage always begins anew because of the nature
of words and the imagination; it’s a form of repetitious self-learning of a
freedom rooted in language and various related intellectual pursuits; it’s
what a number of works on rationalist and positivist epistemology ignore,
clearing away from the field of analysis all possible heuristic exercises in
language and instead building its case on the basis of a tentative move
towards a final, fixed kind of knowledge. But don’t you share this mistrust
with respect to any rhetoric of certainty?
NZD: To be sure I blur the boundary between poetry and history as Ar-
istotle established it so rigidly centuries ago: “the historian relates what
happened, the poet what might happen…”47 Historians, including Thu-
cydides,48 often consider the plausible and the possible—explicitly or im-
plicitly—in evaluating documents, texts, and reports, especially when there
are conflicts and differences among them. I’m drawing on “the possible”
right now in trying to draw meaning from the silences around al-Hasan
al-Wazzān, the silences in contemporary sources about him (where I might
have expected observations), and omissions in his own writings. As I said
before, I’m trying to turn these silences into a plus, a silence that signifies,
that says something about the place of the man in the society around him
and about his own personal practices. To speak of what is possible here, I
174 Chapter 7
DC: If you had to end our conversation with a few words that sum up all
of your research, what would you say?
NZD: Historical research has been for me an arena of joy and intellec-
tual passion. I always feel a shiver of anticipation when I enter an archive
or a rare book collection: what am I going to find? Is the slave woman
I’m looking for finally going to show up on the registers of a plantation?
Might I even find her signature, left by her for some special reason and
precious to me as a sign that she existed and really could write, as her
lover claimed she could? What luck I’ve had to read so many interesting
accounts, some moving me to laughter, others curdling my blood, some
surprising, others familiar. This thirst for history and the struggle to un-
derstand the ways of living and thinking in the past have led me toward
several methodologies—social analysis, anthropological questioning, liter-
ary techniques—and toward several settings, France always, but places very
far from France. Over the years I’ve enlarged my categories of analysis,
and not only in adding the category of gender. To start off, I was more
centered on dualities and polarities, like domination/resistance, Catholic/
Protestant. By now I stress equally the diverse forms of exchange, mixing,
and crossing. My book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, which has
meant a great deal to me, was a culmination of this double approach.
Actually, I sometimes feel that my historical research has come
to me as a gift, a gift from people of the past and from other histori-
ans, dead and living. The gift imposes on me the obligation to recount
their lives and their worlds with responsibility—not recount them exactly
as they would have done, but in being ever attentive to their statements
and their claims. For me this responsibility involves the writing of a his-
tory that offers no direct lessons—a dead end—but that is a critical history,
which displaces the historian herself and her readers. This history requires
both closeness and difference, and it makes affirmations about the past
with the certainty that they can be questioned and modified. This his-
tory reveals the possibilities of the past—admirable, troubling, irritating,
astonishing—and as such, they encourage us to think of the possibilities
in the present and future. For me, the possibilities of the past invite a
commitment to humanity and offer a ray of hope for the future.
Paris/Toronto
September 2003
176 Chapter 7
Notes
1. Svetlana Alpers (1936–) is a major innovator in conceptualizing artistic practice, the viewer’s
experience, and the history of art. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century appeared
in 1983, and among her subsequent works is Rembrandt’s Enterprise (1988), Tiepolo and the Pictorial
Intelligence (with Michael Baxandall) (1994), and The Vexations of Art: Velasquez and Others (2007).
2. William Bouwsma (1923–2004) was an eminent scholar of Renaissance European culture
and past president of the American Historical Association. His major books include Venice and the
Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation (1968), and The
Waning of the Renaissance (1550–1640) (2000).
3. Randolph Starn (1939–) is a historian and cultural critic who specializes in late medieval and
Renaissance Italian history. He has written, among other studies, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme
of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (1982) and Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600
(with Lauren Partridge; 1992). He served as director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities at
the University of California.
4. Gene A. Brucker (1924–) is a leading scholar of the history of Renaissance Florence. His
books include Renaissance Florence (1983) and The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (2008).
5. Lynn Hunt (1945–) is an eminent historian of the French Revolution, as well as cultural and
gender history. A past president of the American Historical Association, she teaches at UCLA and has
written a number of major studies, including Politics, Culture, Class in the French Revolution (1984) and,
more recently, Inventing Human Rights (2007).
6. Paula Fass (1947–) is an expert on the history of the family and childhood. A professor at
Berkeley, she has written The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1977) and, more
recently, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (2006). She served as general
editor of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood (2003).
7. Lawrence Stone (1919–99) was an English historian of early modern Britain best known for
The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (1965) and The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
(1977).
8. Ruth Rosen (1945–) is a historian of American women and a journalist, who was for many
years professor of history at the University of California at Davis. The books referenced are The Lost
Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (1983) and The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s
Movement Changed America (2000).
9. The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies was established in 1968 to promote
excellence in scholarship and the teaching of history at Princeton University.
10. Robert Darnton (1939–) is a leading scholar of eighteenth-century French cultural history
and the history of the book. Among his many books are The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in
French Cultural History (1984) and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995).
11. Anthony Grafton (1950–) is a prolific scholar of the classical tradition from the Renaissance
to the eighteenth century. His books include Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in the
Age of Science, 1450–1800 (1991) and, more recently, Worlds Made by Words (2009).
12. Carl Schorske (1915–) is a historian of modern European cultural and political history.
His Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) won the Pulitzer Prize. He was among the initial
recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.
13. The Yugoslav Wars were a series of violent conflicts between ethnic groups in the former
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1990s and 2001. The conflicts in Africa include
the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the civil war and massacres in Sudan from the late 1990s to
the present.
14. Nelson Mandela (1918–) is an antiapartheid activist and for many years leader of the African
National Congress. Long imprisoned by the apartheid government of South Africa, he became South
Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994.
15. Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was an Austro-Hungarian intellectual and social thinker, who
in 1933 immigrated to London and then to North America. His new vision of economic history, in
which gift economies were the major form of exchange for centuries, was put forth in his influential
Hopes 177
who established a communal society of “saints” in Wieuwerd in the Netherlands. By the end of the
seventeenth century, the Wieuwerd community had dissolved, though individual former members
carried on the spirit of Labadie’s teaching.
31. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, began as a Christian Dissenter movement in seventeenth-
century England. They advocated pacifism and were among the first groups to call for the abolition
of slavery.
32. In 1994, Israel began construction of a security wall around the West Bank.
33. Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541) was a German theologian during the Protestant Reformation.
34. Thomas Müntzer (1488–1525) was a radical German theologian during the early Protestant
Reformation, arguing against Luther’s doctrine of the baptism of infants. He also supported the
peasants during the uprising of the Peasants’ War (1524–25), during which Müntzer lost his life.
35. Anabaptism began as a radical movement in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation;
among their direct descendants today are the Amish, Hutterites, and Mennonites.
36. Manifest Destiny first appeared as a term in the 1830s and reflected the belief that the
territorial expansion of the United States across the continent was inevitable and divinely ordained.
The belief was sometimes expanded to include countries north and south of the United States.
37. Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) was president of the United States between 1912 and
1920. In 1918, he articulated what came to be known as the Fourteen Points as a basis for a peace
settlement on democratic principles following World War I. It was only partially realized in the
Treaty of Versailles (1919).
38. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a major German philosopher and classical philologist
who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality.
39. Neocons are exponents of neoconservatism, an American political philosophy that
developed after the 1960s. It repudiates the tenets of modern liberalism and advocates the use of
American military power to advance free-market capitalism and democracy.
40. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) was a German political theorist and jurist known for his hard-
boiled writings on the nature of the state, power, and political violence. He was professor of law at
the University of Berlin from 1933 until Germany’s defeat in World War II.
41. Mea Sharim is one of the oldest neighborhoods in West Jerusalem and today is populated
mainly by Haredi Jews, the most conservative wing of Orthodox Judaism, also found in Brooklyn,
Paris, and other places around the world.
42. Specifically verse 18:94, which reads “They said: ‘O Zul-qarnain! the Gog and Magog [people]
do great mischief on earth: shall we then render thee tribute in order that thou mightest erect a
barrier between us and them?’” Yusuf Al English translation (1934).
43. Suleyman I (1494–1566) ruled the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power.
44. Condoleezza Rice (1954–) is a political scientist and specialist of the former Soviet Union
who became national security advisor to President Bush between 2000 and 2004, after which she
became secretary of state until 2009.
45. Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480–524 or 525) was a Christian philosopher best
known for his The Consolation of Philosophy, which he cast as a dialogue between himself and a beautiful
woman representing philosophy. She teaches him not to put any trust in the vagaries of fortune but
instead to place his faith in God.
46. Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) was a prominent American sociologist at Columbia Univer-
sity. The quote comes from his influential article by the same name that appeared in the American
Sociological Review 1/6 (1936): 894–904.
47. Aristotle (384–322 bce), the Greek philosopher, discussed this point in part 9 of his Poetics.
48. Thucydides (460–395 bce), the Greek historian, considered these problems in his History
of the Peloponnesian War.
49. Amy Clampitt (1920–94) was an American poet and author. The poem appeared in A
Silence Opens (1994).
50. Khionrea the Huron was brought by her parents to the Ursuline convent for instruction
in French and Algonquian, and in writing. She received the name Thérèse upon her conversion to
Catholicism around 1640.
Hopes 179
51. Robert Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre”; and Natalie Zemon Davis, “On the
Lame,” in “AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre,” American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (June
1988): 572–603.
Epilogue
Six years have elapsed since Denis Crouzet and I concluded these conver-
sations. The political landscape has changed in both our lands. We have
both published works whose themes are anticipated in our exchange:
Denis his brilliant study of Christopher Columbus, whom he portrayed as
“a herald of the apocalypse”; I, my Trickster Travels, where I placed al-Hasan
al-Wazzān between the worlds of Islam and Christianity. I turned eighty a
year ago and chat with students about their doctoral dissertations on my
parlor couch; Denis in his mid-fifties is busy training a new generation of
young historians at the Sorbonne. Despite the decades that separate us, I
feel a kinship in our ethical and scholarly goals, a complicity deepened by
our discussions.
A year ago, too, Barack Obama was elected the president of the
United States, an event totally unpredictable during the time of our con-
versations and, indeed, still chancy until the votes were finally counted
and we knew that the election had not been stolen again and that Obama
had won. So was ushered in one of those “moments of hope” in history,
about which I spoke with Denis, here a very great moment, felt around the
world. Now a year later, we are enmeshed in the old order of things—Iraq,
Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the recession dropped on us by the bankers,
the American health-care crisis, climate change, and more. Much of this
was inherited by Obama and is part of the tough structure of institutions
of power, infused as they are by greed and aggression. But the president’s
own decisions must bear part of the blame: some could be expected from
his campaign speeches (though he had opposed the invasion of Iraq, he
always said he wanted to intensify the war in Afghanistan); others come as
more of a surprise (concessions he has made in perpetuating the uncon-
stitutional treatment of Guantánamo Bay prisoners).
Yet the moment of hope is not an illusion: it stems from events
and observations that can shape the possibilities and difficulties ahead.
Barack Obama’s life and family—his graduate-student anthropologist,
180
Epilogue 181
socially engaged white mother, his Kenyan father, his Indonesian step-
father, his African-American lawyer wife (she was an undergraduate at
Princeton!)—still confirm for us the multiple sites and sources of world
leadership in the early twenty-first century. From the pages of Dreams from
My Father still emerges the community organizer deeply committed to the
black residents of Chicago’s South Side: we can urge upon the president
the strong needs of the poor and unemployed so that their voices, which
he once headed, will not be drowned out by the Wall Street advisors he
has selected. In fact, it seemed to me that I was hearing that young activist
on the radio today as the president defended the current health-care bill,
with its public option, and warned us not to believe what the insurance
companies were saying against it.
Obama’s great speeches still offer a vision of what we might strive
for: his truth-telling speech in March 2008 on the wounds of slavery and
racism in America and the need for alliance between white and black; his
Cairo speech in June 2009, where he recast the relation between America
and the world of Islam, noting the overlap between the two worlds, since
there were many Muslims living in the United States, and calling for com-
mon endeavor toward shared goals.
And finally, there is the enduring fact that American voters chose
an African-American to be president of the United States, an event many
of us never thought we would see in our lifetime. That event reminds us
that even in the face of situations fraught with violence and passionate
and irreconcilable claims, we must keep our ears pricked for those still
saying “Yes, we can,” and trying to nudge the situation toward the better.
In my own life, too, there was a deeper relation with the world
of Islam in these past six years, as I completed my study of al-Hasan al-
Wazzān (Leo Africanus) and published it as Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-
Century Muslim Between Worlds. I had been struggling with the ending of
the book during my conversations with Denis on two counts. One was
the question of al-Wazzān’s apparent failure to continue as an author af-
ter his return from Europe to North Africa and to Islam. In the end, I
offered a cluster of possibilities: an enduring uprootedness drawn from
the practices he developed to live between worlds during his Italian years;
his failure to find patrons and listeners for a detailed travel account that
would have conversion to Christianity as a necessary story line—and told
by an apostate who had for a time been in the service of pope and cardinal.
Right after Trickster Travels came off the press, I learned while lecturing in
182 Epilogue
Istanbul that there were a few captivity narratives written by Turkish Mus-
lims in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, but they never admit-
ted to conversion to Christianity (I was able to add this reference to later
editions and translations of my book!).
I compensated for al-Wazzān’s silence in North Africa by stressing
the balanced tone of the book he wrote in Europe, as he talked of Islam
and wars between Muslims and Christians. He ridiculed some forms of
popular piety as inefficacious and condemned harshly the Shia “heresy”
in Persia, but his description of his Sunni religion was informative and of-
ten appreciative, yet not partisan—an unusual achievement for a writer on
either side of the Mediterranean in those years. I left it to a seventeenth-
century Spanish inquisitor to make the point for me in the last sentences
of the main body of my book: on the title page of a copy of al-Wazzān’s
Description of Africa in the National Library in Madrid, the outraged cleric
had written “Prohibited in full.”
Denis and I had also discussed how I would shape the relation be-
tween François Rabelais and al-Wazzān, important to me as a final bridge-
building across the Mediterranean. I decided to follow my outraged in-
quisitor with an epilogue on the two men. I showed how Rabelais, during
his own visits to Italy, could easily have heard of the African “Giovanni
Leone” and his manuscripts, and suggested possible faint echoes of the
Africa book in Rabelais’s great novel. But much more important were
the parallels between the two men, parallels that Denis and I had talked
about: the truth-telling role they gave to trickster figures; their distaste
for world-conquerors of all religions; and their quest for grounds for com-
mon agreement. I had also wondered with Denis whether I might ever
again resort to an imaginary dialogue with my subjects, as I did in the
prologue to Women on the Margins. I didn’t quite do that in the last pages
of Trickster Travels, but I did imagine what might have happened if Rabe-
lais and al-Wazzān had been able to meet—and while I was at it, I added
al-Wazzān’s Jewish collaborator, Jacob Mantino, to the party. Who knows
whether I hit it right? But I wanted to end the book with a moment of
peace and laughter.
Several times in my exchanges with Denis, I found myself saying
that I wrote about historical figures or subjects that in some sense “need-
ed” me, or to whom I felt a special responsibility. I felt this way about
al-Hasan al-Wazzān and his books. This is not because Leo Africanus is ig-
nored by other scholars; he is not—some splendid writing on him has been
Epilogue 183
184
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 185
Translated into French by Dominique Peters (Paris: Payot, 2007). Translated into
German by Gennaro Ghiradelli (Berlin: Wagenbach, 2008). Translated into Italian
by Maria Gregorio (Rome: Laterza, 2008). Translated into Spanish by Aitana Guia
(Valencia: Publicaciones de la Universitat de València, 2008). Translated into
Korean by Cha-Seop Kwak (Seoul: Purnyoksa, 2010). Translated into Turkish by
Ayşen Anatol (Istanbul: Kultur Yayinlari, 2010).
Contributions to Books
“The Protestant Printing Workers of Lyons in 1514.” In Aspects de la propagande religieuse,
edited by Gabrielle Bethoud et al., 247–57. Geneva: E. Droz, 1957.
“The 1592 Edition of Estienne’s ‘Apologie pour Hérodote.’” In Aspects de la propagande
religieuse, edited by Gabrielle Berthoud et al., 373–76. Geneva: E. Droz, 1957.
“Publisher Guillaume Rouillé, Businessman and Humanist.” In Editing Sixteenth-Century
Texts, edited by R. J. Schoeck, 72–112. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966;
reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1978.
“City Women and Religious Change in Sixteenth-Century France.” In A Sampler of
Women’s Studies, edited by Dorothy McGuigan, 17–45. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Center for Continuing Education of Women, 1973.
Reprinted in Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), chap. 3.
188 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
“Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion.” In The Pursuit of Holiness in
Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion: Papers from the University of Michigan Conference,
edited by Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman, 484–514. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974.
“The Historian and Popular Culture.” In The Wolf and the Lamb: Popular Culture in France
from the Old Regime to the Twentieth Century, edited by Jacques Beauroy, Marc Bertrand,
and Edward T. Gargan, 9–16. Saratoga, CA: Anima Libri, 1977.
“Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820.” In Beyond Their Sex:
Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labalme, 153–82. New
York: New York University Press, 1980.
Translated into French by Sylvie Deleris as “Genre féminin et genre littéraire:
Les femmes et l’écriture historique, 1400–1820.” In Histoires d’historiennes, edited
by Nicole Pellegrin 21–43 (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-
Etienne, 2006).
“Women in the Arts Mécaniques in Sixteenth-Century Lyon.” In Lyon et l’Europe: Hommes
et sociétés; Mélanges d’histoire offerts à Richard Gascon, edited by Françoise Bayard et al.,
1:139–67. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980.
Expanded and revised as “Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century Lyon,”
Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 46–80. Revised and reprinted in Women and
Work in Preindustrial Europe, edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt, 167–90 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986). Reprinted in The Other Side of Western Civilization,
4th edition, edited by Stanley Chodorow and Marci Sortor, 396–408 (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992; 5th ed. 2000). German translation of revised
version in Arbeit, Frömmigkeit und Eigenstinn. Studien zur historischen Kultur forschung,
edited by Richard van Dülmen, 43–74, 304–10 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990).
“Charivari, honneur et communauté à Lyon et à Genève au XVIIe siècle.” In Le Charivari:
Actes de la table ronde organisée par le CNRS et l’EHESS, Paris (25 avril 1977), edited by
Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, 207–20. Paris: Mouton, 1981.
In English as “Charivari, Honor, and Community in Seventeenth-Century Lyon
and Geneva.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural
Performance, edited by John A. MacAloon, 42–57 (Philadelphia: Ishe Press, 1984).
Translated in Spanish edition of Society and Culture (1993), chap. 3. Translated into
Japanese in Shiso.
“From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures.” In Reformation Europe: A Guide to
Research, edited by Steven Ozment, 321–41. St. Louis, MO: Center for Reformation
Research, 1982.
Translated into French in Religion populaire, religion des clercs? edited by B. Lacroix
and J. Simard, 393–416 (Quebec: IQRC, 1984).
“Le monde de l’imprimerie humaniste: Lyon.” In Histoire de l’édition française, vol. 1, Le
livre conquérant du Moyen Age au milieu du 17e siècle, edited by Henri-Jean Martin and
Roger Chartier, 255–78. Paris: Promodis, 1983.
“Introduction.” In Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern
Marriage in Medieval France, translated by Barbara Bray, vii–xv. New York: Pantheon,
1983.
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 189
“‘The Sense of History’: A Case Study.” In Historians and Filmmakers: Toward Collaboration,
edited by Barbara Abrash and Janet Sternburg, 28–39. New York: Institute for
Research in History, 1983.
“Scandale à l’Hôtel Dieu (Lyon, 1537–1543),” translated by Alain Croix. In La France
d’Ancien Régime. Etudes réunies en l’honneur de Pierre Goubert, vol. 1, edited by Alain
Croix, Jean Jacquart, and François Lebrun, 175–88. Toulouse: Privat, 1984.
Translated into German in Davis, Frauen und Gesellschaft (1986), 93–107, 157–59.
Translated into Spanish in Davis, Society and Culture (1993), chap. 5.
“Women’s History as Women’s Education.” In Women’s History as Women’s Education:
Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis and Joan Wallach Scott from a Symposium in Honor of Jill
and John Conway, Smith College, April 17, 1985, 7–22. Northampton, MA: Smith
College Archives and the Sophia Smith Collection, 1985.
Reprinted in Smith Voices: Selected Works by Smith College Women, 35–47
(Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1990).
“Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Early Modern France.” In Reconstructing Individualism:
Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, edited by Thomas C. Heller,
Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellberry, 53–63, 333–35. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1986.
Translated into German in Davis, Frauen und Gesellschaft (1986), 7–18, 133–35.
“Scoperta e rinnovamento nella storia delle donne.” In Profil di donne: Mio Immagine Realtà
fra Medioevo et Età Contemporanea, edited by B. Vetere and Paolo Renzi, 303–22.
Università degli Studie di Lecce, Dipartimento di Scienza Storiche e Sociali, Saggi
e Ricerche 19. Galatina: Congedo Editor, 1986.
“Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography.” In The
Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s “Life of Judah,”
translated and edited by Mark Cohen, 50–70. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1988.
Reprinted in Essays in Jewish Historiography, edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert, 103–
18. History and Theory 27 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
Translated into Italian by Caterina Grendi Baglietto, Quaderni Storici 64 (April
1987): 39–60. Translated into German by Wolfgang Kaiser, Freibeuter 54 (1992):
9–32.
“Life-Saving Stories.” In A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier and R.
Howard Bloch, 139–44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Translated into French in De la littérature française, edited by Denis Hollier and R.
Howard Bloch, 136–42 (Paris: Bordas Editeur, 1993).
“Donne e politica.” In Dal Rinascimento all’età Moderna, edited by Davis and Farge, 201–
19. Vol. 3 of Storia delle Donne in Occidente, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle
Perrot. Rome: Laterza, 1991.
Translated into French by Pascale de Mézamat, 175–90 (Paris: Plon, 1991).
Translated into Dutch by Margreet Blok, 157–70 (Amsterdam: Agon, 1992).
Translated into Spanish by Marco Aurelio Galmarini, 211–27 (Madrid: Taurus,
1992). Original in English as “Women and Politics,” in Davis and Farge, Renaissance
and Enlightenment Paradoxes, vol. 3 of A History of Women in the West (1993), 167–83.
190 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
“Beyond Evolution: Comparative History and Its Goals.” In Swiat historii: Prace z
metodologii historii i historii historiografii dedykowane Jerzemu Topolskiemu, edited by
Wojciecha Wrozsaka, 149–57. Pozna: Instytut Historii, 1998.
“Neue Perspektiven für die Geschlechterforschung in der Frühen Neuzeit,” translated
by Josefine Danneberg. In Geschlechter Perspektiven: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit,
edited by Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel, 16–41. Königstein: Ulrike Helmer
Verlag, 1998.
“Displacing and Displeasing: Writing about Women in the Early Modern Period.” In
Attending to Early Modern Women, edited by Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff,
25–37. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.
“Who Owns History?” In Historical Perspectives on Memory, edited by Anne Ollila, 19–34.
Helsinki: Studia Historica, 1999. This essay is a revised and considerably enlarged
version of a paper that appeared in Perspectives 34, no. 8 (November 2006): 1, 4–6.
“Global History, Many Stories.” In Eine Welt—Eine Geschichte? 43: Deutscher Historikertag in
Aachen, 26. bis 29. September 2000, 373–80. Munich: Berichtsband, 2001.
Translated into German in Lettre International 51 (Winter 2000): 86–88.
“Polarities, Hybridities: What Strategies for Decentring?” In Decentring the Renaissance:
Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700, edited by Germaine
Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny, 19–32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2001.
“Glikl bas Judah Leib—ein jüdisches, ein europäisches Leben.” In Die Hamburger Kauffrau
Glikl: Jüdische Existenz in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Monika Richarz, 27–48.
Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 2001.
“Foreword.” In Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany, by Norbert
Schindler, ix–xiv. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
“Voices.” In Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, 2 vols., by Frédéric Brenner, 2:38, 56, 62, 74, 99.
New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
“Conclusion.” In Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, edited by Michael Bonner,
Mine Ener, and Amy Singer, 315–24. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.
“Preface.” In Martin Luther: Üks inimsaatus, by Lucien Febvre, 7–8. Tallinn: Varrak Publishers,
2003.
“Clifford Geertz on Time and Change.” In Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues, edited by
Richard A. Shweder and Byron Good, 38–44. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005.
“Conclusion.” In Autour de Polanyi: Vocabulaires, théories et modalités des échanges, edited by
Philippe Clancier, F. Joannès, Pierre Rouillard, and Aline Tenu, 283–90. Paris: De
Boccard, 2005.
“Henri Hauser: Historien, Citoyen, Pionnier.” In Henri Hauser (1866–1946): Humaniste,
Historien, Républicain, edited by Séverine-Antigone Marin and Georges-Henri
Soutou, 13–23. Paris: PUPS, 2006.
“What Is Universal about History?” In Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und
Theorien, edited by Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, 15–20.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006.
192 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
Translated into Italian, Quaderni Storici 41, no. 3 (December 2006): 1–7. Translated
into German, Historische Anthropologie 15 (2007): 126–31.
“‘Leo Africanus.’” In The New Encyclopedia of Africa, edited by John Middleton and Joseph
C. Miller, 3:281–82. Detroit: Thomason Gale, 2007.
“Stedman’s Suriname Book in Sweden.” In Vänskap over Gränser: En Festskrift till Eva
Österberg, edited by Kenneth Johansson and Marie Lindstedt Cronberg, 77–98.
Lund: Förtfattarna, 2007.
“Feminism and a Scholarly Friendship,” with Jill Ker Conway. In Minds of Our Own:
Inventing Feminist Scholarship in Canada and Quebec, 1966–76, edited by Wendy
Roberts, 78–88. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008.
“About an Inventory: A Conversation Between Natalie Zemon Davis and Peter N. Miller,”
with Peter N. Miller. In Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta
van Varick, edited by Deborah L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller, 117–29. New York:
Bard Graduate Center, New York Historical Society; New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009. Also available as a BGC film, directed by Han Vu, at http://www.bgc.
bard.edu.
“Le conte de l’amphibie et les ruses d’al-Hasan al-Wazzān.” In Léon l’Africain, edited by
François Pouillon, 311–23. Paris: Karthala and IISMM, 2009.
“La Cosmographia de Afriqua de Jean-Léon l’Africain.” In Histoire du monde au XVe siècle,
edited by Patrick Boucheron, 627–32. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2009.
“Epilogue.” In Atlantic Diasporas. Jews, Conversos, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism,
1500–1800, edited by Richad Kagan and Philip Morgan, 213–17. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2009.
“Conclusion.” In Inventing Collateral Damage: Civilian Casualties, War, and Empire, edited by
Stephen J. Rockel and Rick Halpern, 329–38. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009.
Articles
“On the Protestantism of Benoît Rigaud.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 17 (1955):
246–51.
“Holbein’s Pictures of Death and the Reformation at Lyons.” Studies in the Renaissance 3
(1956): 97–130.
“Christophe Plantin’s Childhood at Saint Just.” De Gulden Passer 35 (1957): 107–20.
“Mathematicians in the Sixteenth-Century French Academies: Some Further Evidence.”
Renaissance News 11 (1958): 3–10.
“Sixteenth-Century French Arithmetics on the Business Life.” Journal of the History of
Ideas 21 (1960): 18–48.
“The Good Name of Martin Ponthus.” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 22 (1960):
287–93.
“Peletier and Beza Part Company.” Studies in the Renaissance 11 (1964): 188–222.
“Strikes and Salvation at Lyons.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965): 48–64.
Reprinted in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, chap. 1.
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 193
Bilder schrieben Geschichte: Der Historiker im Kino, edited by Rainer Rother, 37–64
(Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1991).
“A Symposium: Feminist Book Reviewing,” with Julia Penelope, Marge Wolf, Cynthia
Neverdon-Morton, and Linda Gardiner. Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 601–22.
“History’s Two Bodies.” Presidential Address, American Historical Association. American
Historical Review 93, no. 1 (February 1988): 1–30. Translated into German by Ebba D.
Drolshagen in Der Historker als Menschenfresser: Uber den Beruf des Geschichtesschreibers,
by Fernand Braudel et al., 46–84 (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1990, 1998). Translated
into Chinese in The Challenge of Modern Historiography: The Presidential Addresses of
AHA Presidents, 1961–1988, edited by Wang Jianhua, 505–29 (Shanghai: Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences, 1990).
“‘On the Lame.’” In “AHR Forum: The Return of Martin Guerre.” American Historical
Review 93, no. 3 (June 1988): 507–603.
“Du conte et de l’histoire.” Le débat 54 (March–April 1989): 138–43.
“Women’s History: Multiple Stories.” In de Ban van het Verhall (Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschie-
denis) 11 (1990): 98–106.
“The Shapes of Social History.” Storia della Storiografia 17 (1990): 28–34. Translated into
Spanish by Ferrandis Garrayo, Historia Social 10 (Spring–Summer 1991): 177–82.
Translated into German in Mikro-Historie: Neue Pfade in die Sozialgeschichte, edited by
Hans Medick (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994). Translated
into Finnish in Matkoja moderniin. Lähikuvia suomalaisten elämästä, edited by
Marjatta Rahikainen, 9–17 (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallen Seura, 1996).
“Rabelais Among the Censors (1940s, 1540s).” Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 1–32.
Translated into German by Wolfgang Kaiser, Freibeuter 58 (November 1993): 33–76.
“Stories and the Hunger to Know.” Literaria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 1
(1991): 12–13. Expanded and republished in Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no 4 (Spring
1992): 159–63.
“Censorship, Silence and Resistance: The Annales during the German Occupation of
France.” Literaria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Criticism 1 (1991): 13–23. Transla-
ted into Russian in Sur un point crucial: Débat autour des “Annales,” ou: Comment écrire
l’histoire aujourd’hui et demain, edited by Yui Bessmerty, 166–83 (Moscow: Nauka,
1993). Translated into Italian, Revista di Storia della Storiografia Moderna 13, nos.
1–2 (1993): 161–81. Reprinted in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 24 (1998):
351–74; and in After History, edited by Martin Procházka, 9–31 (Prague: Litteraria
Pragensia, 2006).
“Yom Kippur in Moscow, 5750.” Radical History Review 49 (1991): 155–60.
“The Rights and Responsibilities of Historians in Regard to Historical Films and Video,”
with Daniel J. Walkowitz for the AHA Ad Hoc Committee on History and Film.
Perspectives 30, no. 6 (September 1992): 15, 17.
“Women and the World of the Annales.” History Workshop 33 (Spring 1992): 121–37. Reprinted
in The Annales School, edited by Stuart Clark, 1:203–23 (London: Routledge, 1999).
“Toward Mixtures and Margins.” In “AHR Forum: The Folklore of Industrial Society:
Popular Culture and Its Audiences.” American Historial Review 97 (1992): 1409–16.
196 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
173–90. Translated into French, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 161–62 (2006):
80–96.
“Movie or Monograph? A Historian/Filmmaker’s Perspective.” The Public Historian 25,
no. 3 (Summer 2003): 45–48.
“The Historian and Literary Uses.” Profession (2003): 21–27.
“Being Grateful to Edward Said.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 23, nos. 1–2 (2003): 3–4.
“Non-European Stories, European Listeners.” In “Berichten, Erzählen, Beherrschen.”
Special issue, Zeitsprünge Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 7 (2003): 200–219.
“Commentary.” In “Mobility in French History.” Special issue, French Historical Studies 29
(2006): 509–11.
“Remembering Aron Gurevich” [in Russian]. New Literary Review 81 (2006). Available
online at http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2006/81/.
“Els viatges d’un bergant: Un musulmà del segle XVI entre dos mons,” translated by
Aitana Guia I Conca. In “Les mirades del viatger.” Special issue, Afers 57 (2007):
295–320.
“Remembering Clifford Geertz.” History Workshop Journal 65, no. 1 (2008): 188–94.
“Le silence des archives, le renom de l’histoire.” In “Martin Guerre, retour sur une histoire
célèbre.” Special issue, Annales du Midi 120, no. 264 (Oct.–Dec. 2008): 467–83.
Translated into Portuguese in Davis, El Regresso de Martin Guerre (2009), 139–59.
“Creole Languages and Their Uses: The Example of Colonial Suriname.” Historical
Research 82 (May 2009): 268–84.
Reviews
Review of Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France, 1555–1563, by Robert M.
Kingdon. History of Ideas Newsletter 2, no. 4 (October 1956): 90–92.
Review of Le Miracle de Laon en Lannoys, edited by A. H. Chaubard. History of Ideas Newsletter
3, no. 2 (April 1957): 18–19.
Review of Le Livre du recteur de l’Académie de Genève (1559–1878), edited by S. Stelling
Michaud. Renaissance News 14 (1961): 43–45.
Review of The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, by Henri Noguères, translated by Claire
Eliane Engel. American Historical Review 68 (1962/63): 517–18.
Review of Lyons, 1473–1503: The Beginnings of Cosmopolitanism, by James B. Wadsworth.
Renaissance News 16, no. 2 (1963): 118–21.
Review of Science and the Renaissance, 2 vols., by W. P. D. Wightman. Bibliothèque d’humanisme
et renaissance 25 (1963): 433–36.
Review of Renaissance Studies, by Wallace K. Ferguson. Canadian Historical Review 45, no.
4 (1964): 344–45.
Review of The Renaissance Reconsidered: A Symposium, by Leona Gabel et al. American
Historical Review 70 (1964/65): 851–52.
198 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
Review of René de Lucinge’s Lettres sur les débuts de la Ligue (1585), edited by Alain Dufour
and Eustorg de Beaulieu; and Les Divers rapports, edited by M. A. Pegg. Renaissance
News 18 (1965): 150–52.
Review of Change in Medieval Society: Europe North of the Alps, 1050–1500, edited by Sylvia A.
Thrupp. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 31, no. 4 (1965): 608–9.
Review of Studies in Genevan Government (1536–1605), by E. William Monter. Archiv für
Reformationsgeschichte 57, nos. 1–2 (1966): 276–78.
Review of The Political Ideas of Pierre Viret, by Robert Dean Linder. Renaissance News 19, no.
4 (1966): 371–73.
Review of The Library Catalogue of Anthony Higgen, Dean of Ripon (1608–1624), edited by
Jean E. Mortimer. Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 30 (1968): 413–14.
Review of Strasbourg and the Reform: A Study in the Process of Change, by Miriam Usher
Chrisman. Journal of Modern History 40, no. 4 (December 1968): 588–91.
Review of Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572, by
Robert Kingdon. Renaissance Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1969): 54–56.
“Deforming the Reformation.” Review of Religion and Regime, by Guy E. Swanson. New
York Review of Books 12, no. 7 (April 10, 1969): 35–38.
“Missed Connections: Religion and Regime.” Review of Religion and Regime, by Guy E.
Swanson. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1971): 384–94.
Review of Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands (environs de
1520–environs de 1580), 2 vols., by Richard Gascon. American Historical Review 79,
no. 1 (February 1974): 158–61.
“Les conteurs de Montaillou.” Review of Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, by
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations 34 (1979): 61–73.
Review of The Renaissance Notion of Women: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and
Medical Science in European Intellectual Life, by Ian Maclean. Renaissance Quarterly 34,
no. 2 (1981): 211–13.
“Revolution and Revelation.” Review of The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, by
Georges Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer; and The Age of Cathedrals: Art
and Society, 980–1420, by Georges Duby, translated by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara
Thompson. New York Review of Books 31, no. 1 (2 February 1984): 32–34.
“The Harvest of Sorcery.” Review of The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi
and John Tedeschi; and La sorcière de Jasmin, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Times
Literary Supplement 221, no. 4 (24 February 1984): 179–80.
Review of The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, by Jack Goody. American
Ethnologist 12, no. 1 (1985): 149–51.
Review of Rouen during the Wars of Religion, by Philip Benedict; and The Making of a State:
Württemberg, 1593–1793, by James Allen Vann. Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1985):
327–32.
“Happy Endings.” Review of The Birth of Purgatory, by Jacques Le Goff, translated by
Arthur Goldhammer. New York Review of Books 32, no. 12 (18 July 1985): 31–33.
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 199
Interviews
Judy Coffin and Robert Harding. “Politics, Progeny and French History: An Interview with
Natalie Zemon Davis.” Radical History Review 24 (Fall 1980): 115–39. Reprinted as
“Natalie Zemon Davis,” in Visions of History: Interviews with E. P. Thompson … by Marho,
edited by Henry Abelove et al., 99–122 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Reprinted in
Italian in Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne 9, no. 3 (1983): 79–93; and Quaderni
aretini: Laboratorio di Ricerca 1 (1985): 161–88. Reprinted in German in Freibeuter 24
(1985): 65–75. Reprinted in Japanese in Rekishikatachi: Visions of History, edited by
Kazuhiko Kondo, 83–109 (Nagoya: University of Nagoya Press, 1990; 2nd ed., 1991).
Ed Benson. “Martin Guerre, the Historian and the Filmmakers: An Interview with
Natalie Zemon Davis.” Film and History 13 (September 1983): 49–65.
Marine Valensise, ed. “Una Storia da Film (e poi da Libro): Intervista a Natalie Zemon
Davis.” Problemi dell’ Informazione 10, no. 2 (April–June 1985): 245–64.
William McCleery. “Natalie Zemon Davis.” In Conversations on the Character of Princeton,
33–38, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Office of Communications, 1986.
Saskia Jansens and Anja Petrakopoulos. “Een ‘old pro’ over haar vak: Interview met
Natalie Zemon Davis.” Skript Historish Tijdschrift 12 (1990): 79–87.
Asuncion Doménch and Ana Bustelo. “Natalie Zemon Davis.” Historia 16 15, no. 176 (1990):
123–26.
Roger Adelson. “Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis.” Historian 53, no. 3 (Spring
1991): 405–22. Reprinted in Roger Adelson, Speaking of History: Conversations with
Historians, 41–60 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997).
Danielle Haase Dubosc and Éliane Viennot. “Entretien avec Natalie Zemon Davis.” In
Femmes et pouvoirs sous l’ancien régime, edited by Danielle Haase Dubosc and Éliane
Viennot, 306–9. Paris: Editions Rivages, 1991.
Monika Bernold and Andrea Elmeier. “Geschichte, Hoffnung und Selbstironie: Natalie
Zemon Davis im Gespräch.” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feminische Geschichtswissenschaft
3, no. 2 (1992): 98–105.
Antoinette Reerink. “Natalie Zemon Davis over: Vrouwen, Indianen en Politieke Correct-
heid.” Spiegel Historiael 28, no. 1 (January 1993): 30–34.
Works by Natalie Zemon Davis 201
Barbara Basting. “Natalie Zemon Davis. Das Möglische zeigen.” Du 11 (November 1993):
33–37.
Gisela van Oostveen. “‘The pleasure principle’: De inspiratie van Natalie Zemon Davis.”
Dinamiek 10, no. 1 (1993): 5–11.
Jorge Halperín. “Cuenta Historias Fascinantes Nathalie Davis.” Clarín (Buenos Aires) 49,
no. 17 (16 January 1994): 20–21.
Rebekka Habermas. “Natalie Zemon Davis. ‘In Europa liegen meine Wurzeln, und
doch bin ich hier immer noch fremd.’” In Europa entdecken: Prospekt auf eine neue
Buchreihe, 38–50. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995.
Kazuhiko Kondo, Hiroyuki Nonomiya, and Norihiko Fukui. “Natalie Zemon Davis.”
Iichiko 47 (Spring 1998): 113–27.
“‘Something Always Bubbles Up’: An interview with Natalie Zemon Davis ’59 PhD.”
Michigan Today 32, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 16–17.
Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke. “Natalie Zemon Davis.” In As muitas faces da história: Nove
entrevistas, 81–119. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2000. Translated into English in
The New History: Confessions and Conversations, 50–79 (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press;
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). Translated into Spanish in La Nueva Historia:
Nueve Entrevistas, 67–98 (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València and
Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2005). Also translated into Chinese
and Korean.
“‘Forschung ist westlich dominiert’: Mit Natalie Zemon Davis sprach Simone Meier.”
Tages-Anzeiger (6 May 2002): 57.
Joan Lluís Palos. “‘Me interesa la vida de las mujeres normales’: Entrevista a Natalie Z.
Davis.” La Vanguardia (28 January 2004): 14–15.
“Natalie Zemon Davis: An e-mail interview with Martin Lyons and Monica Azzolini.”
History Australia 2, no. 3 (2005): 91.1–91.10.
“Babelis Nėra Paskutinis žodis: Istorike˛ Natalie Zemon Davis kalbina Violeta Davoliūtė.”
Kulturos Barai 482, no. 1 (2005): 52–56.
Carlos Subosky, “Entrevista a Natalie Zemon Davis en Radio Nacional de Argentina,” 26
January 2007. Available at www.concienciaytrabajo.blogspot.com.
Derin Terzioğlu. “Natalie Zemon Davis: ‘Tarihçiler iyi öyküleri sever ...,’” Virgul 108 (June
2007): 8–15.
Andrea Feldman. In Povijesno gledamo: Razgovori s povjesničarima [Historians’ Gaze:
Conversations with Historians], 21–35. Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2007.
Aitana Guia. “Els tombants de la historia: Entrevista a Natalie Z. Davis.” El Contemporani
35–36 (2007): 43–64.
Emmanuelle Loyer. “A voix nue: Natalie Zemon Davis s’entretient avec Emmanuelle
Loyer,” 30 April to 1 May 2007. France-Culture (archives INA).
Unpublished papers
“Operation Mind: A Brief Documentary Account of the House Committee on Un-
American Activities,” with Elizabeth Douvan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
202 Works by Natalie Zemon Davis
Books
Les Guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610). 2 vols.
Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat; preface by Pierre Chaunu, foreword by Denis Richet.
Seyssel: Editions du Champ Vallon, 1990. Reprinted in one volume, 2005.
Symphorien Champier, Les gestes ensemble la vie du preulx Chevalier Bayard, édition du texte de
1525. Introduction by Denis Crouzet. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1992.
La nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: Un rêve perdu de la Renaissance. Paris: Fayard, 1994, 1998.
La genèse de la Réforme française 1520–1562. Regards sur l’histoire 109. Paris: SEDES-
Nathan, Paris, 1996. Reprint, Paris: Belin, 2008.
La sagesse et le Malheur: Michel de L’Hospital chancelier de France. Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
1998.
Jean Calvin: Vies parallèles. Paris: Fayard, 2000. Translated into Spanish as Calvino (Barcelona:
Ariel Press, 2001).
Charles de Bourbon connétable de France. Paris: Fayard, 2003.
Le haut cœur de Catherine de Médicis: Une raison politique aux temps du massacre de la Saint-
Barthélemy. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005.
Christophe Colomb: Héraut de l’Apocalypse. Paris: Payot, 2006.
Dieu en ses royaumes: Une histoire des guerres de religion. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008.
Contributions to Books
“Sur le concept de barbarie au XVIe siècle.” In La conscience européenne au XVe et au XVIe
siècle: Actes du colloque international organisé à l’E. N. S. de jeunes filles n. 22, edited by
Françoise Autrand and Nicole Cazauran, 106–26. Paris: L’Ecole, 1982.
203
204 Works by Denis Crouzet
Sociétés et idéologies des Temps modernes: Hommages à Arlette Jouanna, 2 vols., edited
by Joël Fouilheron et al., 2:573–89. Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul-
Valéry, 1996.
“A Woman and the Devil: Possession and Exorcism in Sixteenth-Century France.” In
Changing Identities in Early Modern France, edited by Michael Wolfe, 191–215.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
“La rencontre de Charles de Bourbon, Connétable de France, et de Princesse dame
Renommée (1527).” In L’Histoire grande ouverte: Hommages à Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, edited by André Burguière, Joseph Goy, and Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide,
127–32. Paris: Fayard, 1997.
“Sur la signification eschatologique des ‘canards’ (France, fin XVe–milieu XVIe siècle).”
In Rumeurs et nouvelles au temps de la Renaissance, edited by Marie-Thérèse Jones-
Davies, 25–45. Paris: Klincksieck, 1997.
“A propos de quelques regards de voyageurs français sur le Brésil (vers 1610–vers 1720):
Entre espérance, malédiction, et dégénérescence.” In Naissance du Brésil moderne,
1500–1808 (XXe Colloque de l’IRCOM), edited by Katia de Queiros Mattoso,
Idelette Muzart-Fonseca dos Santos, and Denis Rolland, 67–117. Paris: Presses de
l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 1998.
“Chrétienté et Europe: Aperçus sur une sourde interrogation du XVIe siècle.” In L’ordre
européen du XVIe au XXe siècle: Actes du colloque de l’IRCOM 15–16 mars 1996, edited by
Georges Soutou and Jean Bérenger, 11–50. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris–
Sorbonne, 1998.
“La foi, la politique, la parole: Une problématique de l’Edit de janvier 1562.” In Axes
et méthodes de l’histoire politique, edited by Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza, 13–40.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998.
“Calvin,” “Catherine de Médicis,” “Charles IX,” “Henri Ier de Guise,” “Henri III,”
“Henri IV,” “Ligue,” “Edit de Nantes,” “Réforme,” “Guerres de Religion,” “Saint-
Barthélemy,” and “Sully.” In Dictionnaire de l’Histoire de France, edited by Jean-
François Sirinelli. Paris: Armand Colin, 1999, 2006.
“La nuit de la Saint Barthélemy: Confirmations et compléments.” In Le second ordre: L’idéal
nobiliaire; Hommage à Ellery Schalk, edited by Chantal Grell and Arnaud Ramière de
Fortanier, 55–81. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 1999.
“Calvinism and the Uses of the Political and the Religious (France, ca. 1560–ca. 1572).”
In Reformation and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, edited by Philip
Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard, 99–113. Amsterdam:
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999.
“Michel de L’Hospital et l’idée de la paix.” In Krieg und Frieden im Ubergang vom Mittelalter
zur Neuzeit: Theorie, Praxis, Bilder, edited by Heinz Durchardt and Patrice Veit, 103–
18. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2000.
“Préface.” In Grenoble au temps de la Ligue: Etude politique, sociale et religieuse d’une cité en crise
(vers 1562–vers 1598), by Stéphane Gal, 11–15. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de
Grenoble, 2000.
“Patrie, antihispanisme et quête de la paix dans la pensée de Michel de L’Hospital.” In
Le Traité de Vervins: Guerre et paix en Europe (fin XVIe–début XVIIe siècle; Quatrième
206 Works by Denis Crouzet
“Une mort qui fut une vengeance: Le connétable de Bourbon. Rome, mai 1527.” In
Vengeance: Le face-à-face victime/agresseur, edited by Raymond Verdier, 170–79. Paris:
Edition Autrement, 2004.
“Craindre Dieu autrement dans les sermons et pamphlets de Calvin.” In Les deux réformes
chrétiennes: Propagation et diffusion, Colloque international, Les réformes religieuses des
XVI–XVIIe siècles, Haïfa, 2000, edited by Ilana Zinguer and Myriam Yardeni, 3–22.
Leiden: Brill, 2004.
“Königliche und religiöse Gewalt im Massaker der Bartholomaüsnacht oder der ‘Wille’
Karls IX.” In Gewalt in der frühen Neuzeit: Beiträge zur 5. Tagung der Arbeitsgemeinschaft
frühe Neuzeit im VHD, edited by Claudia Ulbricg, Claudia Jarzbowski, and Michaela
Hohkamp, 33–58. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005.
“Une princesse qui voulait faire rêver de paix et sérénité.” In Pouvoirs, contestations et
comportements dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges en l’honneur du professeur à Yves-Marie
Bercé, edited by Bernard Barbiche, Jean-Pierre Poussou, and Alain Tallon, 123–64.
Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2005.
“Préface.” In Sylvie Daubresse, Le parlement de Paris ou la voix de la raison (1559–1589).
Geneva: Droz, 2005.
“1572: Les protestants sont massacrés la nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy sous le règne de
Charles IX.” In 1515: Les grandes dates de l’histoire de France revisitées par les historiens
d’aujourd’hui, edited by Alain Corbin. Paris: Seuil, 2005, 2008.
“A propos de quelques usages de la monarchie française du XVIe siècle dans le discours
historique du XVIIe siècle.” In Monarchies, noblesses et diplomaties européennes:
Mélanges en l’honneur de Jean-François Labourdette, edited by Jean-Pierre Poussou,
Roger Baury, and Marie-Catherine Vignal-Souleyrou, 355–83. Paris: Presse de
l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2005.
“1588: Le roi Henri III fait assassiner son rival Henri de Guise au château de Blois.” In
1515: Les grandes dates de l’histoire de France revisitées par les historiens d’aujourd’hui,
edited by Alain Corbin. Paris: Seuil, 2005, 2008.
“Préface.” In Sylvie Daubresse, Le parlement de Paris ou la voix de la raison (1559–1589),
vii–xv. Geneva: Droz, 2005.
“Préface.” In Frédéric Jacquin, Affaires de poison: Un crime et son imaginaire au XVIIIe siècle.
Paris: Belin, 2005.
“Ira Dei Super Nos.” In Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations, edited by James B.
Collins and Karen L. Taylor, 90–100. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
“Dieu et les petits enfants pendant les troubles de religion.” In Istoricheskaya antropologiya:
New Directions in Historical Research, vol. 3, edited by Gadi Algazi, Mikhail Krom,
and David Sabean, 163–89. Göttingen: Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte/
European University at St. Petersburg, 2006.
“Intolérance et tolérance en France au XVIe siècle.” In Stratégies de la Contre-Réforme en
France et en Pologne, edited by Chantal Grell and Macej Servanski, 23–44. Poznan:
Instytut Histgorii UAM, 2006.
“Une loi qui fut une confession de foi évangélique: Autour de l’Edit de janvier 1562.”
In Religious Differences in France: Past and Present, edited by Kathleen Perry Long,
208 Works by Denis Crouzet
1–18. Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 74. Kirksville, MO: Truman State
University Press, 2006.
“Les stratégies d’occupation de l’espace urbain au temps des premières guerres de
Religion.” In Die besetzte res publica: Zum Verhältnis von ziviler Obrigkeit und militärischer
Herrschaft in besetzten Gebieten vom Spätmittelalter bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, edited by
Markus Meumann and Jörg Rogge, 167–93. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006.
“Sainthood and Heroism: Images and Imagery in Sixteenth-Century Europe.” In Finding
Europe. Discourses on Margins, Communities, Images, edited by Antony Molho and
Diego Curto, 335–57. New York: Berghahn Book, 2007.
“La question du millénarisme dans L’Ethique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme.” In
Histoire des familles de la démographie et des comportements en hommage à Jean-Pierre
Bardet, edited by Jean-Pierre Poussou and Isabelle Robin, 777–805. Paris: Presse de
l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2007.
“Le mythe savoyard, Bayard et le regret d’un temps perdu.” In Bayard et la Maison de
Savoie: Actes des rencontres Bayard 2002. Chambéry, 18 et 19 octobre 2002, Université de
Chambéry–Association des amis de Bayard, 81–101. Pontcharra, 2003. Revised version
in Bayard: Histoires croisées du chevalier, edited by Stéphane Gal, 131–45. Grenoble:
Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2007.
“Sur la symbolique du refus de la ‘farce’ papiste: La France des années 1530–1560.” In
La Réforme en France et en Italie: Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes, edited by Ph.
Benedict, S. Seidel, and A. Tallon, 403–30. Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2007.
“Mystique royale et sentiment national? Les visions du frère Fiacre de Sainte-Marguerite.”
In Le sentiment national dans l’Europe méridionale (France, Espagne, Italie) aux XVIe
et XVIIe siècles, edited by Alain Tallon and Benoît Pellistrandi, 295–322. Madrid:
Casa de Velasquez, 2007.
“Langages de l’absoluité royale (1560–1576).” In Absolutismus, ein unersetzliches Forschungskonzept?
Eine deutsch-französische Bilanz: L’Absolutisme, un concept irremplaçable? Une mise au point
franco-allemande, edited by Lothar Schilling, 107–39. Munich: Institut Historique
Allemand, 2008.
“Les guerres de Religion, violences pour Dieu.” In La guerre dans tous ses états: Concordance
des temps, edited by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, 57–83. Paris: Nouveau Monde Editions,
2008.
“Préface.” In Florence Buttay, “Fortuna”: Usages politiques d’une allégorie morale à la Renaissance,
7–16. Paris: Presse de l’Université de Paris–Sorbonne, 2008.
“Sur le désenchantement des corps saints au temps des troubles de religion.” In Reliques
modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions, 2 vols.,
edited by Philippe Boutry, Pierre Antoine Fabre, and Dominique Julia, 2:436–82.
Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 2009.
“Deux hommes dans un bateau, Lucien Febvre et Fernand Braudel: Leçons inaugurales
au Collège de France.” In Le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance au Collège de France, edited
by Pierre Toubert and Michel Zink, 299–318. Paris: Fayard, 2009.
Works by Denis Crouzet 209
Articles
“Recherches sur la crise de l’aristocratie en France au XVIe siècle: Les dettes de la Maison
de Nevers.” Histoire Economie et Société 1 (1982): 7–50.
“Recherches sur les processions blanches, 1583–1584.” Histoire, Economie et Société 4
(1982): 511–63.
“La représentation du temps à l’époque de la Ligue.” Revue historique 270, no. 2 (1983):
297–388.
“La violence au temps des troubles de religion vers 1525–vers 1610.” Histoire, Economie et
Société 4 (1989): 507–25.
“Royalty, Nobility and Religion: Research on the Wars of Italy.” In Eighteenth Annual
Meeting: Papers, 1–14. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society
for French History 18. N.p., 1991.
“Désir de mort et puissance absolue de Charles VIII à Henri IV.” Revue de synthèse 3–4
(July–December 1991): 423–41.
“Crise du Sacré et politique: Sur le désir de Dieu au XVIe siècle.” Tumultes 1, no. 1 (1992):
49–71.
“Au temps des premières guerres de Religion: Violence catholique et désir de Dieu.” Notre
Histoire, L’Eglise et la guerre 88 (April 1992): 36–40.
“Le massacre et son désir au temps des premières guerres de Religion,” in “Medium,
médiatisation et fanatisme.” Revue internationale de psychanalyse 2 (1992): 31–54.
“Aux origines de la Saint-Barthélemy: De la concorde à la violence ou de l’Amour au
crime.” L’information historique 57 (1995): 1–9.
“La caravane des perles: Note critique à propos de l’histoire de la “dame aux chameaux.’”
L’information historique 57 (1995): 58.
“Charles IX ou le roi sanglant malgré lui?” Bulletin de la société de l’Histoire du protestantisme
français (July–September 1995): 323–39.
“L’étrange Génie du Mythe de croisade.” Le Débat 99 (March–April 1998): 85–92.
“Introduction: L’Etat comme fonctionnement socio-symbolique (1547–1635).” Histoire,
Economie et Société 3 (1998): 339–40.
“Un édit qui fut une confession de foi: Une lointaine ‘mémoire’ de l’édit de Nantes.” In
“L’Edit de Nantes: Sa genèse, son application en Languedoc: Actes du colloque
organisé le 15 mai 1998 par la ville de Montpellier,” edited by Arlette Jouanna and
Michel Péronnet. Special issue, Bulletin historique de la ville de Montpellier 23 (1999):
6–28.
“Circa 1533: Anxieties, Desires, and Dreams.” Journal of Early Modern History 5, no. 1
(2001): 22–61.
“A propos de la plasticité de la violence réformée au temps des premières guerres de
Religion.” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 148 (October–
December 2002): 907–51.
“Le devoir d’obéissance à Dieu: Imaginaires du pouvoir royal,” in “Métaphysique et
210 Works by Denis Crouzet
Interviews
“Enquête sur un massacre: La Saint-Barthélemy.” L’Histoire, March 1994, 94–101.
“Une immense angoisse traverse la Renaissance …” L’Histoire, December 2002, 44–49.
“Pourquoi fut-elle si détestée.” L’Histoire, November 2006, 50–57.
About Authors
211
BLANK
Index
Addams, Jane, 155n22 Beauvoir, Simone de, 125, 129n29, 138
Afghanistan, 153, 161, 180 Bellay, Jean du, 36, 58n8
Africa, contemporary conflicts in, 161, Benedict, Philip, 45, 60n47
176n13 Bercé, Yves-Marie, 40, 59n22
aging, 37–38 Berkeley, University of California at, ix,
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich 64–65, 114, 152–53, 156n45, 158,
Cornelius, 11, 27n7 159
Agulhon, Maurice, 39, 42, 59n19 Berkshire Conference of Women
al-‘Arabi, Ibn, 21, 28n20 Historians, 128n16
al-Farid, Umar Ibn, 21, 28n19, 36 Berkshire Conference on the History of
al-Ghazāīl , AbūHāmid, 20, 28n15 Women, 114, 128n16
al-Hamadhānī, Badī’ al-Zamān, 20–21, Berque, Jacques, 50, 61n61
28n16, 36 Berlin, Irving, 97, 108n4, 155n18
al-Hariri, Muhammad al-Qasim ibn Ali Berr, Henri, 41, 59n27
ibn Muhammad ibn Uthman, 20, biographies, writing, 74–75, 106–7
28n17 Blanc, Judith, 164, 177n23
Alberto Pio, Prince of Carpi, 35, 58n4 Bloch, Marc, 41, 42, 51, 59nn28, 29, 61,
Algazi, Gadi, 164, 177n24 87–89, 90, 173
Alpers, Svetlana, 158, 176n1 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 74, 91n9
al-Wazzān, al-Hasan (Leo Africanus), Boethius, Ancius Manlius Severinus, 172,
8–10, 13–20, 21–23, 34–37, 77, 165– 178n45
66, 173–74, 181–83 Bosnia, 24, 28n27
Anabaptists, 167, 177n29, 178n35 Bossy, John, 55, 62n67
the Annales, 26, 44, 88–89, 125, 152 Bouwsma, William, 158, 176n2
Annales school, 59nn 15, 17, 28, 61n65 Bretonne, Nicolas Edmé Restif de la, 25,
Annie Get Your Gun, 134, 155n18 29n31
Anouilh, Jean, 3, 27n3 British Mandate, 162, 177n18, 177n21
anthropology, 45–51, 88, 113, 152, 158, 175 Brucker, Gene A., 158, 176n4
anti-Semitism, 80, 91n19, 92n34, 96, 130, Buber, Martin, 162, 177nn19, 20
154n5 Budé, Guillaume, 2, 27n2, 110, 139
anti-war movement, 44, 63–64, 153 Burke, Peter, 43, 60n44
Arbaleste, Charlotte, 112, 127–28n9 Bush, George W., 161, 166, 168, 169, 171,
Ariès, Philippe, 42, 59n30, 152 178n44
Aristotle, 28n9, 127n3, 173, 178n47
Armstrong, Elizabeth, 43, 60n35 Calvin, Jean, 19, 25, 28n14, 69, 73, 86
Ashkenazic Jews, 108n8, 100 Calvinism, 19, 55, 60n47, 66, 91n3, 167–68
Cardano, Girolamo, 56, 62n70
Baez, Joan, 153, 157nn46, 47 Castiglione, Baldassar, 109, 127n5
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 39, 43, 59n20 Catholic Church. See Catholicism
Bancroft, Aaron, 135, 155n21 Catholic Holy League, 68, 69, 91n3
Barenblatt v. United States, 148, 156nn35, Catholicism, 52–55, 64, 68–71, 115, 175.
36, 37 See also St. Bartholomew’s Day
Bataille, Georges, 133, 154n15 Massacre; Women on the Margins:
Beard, Charles, 127n2 Three Seventeenth-Century Lives
Beard, Mary Ritter, 109, 127n2 Caudwell, Christopher, 132–33, 154n13
213
214 Index
Certeau, Michel de, 50–51, 61n63 Duby, Georges, 124, 126, 127, 129n28
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, x, 76, 78, 79–80, 81, Dumas, Alexandre, 24, 28n25
91n10 du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe, 112, 127–
Chandler, Lucretia, 155n21 28n9, 128n10
charivaris, 8, 17, 39, 76
Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, 82, 92n24 Engels, Friedrich, 132, 154n8
Charles V, Emperor, 82, 92nn24, 28 Enlightenment, 3, 91n13, 102
Chéreau, Patrice, 24, 28nn21, 26 Enron scandal, 148, 156n40
Christianity, 9, 163, 170, 180, 181–82 Erasmus, Desiderius, 73, 87–88, 90, 91n7
Cixous, Hélène, 125, 129n31 eschatology, 56–57, 62n71, 65–66, 67, 68,
Clampitt, Amy, 174, 178n49 70, 166–71
Coburn, Nathaniel, 156n34 evangelicalism, American, 168, 169
Cohen, Mark, 56 Existentialism, 27n4
Colie, Rosalie, 26, 29n32, 40, 42–43, 150 Ezrahi, Sidra, 164, 177n26
Collège de France, 27, 49, 89, 127, 129n40
communism, 59n13, 140–41, 154n16 family history, 93–108
The Communist Manifesto, 132, 154n8 Farge, Arlette, 126, 129n37
Conway, Jill Ker, 43, 60n39, 111, 113–14, Fass, Paula, 158, 176n6
152 Febvre, Lucien, 53, 59n28, 61n65, 87–90,
Coornaert, Émile, 39, 59n17 92nn32, 34
Coquéry-Vidrovitch, Catherine, 126–27, Feilchenfeld, Alfred, 119–20, 128n23
129n39 Feminine Mystique, 125, 129n33
Coras, Jean de, 5, 19, 22, 69, 75 feminism, 111, 120, 134
Corneau, Alain, 25, 28–29n28 feminist criticism in France, 125
Coughlin, Charles, 130, 154n4 Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their
Coxeter, Donald, 151, 156n42 Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France,
31–33, 119, 123
d’Orléans, King Louis–Philippe, 24, 28n23 Foucault, Michel, 85, 86, 92n29, 127, 152
Danbury Correctional Institution, 148– Fournier, Jacques, 26, 29n35, 31
49, 151, 156nn39, 40 François I, King, 27n2, 74, 82, 91n8,
Dante, 82, 92n27, 118 92n24, 128n20
Darnton, Robert, 160, 176n10 Free Speech movement, Berkeley’s, 153,
Daston, Lorraine, 122, 129n26 156n45
Davis, Chandler, 13, 103–4, 110, 161 French Revolution, 1–2, 3, 25, 29n30, 102,
Hallowell ancestors of, 135, 155n20 109, 128n14
HUAC and, 141, 143–48 Friedan, Betty, 125, 129n33
marriage to Natalie Zemon, 134–40
prison experience of, 148–49, 150, 151, Gabel, Leona C., 109, 127n1
156n40 Galison, Peter, 122, 129n27
at University of Toronto, 151, 152, 159, Garrisson, Janine, 54, 61n66
160 Gascon, Richard, 38–39, 58n11
“decisionism,” 169–70 Geertz, Clifford, 46–47, 49, 50, 61nn51,
Delmas–Marty, Mireille, 127, 129n42 52, 70, 160
Demme, Robert Jonathan, 17–18, 28n13 gender inversion, 46
de Pizan, Christine, ix–x, 2, 27n1, 109–10, gender as genre, 113–14, 124–25
110–11, 112, 114, 139 gender in writing women’s history, 11,
Detroit race riots, 131, 154n7 113–17, 122–27
Diefendorf, Barbara, 40, 45, 59n21 Geneva Accord, 164, 177n27
Dognon, Suzanne, 92n34 Geremek, Bronislaw, 43, 60n40
Douglas, Mary, 47, 61n53 Germaine de Staël, Anne Louise, 128n14
Douglas, William O., 148, 156n37 Gershwin, George, 97, 108n5
Douvan, Elizabeth, 140, 155n29 Gershwin, Ira, 97, 108n5
Droz, Eugénie, 37, 58n9
Index 215
Roche, Daniel, 127, 129n44 Toronto, University of, 43, 111–12, 113–14,
Rodgers, Richard, 96, 108n3 138–39, 151, 152, 164
Roelker, Nancy L., 43, 60n33, 150 Tous les matins du monde, 25, 28–29n28
Rosaldo, Renato, 50, 61n62 Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim
Rosen, Ruth, 160, 176n8 Between Worlds, 180, 181–82. See
Rushd, Abū’l-Walīd ibn (Averroës), 15, also al-Wazzān, al-Hasan (Leo
28n9 Africanus)
Trinkaus, Charles, 41, 59n25
Saarinen, Eero, 102, 108n9 Troeltsch, Ernst, 166, 177n28
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 27n4 Trotskyists, 133, 154n16
Schmitt, Carl, 169–70, 178n40 Turner, Victor, 46, 61n50
Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 49, 61nn59, 60, 81 Turniansky, Chava, 119, 128n21
Schorske, Carl, 160, 176n12
Scola, Ettore, 25, 29n30 Ursulines, 33–34, 51, 57, 58n1, 71
Scott, Joan W., x, 114–15, 125, 128n17
self–fashioning, 10–12, 18, 63, 71, 72, 75, Valensi, Lucette, 14, 27n8
83, 146 Valois, Marguerite de (Queen Margot), 24,
Sen, Amartya, 162, 177n16 28n21, 125, 126
sexuality van Gennep, 45–46, 61n48
gender and, 123–24 Varga, Lucie, 89, 92n34
religion and, 71–72, 169 Vichy regime, 39, 59n18, 92n31
Sforza, Caterina, 109, 127n1 Vico, Giambattista, 41, 59n23, 132
Shapin, Steven, 80, 91n18 Viennot, Éliane, 24, 28n22, 125, 126
Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Vietnam War, 44, 63–64, 153, 156n45,
Studies, 160, 176n9 157n47
slavery, 2, 17–18, 82, 123, 178n31, 181, 183 violence, 40, 47, 54, 63–68, 79, 145
Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Virgil, 82, 92n26
17–18, 23
Smith College, 41, 42, 103, 109–10, 131– Walesa, Lech, 60n42
34, 140, 154n16, 162–63 Wallace, Henry, 134–35, 155n19
“Solidarity Forever,” 134, 154–55n17 Warkentin, Germaine, 111, 127n7
Solidarność, 43, 60n42 Wars of Religion, French, 28n24, 72,
Spielberg, Steven, 17–18, 28n12 91n3, 166, 167
Spinoza, Baruch, 162, 177n17 Weber, Max, 39, 58n12, 70–71, 110, 132,
St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 24, 166, 169, 173
28n24, 54, 63, 145, 146 Weil, Françoise, 43, 60n36
Starn, Randolph, 158, 176n3 Weil, Simone, xi, 138
Stone, I. F., 130, 154n4 Wilson, Woodrow, 168, 178n37
Stone, Lawrence, 159, 160, 176n7 Winchevsky Centre, 139, 155n24
subaltern theory, 76, 91n10 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 120, 128–29n25
Suleyman I, 170, 178n43 women’s historiography, 11, 107, 109–20,
122–27
Ta’ayush, 164, 166, 177n25 women’s suffrage, 127n2, 128n13, 137
Teresa of Avila, 69, 91n5 Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-
Thomas, J. Parnell, 148, 156nn38, 39 Century Lives, 7, 30, 48, 55–58, 74,
Thomas, Keith, 43, 60n43 75, 84, 123, 182
Thomas, Norman, 131, 154n6
Thompson, Edward P., 43–44, 60n45, 125, Xenophon, 79, 91n16
129n34
Throop, Palmer, 109–10, 127n4, 139 Yugoslav Wars, 161, 176n13
Thrupp, Sylvia, xi, 42, 60n32
Thucydides, 79, 91n17, 173, 178n48 Zemon family, 95–98, 99, 101–4, 138–39,
Tilly, Louise, x, 111, 114–15, 125, 127n6 162
218 Index