Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis specializes in the social and cultural history of France, as well as other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton University, where she was Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. She has been awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal, and been named Companion of the Order of Canada. Davis’s early work explored the Protestant-dominated printing industry in sixteenth-century Lyon and set the stage for her investigation of the complex intersection of class, religion, and consciousness in early modern Europe. Her first book, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), was a collection of essays covering a vast array of topics, including gender, social class, literacy, and religious culture in the early modern period. Davis has always displayed a remarkable ability to draw broad historical conclusions from the small details of daily life. In The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), Davis used sixteenth-century court records to craft a dramatic and revealing tale about Bertrande of Artigat and the impostor who posed as her husband, Martin Guerre. In Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987), Davis again brings archival sources to life, describing how common people accused of crimes explained their actions as they sought royal pardon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995) explores the lives of Glückel of Hameln, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian.