Radcliffe College
Where was Natalie Zemon Davis educated in 1949?
Natalie Zemon Davis Natalie Zemon Davis , ( born 8 November 1928 ) is a Canadian and American historian of the early modern period . She is currently an Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada . Her work originally focused on France , but has since broadened to include other parts of Europe , North America , and the Caribbean . For example , Trickster Travels ( 2006 ) views Italy , Spain , Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanuss pioneering geography . It has appeared in four translations , with three more on the way . Davis books have all been translated into other languages : twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre . She was the second female president of the American Historical Association ( the first , Nellie Neilson , was in 1943 ) and someone who has not lost the integrity and commitment to radical thought which marked her early career . She has been awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal and been named Companion of the Order of Canada . Life . Natalie Zemon Davis was born in Detroit , Michigan in 1928 to a middle-class Jewish family . She traces her intellectual path to her Jewish heritage , although her work hasnt centered on Jewish issues . Davis attended Kingswood School Cranbrook and was subsequently educated at Smith College , Radcliffe College , Harvard University , and the University of Michigan , from which she received her PhD in 1959 . In 1948 , she married Chandler Davis . She and Davis had difficulties in the U.S . during the era of the Red Scare . He lost his professorship in Michigan , and in the 1960s , they moved to Canada ( Toronto ) with their three children . Natalie Zemon Davis subsequently taught at Brown University , the University of Toronto , the University of California at Berkeley , and from 1978 to her retirement in 1996 , at Princeton University , where she became the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies . In addition to courses in the history of early modern France , she has taught or co-taught courses in history and anthropology , early modern Jewish social history , and history and film . She has also been an important figure in the study of the history of women and gender , founding with Jill Ker Conway a course in that subject in 1971 at the University of Toronto : one of the first in North America . Since her retirement , she has been living in Toronto , where she is Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto . Research interests . Natalie Davis main interests are in social and cultural history , especially of those previously ignored by historians . She makes use of numerous sources such as judicial records , plays , notarial records , tax rolls , early printed books and pamphlets , autobiographies and folk tales . She is a proponent of cross-disciplinary history , which consists of combining history with disciplines such as anthropology , ethnography and literary theory . In her Society and Culture in Early Modern France ( 1975 ) , she explored the lives of artisans and peasants : their relation to the Protestant Reformation , their carnivals , uprisings , and religious violence , and the impact of printing on their ways of thinking . In her book best known to the public , The Return of Martin Guerre ( 1983 ) , she followed a celebrated case of a 16th-century impostor in a village in the Pyrénées so as to see how peasants thought about personal identity . Often linked with Carlo Ginzburgs microhistory The Cheese and the Worms about the radical miller Menocchio , Daviss book grew out of her experience as historical consultant for Daniel Vignes film Le retour de Martin Guerre . Her book first appeared in French in 1982 at the same time as the premiere of the film . Daviss interest in story-telling continued with her book , Fiction in the Archives : Pardon Tales and their Tellers in 16th-century France ( 1987 ) , a study of the stories people of all classes told to the king to get pardoned for homicide in the days before manslaughter was a possible plea . In her Women on the Margins ( 1995 ) , she looked at the autobiographical accounts of three 17th-century women – the Jewish merchant Glikl Hamel , the Catholic nun Marie de lIncarnation , who came to New France , and the Protestant entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian—and discussed the role of religion in their lives . Her book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France ( 2000 ) is both a picture of gifts and bribes in the 16th century and a discussion of a viable mode of exchange different from the market . In Trickster Travels ( 2006 ) , she describes how the early 16th-century North African Muslim Leo Africanus ( Hasan al-Wazzan ) managed to live as a Christian in Italy after he was kidnapped by Christian pirates and also sees his writings as an example of the possibility of communication and curiosity in a world divided by violence . In 2017 , she served as historical consultant for Wajdi Mouawads new play Tous des Oiseaux that premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de La Colline . Set in present-day New York and Jerusalem , the play follows a German/Israeli family riven by conflict when the geneticist son wants to marry an Arab-American woman who is doing her doctoral dissertation on Hassan al-Wazzan/Leo Africanus , the subject of Davis Trickster Travels Her book ( in-process ) , Braided Histories on 18th-century Suriname studies networks of communication and association among families , both slave and free , on the plantations of Christian and Jewish settlers . Though Daviss historical writings are extensively researched , she sometimes resorts to speculation , using analogous evidence and inserting words like perhaps and phrases like she may have thought . Some critics of her work find this troubling and think that this practice threatens the empirical base of the historians profession . Daviss answer to this is suggested in her 1992 essay Stories and the Hunger to Know , where she argues both for the role of interpretation by historians and their essential quest for evidence about the past : both must be present and acknowledged to keep people from claiming that they have an absolute handle on truth . She opened her Women on the Margins with an imaginary dialogue , in which her three subjects upbraid her for her approach and for putting them in the same book . In her Slaves on Screen ( 2000 ) , Davis maintains that feature films can provide a valuable way of telling about the past , what she calls thought experiments , but only so long as they are connected with general historical evidence . Awards and recognition . In 2010 , Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize , worth 4.5 million Norwegian kroner ( ~$700,000 US ) , for her narrative approach to the field of history . The awards citation described her as one of the most creative historians writing today who inspired younger generations of historians and promoted cross-fertilization between disciplines . The citation said her compelling narrative shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action . In 2011 , Davis was elected to the American Philosophical Society . On 29 June 2012 , Davis was named Companion of the Order of Canada , the highest class within the order . On 10 July 2013 , Davis was awarded the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for her insights into the study of history and her exacting eloquence in bringing the past into focus . On 13 September 2013 , Davis was awarded an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews . Works . - Society and Culture in Early Modern France : Eight Essays , Stanford , California : Stanford University Press , 1975 . - Womens History in Transition : the European Case pages 83–103 from Volume 3 , Issue 3 , Feminist Studies , 1975 . - Ghosts , Kin , and Progeny : Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France pages 87–114 from Daedalus , Volume 106 , Issue #2 , 1977 . - Gender and Genre : Women as Historical Writers , 1400–1820 pages 123–144 from University of Ottawa Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue #1 , 1980 . - Anthropology and History in the 1980s : the Possibilities of the Pastpages 267–275 from Journal of Interdisciplinary History , Volume 12 , Issue #2 , 1981 . - The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-century Lyon , pages 40–70 from Past and Present , Volume 90 , 1981 . - Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-century Lyon pagers 47–80 , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , from Feminist Studies , 1982 . - Beyond the Market : Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-century France pages 69–88 from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Volume 33 , 1983 . - The Return of Martin Guerre , Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press , 1983 . - Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit , Berlin : Wagenbach , 1986 . - `Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead : Film and the Challenge of Authenticity pages 457–482 from The Yale Review , Volume 76 , Issue #4 , 1987 . - Fiction in the Archives : Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France , Stanford , California : Stanford University Press , 1987 . - Fame and Secrecy : Leon Modenas Life as an Early Modern Autobiography pages 103–118 from History and Theory , Volume 27 , Issue #4 , 1988 . - Historys Two Bodies pages 1–13 from the American Historical Review , Volume 93 , Issue #1 , 1988 . - On the Lame pages 572–603 from American Historical Review , Volume 93 , Issue #3 , 1988 . - Rabelais among the Censors ( 1940s , 1540s ) pages 1–32 from Representations , Volume 32 , Issue No . 1 , 1990 . - The Shapes of Social History pages 28–32 from Storia della Storiographia Volume 17 , Issue No . 1 , 1990 . - Gender in the academy : women and learning from Plato to Princeton : an exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton University / organized by Natalie Zemon Davis .. . [ et al. ] , Princeton : Princeton University Library , 1990 - Women and the World of Annales pages 121–137 from Volume 33 , History Workshop Journal , 1992 . - Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes , co-edited with Arlette Farge , Cambridge , MA : Belknap Press , 1993 . Volume III of A History of Women in the West . [ Originally published in Italian in 1991. ] - Women on the Margins : Three Seventeenth-century Lives , Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press , 1995 . - A Life of Learning : Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997 , New York : American Council of Learned Societies , 1997 . - Religion and Capitalism Once Again ? Jewish Merchant Culture in the Seventeenth Century from Representations No . 59 ( Summer , 1997 ) . - Remaking Imposters : From Martin Guerre to Sommersby , Egham , Surrey , UK : Royal Holloway Publications Unit , 1997 . - Beyond Evolution : Comparative History and its Goals pages 149–158 from Swiat Historii edited by W . Wrzoska , Poznan : Instytut Historii , 1998 . - The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France , University of Wisconsin Press 2000 - Slaves on Screen : Film and Historical Vision , Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press , 2002 - Trickster Travels New York : Hill & Wang , 2006 . Sources . - Adams , R.M . Review of Fiction in the Archives page 35 from New York Review of Books , Volume 34 , Issue No . 4 , March 16 , 1989 . - Adelson , R . Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis pages 405–422 from Historian Volume 53 , Issue No . 3 , 1991 . - Benson , E . The Look of the Past : Le Retour de Martin Guerre pages 125–135 from Radical History Review , Volume 28 , 1984 . - Bossy , J . As it Happened : Review of Fiction in the Archives , pages 359 from Times Literacy Supplement , Issue 4488 , April 7 , 1989 . - Chartier , Roger Cultural History Between Practices and Representations , Cambridge : Polity Press , 1988 . - Coffin , J . & Harding . R . Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis pages 99–122 from Visions of History edited by H . Abelove , B . Blackmar , P.Dimock & J . Schneer , Manchester , UK : Manchester University Press , 1984 . - Diefendorf , Barbara and Hesse , Carla ( editors ) Culture and Identity in Early Modern France ( 1500–1800 ) : Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis , Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press , 1993 . - Finlay , R . The Refashioning of Martin Guerre pages 553–571 from American Historical Review Volume 93 , Issue #3 , 1988 . - Guneratne , A . Cinehistory and the Puzzling Case of Martin Guerre pages 2–19 from Film and History , Volume 21 , Issue # 1 , 1991 . - Le Roy Ladurie , Emmanuel Double Trouble : Review of The Return of Martin Guerre pages 12–13 from The New York Review of Books , Volume 30 , Issue #20 , December 22 , 1983 . - OConnor , J.E ( editor ) Images as Artifact : the Historical Analysis of Film and Television , Malabar , Florida : R.E . Krieger , 1990 . - Orest , R . Review of Women on the Margins pages 808–810 from American Historical Review , Volume 102 , Issue #3 , 1997 . - Quinn , A . Review of Women on the Margins page 18 from New York Times Review of Books , December 10 , 1995 . - Roelker , N.L . Review of Fiction in the Archives pages 1392–1393 from American Historical Review Volume 94 , Issue #5 , 1989 . - Roper , L . Review of Women on the Margins pages 4–5 from Times Literacy Supplement 4868 , July 19 , 1996 . - Snowman , Daniel Natalie Zemon Davis pages 18–20 from History Today Volume 52 Issue 10 October 2002 . External links . - Interview with Natalie Zemon Davis – interviewed in May 2007 , from Medievalists.net - Natalie Zemon Davis : A Life of Learning ( Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997 ) - A Star Historian Opens a New Chapter : Jewish Slaveowners , The Jewish Forward , August 17 , 2006 .