Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis, CC (November 8, 1928 – October 21, 2023) was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels (2006), views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus's pioneering geography. (By 2023, the text had appeared in six translations.) 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).

Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal and was named Companion of the Order of Canada.

Natalie Zemon Davis (née Zemon) was born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 8, 1928, into a middle-class Jewish family of Eastern European origin. Her mother worked as a homemaker, and her father worked in the textile trade. She traced her intellectual path to her Jewish heritage although her work did not center on Jewish issues. Davis attended Cranbrook Kingswood School and she was subsequently educated at Smith College, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan, from which she received her PhD in 1959. Her dissertation treated religion and class among the printers of Lyon in the 16th century. In 1948, she met and married the mathematician and activist Chandler Davis (1926–2022). Natalie became involved in left-wing politics while at Smith College and the couple had difficulties in the U.S. during the era of the Red Scare. Chandler Davis lost his professorship in Michigan, and in the 1960s, the couple moved to Canada 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 and co-taught courses in history and anthropology, early modern Jewish social history, and history and film. She was also 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 such courses in North America).

Following her retirement, she lived in Toronto, where she was Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She died of cancer at her home in Toronto on October 21, 2023, at the age of 94.

Natalie Davis' main interests were in the social and cultural history of the Early Modern Europe, especially France, and focused on individuals and social groups previously ignored by historians. She made use of numerous sources such as judicial records, plays, notarial records, tax rolls, early printed books and pamphlets, autobiographies and folk tales. She was 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 to see how peasants thought about personal identity. Often linked with Carlo Ginzburg's microhistory The Cheese and the Worms about the radical miller Menocchio, Davis's book grew out of her experience as historical consultant for Daniel Vigne's film Le retour de Martin Guerre. Her book first appeared in French in 1982 at the same time as the premiere of the film. The Financial Times described Zemon Davis as a "pioneer of microhistory".

Davis's 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 l'Incarnation, who came to New France, and the Protestant entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian—and discussed the role of religion in their lives.