Across Fields and Disciplines, Historian Natalie Davis's Pathbreaking Work Has Left a Lasting Mark

Henry Charles Lea Professor Emerita of History at Princeton University, Natalie Zemon Davis, died in Toronto on October 23, 2023.

Davis was truly a most remarkable interdisciplinary historian, one who straddled such diverse fields as history and anthropology, history and literary studies, history and film, the study of women and gender, and the history of Jews in early Modern Europe.

She taught at Princeton University in the 1980s and 1990s, and for the years 1990-1994 she was the director of a remarkable centre for advanced research in history at Princeton, where she helped pioneer new departures in history writing. For the years 1992-94, she invited a select group of historians in residence to devote their   attention to the fascinating theme, ‘Persuasion and Proof’ in History – i.e., the relationship between the evidence of the archive and the prose of the historian – a recurring concern in her half a dozen path-breaking books over the last 30 years.

Outside the United States, Davis held positions in Paris, the prestigious Eastman Visiting Professorship at Balliol College, Oxford and several other leading institutions of the world. In January 2005, she was invited by the University of Delhi to deliver the Millennium Lecture in History.

Davis was one of the most daring band of historians of our times. Along with such master practitioners as Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson in England, Le Roy Ladurie in France and the kindred Italian Carlo Ginzburg, Davis created for good the possibilities of retelling the lives of the menu peuple – ordinary and  marginalised, yet remarkable women and men from yesteryears: those who produced goods and services, not documents.

A young mother before she obtained the requisite research degree, a university teacher without a published book, an American citizen without a passport for ten long years following the Macarthyite witch hunt of the 1950s, Professor Davis has always used her own ‘life experiences’ to ask newer questions of the historical record. As she herself noted, when invited by the American Council of Learned Societies in 1997 as an eminent humanist to reflect on a life time of work as a scholar:

“During the 1950s, we… had our three children. The joys of childbirth and childrearing far outweighed the political travails we were going through. “How do you manage both babies and books?”, my students sometimes ask me as they try to plan their own futures… The key, besides shared parenting… was closely connecting the two registers of life, in action and thought. I got very good at instant transition from sand-pile to study room, from reading a Calvinist tract to Pat the Bunny. Sometimes I typed with a child in my lap. Interruption became a way of life… Having children helped me as a historian. It humanized me; it taught me about psychology and personal relations and gave flesh to abstract words like “material needs” and “the body”; it revealed the power of family, rarely treated by historians in those days’.”

It is a remarkable lifespan of 94 years. Davis produced histories both for the ‘card carrying’ historian and the  general reader: those, so to speak, of the Buddhist sangha who have taken refuge in the house of history, as well as the interested householder, intrigued by the ways of the ‘Peoples of the Past’. Her pioneering essays in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, with such unconventional themes as ‘Strikes and Salvation in Lyons’,  ‘The Reasons for Misrule’, ‘Women on Top’, ‘The Rites of Violence’ and ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’, were hailed as the work of one of the most daring and original historians of the last 120 years. ‘No historian of our time has a more immediate and vital sense of the past than … Davis,’ noted the English scholar J.H. Elliot,  ‘and none has been more ingenious and persistent in putting the smallest piece of evidence to work in order to recover the sights, sounds and the sensations of a world we have lost’, he added for good measure.

The eight essays were followed by the bestseller The Return of Martin Guerre, the remarkable story of an impostor in 16th century France, who in the long absence of the genuine man had managed to work his way into the local community and into the bed of the bereft wife, only to be found out, tried in court and hanged. Indian audiences would be familiar with the recurrence of a suspect trickster or husband  in such cases as the astounding Bhawal Sanyasi case from East Bengal in the 1930s, the story ‘Duvidha’ by the great Rajasthani writer Vijay Dan Detha, the 1960s Bombay blockbuster Hum Dono starring the matinee idol Dev Anand, and  lately, Shah Rukh Khan’s Paheli, which despite a star cast bombed at the box office. But it was not just the excitement of the story that had made Davis first collaborate with the making of a film on this theme, helping the accomplished actor Gerad Deperdieu as well as local villagers enact a very differing 16th century. Instead, questions such as the notion of identity in 16th-century France, the attractions of Protestantism for a suspect couple no longer bound to go to the confessional, and the way a learned judge who himself would lose his life in an anti-protestant riot adjudicated on the case that made Davis ransack half a dozen village, district and  provincial archives in the south of France. (This even led Peter Brooks to invite her as a consultant adviser in his monumental stage version of The Mahabharata!)

The Return of Martin Guerre was a masterpiece of narrative prose and historical reconstruction, which in the last 20 years has been translated into as many languages, an unprecedented thing for a non-fiction writer. And it starts with perhaps the most famous disclaimer in a historian’s work, which is also a confident credo for  experimenting with daring  newer ways of writing based on relentless erudition: ‘What I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by voices of the past,’ wrote Davis on the first page of the book.

An abiding interest in cinematic narrative and filmic truth led to her Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Here she explored the trope of slavery in its various dimensions in such classic films as Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, Pontecervos’s Quemada, Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and Jonathan Demme’s Beloved, based on the novel by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a colleague of Davis’s at Princeton. Her quest for voices from the past led to the remarkable Fiction in the Archive: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in the Sixteenth Century (1987). This again was a deft retelling of how peasants in France of that time reworked cultural constructs, fabricating narratives of their crime told to legal notaries so as to evoke royal pardon by the King. The telling of these stories lay in their effect, in creating a structure of feeling within readers by which the King’s emissaries would be moved literally from the world of blood and gore of the crime to the domain of mercy.

In another remarkable work, she opened new vistas in the writing of gendered history. In Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives, Davis again recreated individual lives from historical obscurity, as yet again in newer ways. Women on the Margins (a wonderful title) marked a move in the direction of exploring the relation between the world of European settlements in the New World, with its Catholic and Protestant certitudes, and the women of recently-colonised Canada and the Dutch sugar colony of Surinam, with its characteristic Maroon villages, formed by runaway slaves. In this work Davis re-narrated the lives of two remarkable 17th–century women – a Catholic nun who tried to proselytise in Canada, and the other, an even more remarkable woman, an engraver and artist from Protestant Amsterdam who packed her bags, borrowed money for her voyage and sailed with her daughter for distant Suriname in the Caribbean which was to become the Sarnaam of the Gorakhpuri and Bihari labourers in the late 19th century. These Bhojpuri-speaking ‘cane hands’ were  now to be ‘exported’ from the Calcutta docks in late 19th century to work in semi-bondage in the sugarcane plantations of British colonists in the 19th century: the indigent forefathers of V.S. Naipaul and the remarkable Munshi Rahman from Banda district in southern Uttar Pradesh.

In Suriname was Davis’s other remarkable woman, one Maria Sibylla Merian. This ‘heroine’ literally sketched the lives of insects and lepidoptera (butterflies, my Google tells me), selling her prints to the male entomologists and zoologists of Europe, while commenting ethnographically on her local women helpers. Here Davis was crossing yet another boundary, breaking up yet another specialisation: one marked by the ghettoised demarcation resulting from the easy division between those who did Europe, and others who dwelt in the non-West.

Davis’s still more recent move was to break open the disciplinary walls that have marked the study of the historical relations between two related peoples of the Book, the Ahl-e-Kitab: Christians and Musalmans in and on the margins of Europe. A 16th century Moroccan man crosses and re-crosses, from captivity and back into freedom, between North Africa and Italy, north African Islam and  Rome, the land of the Pope and the Holy See – a life which is the subject of her full-length study of Leo Africanus, or Asad bin Maghribi – a life that she  touched upon in one of the Millennium Series of Lectures sponsored by Delhi University in January 2005. In that intellectually exciting  year, vice-chancellor Deepak Nayyar, Rajeev Bhargava et al brought together some of leading scholars and academicians of the world: the economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, social theorists  Charles Taylor and Michael Waltzer, the prodigious Marxist Perry Anderson and our very own Natalie Zemon Davis. These distinguished scholars  were to stay in our city for a week interacting with the Delhi audiences. But those, as they say, were different times.

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Returning once more to the sorely missed late Natalie Davis… Several years ago, a French scholar had this to say about interdisciplinary work in the humanities and the social sciences:

“Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, is in fact, willing to let go of itself). To do something interdisciplinary it is not enough to choose a “subject” (a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.”

Davis is widely regarded by scholars throughout the world as a historian who has created several such new ‘objects’, which did not belong to anyone – indeed not regarded as objects at all, till she dared to write these (peoples) anew.

Forty years ago, someone who no doubt knew Davis well described her in an Envoi, the commendatory remarks at the end of her Society and Culture in Early Modern France in these lines, which have gained in poignancy with every new book she wrote.

Born abroad, she longs for you campagnons
She longs to shake your hand, to share your wine,
Through the pane she hears you but is not heard,
She deserves your pity but will not have it.

The songs you think are vanished once they are sung,
The pleas you think are wasted if turned down,
Jokes you dismiss if no one laughs or winces,
She listens for. You speak sometimes too soft.
And since there is no God, she notes your prayers.
And since there is no God, she marks your fall.

RIP Natalie.

Shahid Amin taught history at Delhi University, 1985-2015.