Natalie Zemon Davis
Description
Natalie Zemon Davis (born November 8, 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, 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. 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). She has been awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal and been named Companion of the Order of Canada. Source: [Natalie Zemon Davis]( on Wikipedia.
Books
Slaves on screen
"Davis tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations. The potential of film to narrate the historical past in an effective and meaningful way, with insistence on loyalty to the evidence, is assessed in five films: Spartacus (1960), Burn! (1969), The Last Supper (1976), Amistad (1997), and Beloved (1998).". "Slaves on Screen is based in part on interviews with the Nobel prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, and with Manuel Moreno Fraginals, the historical consultant for The Last Supper."--BOOK JACKET.
Women on the margins
As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women - one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant - left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history. All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de L'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.
The Return of Martin Guerre
Recounts the history of French imposter Arnaud du Tilh and his denouncement in court by Martin Guerre, whose identity, property, and wife du Tilh tried to claim. Reveals new information about sixteenth-century peasant life.
Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy
"Using the North African diplomat Hasan al-Wazzan, known in Europe as Leo Africanus (c. 1488-after 1532), as its guide, this book offers a comparative journey through the worlds of Arabic and Italian theatre and poetics in the late medieval and early modern period (1300-1600). Special attention to theatrical performances in Rome and in Italy in general, as well as in Tunis, Cairo, and in North Africa in general."--
Society and culture in early modern France
A collection of essays discussing various social questions in France during the specified period including the position of women, forms of and reasons for social and religious protest, literacy and the question of proper attitudes towards and treatment of the poor.