Natalie Zemon Davis 1928 - 2023

In Memoriam:

Natalie left us 21 October 2023. The historical community across the world shared the news with sorrow and gratitude expressed in tributes in many languages and formats. At a dinner party in Florence a few days after her death, scholars from Italy, England and the United States remembered her with affection, admiration and laughter; they had become acquainted because she had introduced them to each other. Regardless of where she had taught them, former students felt like siblings; people she put in touch with each other became lifelong collaborators. One of my favorite memories as a graduate student was watching Natalie navigate the History Department’s notorious Davis Center Seminars when she first arrived at Princeton. Under the direction of its combative director, “discussion” was customarily gladiatorial, so it was a shock when the elegant Professor Davis complimented the poor presenter and then phrased a profoundly unsettling question that revealed how completely everyone else in the debate had missed the most important point in the author’s paper. Her brilliantly framed questions there, at other seminars and at conferences often took the speaker to parts of their own presentation they had neglected or failed fully to appreciate.

Natalie was an inspiration for colleagues, students and interlocutors around the world. She was a brave, original, resourceful and imaginative historian and a generous, compassionate, practical and faithful friend. She was indifferent to hierarchies, keen only to bring people together who might share interests and ideas with her and with others.

Her curiosity and resourcefulness were boundless. When her passport was taken away by the United States government in the McCarthy era, Natalie excavated the extraordinary collections of American rare book libraries. She became the rare social historian who valued printed sources, not just reading them to answer historical questions but asking who had produced them and what constituted their stake in the radical new technology of print. Her appreciation of Judge Jean de Coras’ 1560 account of the imposter “Martin Guerre” had prompted her to think of it as a movie, and, when in the 1980s it captured the attention of filmmaker Daniel Vigne, she became the French troupe’s historical consultant. Natalie was dissatisfied with a mere drama; she had a deeper historian’s question. What made not only the community in which “Martin” appeared to have grown up but also his supposed wife accept his deception? Since she was just as much an archival historian as a scholar of the printed book, Natalie searched the documentary traces of rural France to try to comprehend the feelings and relationships among sixteenth-century villagers.

No short account can do her justice. From her early articles, collected in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975), to her most recent works, published when she was in her 90s, we see Natalie’s scholarly qualities of deep learning, sympathetic reading, crystalline writing and exuberant courage. Probing the issues of identity “marginal” individuals confront, Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy: Theatre and Poetry Across the Mediterranean (2021) required meticulous analysis of classical and Arabic literature, and Listening to the Languages of the People: Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish and French (2022) stretched her into a new period and other new languages.

Natalie’s involvement with the Sixteenth Century Society goes back to 1969 when she gave the plenary address at its first conference and was a member of the first council. This year the SCS created two prizes in her honor, one for a first book and one for a subsequent book in early modern women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She was thrilled to hear about the new awards. In reading the many memorials and messages that have appeared since her death, I was struck by how often the writers used metaphors of light to describe Natalie both as a historian and as a person. From a description of a draft of what became Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-century France (1987) as “fire arrows shot into a dark cave, illuminating the sides as they flew by,” to praise for the light she shone on obscure people of the past, to appreciation for her radiant grace and kindness. Very few people I know of, scholars and non-scholars alike, who had a conversation with Natalie ever forgot it. Her writings, her teaching, her advice, her example of impassioned inquiry and moral commitment have left a shower of sparks among readers, students, colleagues, and friends.

Laurie Nussdorfer

Wesleyan University