Natalie Zemon Davis

The gift in sixteenth-century France

In this gem of a book, Natalie Zemon Davis explores the role of gifts in Renaissance France. From the Kings bounty to the beggars alms, from the lavish feasting and display of civic dignitaries to the humble tokens exchanged by peasant bride and groom, the giving and receiving of gifts - then, as now - held tremendous significance.

What is Women’s History … ?

It is perhaps a salutary exercise in the midst of writing a book whose scope is as breathtakingly wide as Women in European Society 1500–1800 to define what one is about. For me, a history of women implies a triple commitment. The first and most obvious is to discern women’s past role and situation — in this instance to locate them in the social, economic, religious, political and psychological monde immobile of traditional society. The second is to give the history of the period a ‘gender dimension’: less grandly, to suggest relevant areas or issues in the period under review where the attitudes or position of women, differentiated perhaps by class or national group, influenced the course of events, and hence to make clear that to write history without reference to gender is to distort the vision. Thirdly, women did not live in society in isolation. Indeed, much of the evidence about them in the period which my book covers, given differential literacy rates, was compiled or invented by men and rests on male assumptions. In examining some of these, we are looking not merely at how men conceived ‘the sex’ but also themselves. At this point, the history of women becomes the history of mentalities.

Missed Connections: Religion and Regime

Religion and Regime Guy E. Swansons Religion and Regime is one of a line of studies in which he has tried to identify the social sources of symbolization, especially religious symbolization. The line is derived ultimately from Emile Durkheim, who saw the sacred realm as a projection of the way in which a society encourages, frightens, and controls its members. As Swanson put it: The ideas of gods and spirits arise from experiences with more enduring and often inarticulated traits of societies and of other groups as corporate actors-as social systems. A church embodies those traits in doctrine, organization and ritual; it systematizes and rationalizes them.I

Writing ‘The Rites of Violence’ and Afterward

I The year 1972 was the three-hundredth anniversary of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s day, and French historians in many lands marked its bloodshed and cruelty by conferences and scholarly papers. Alfred Soman invited me to present a paper at a colloquium on the massacre in Chicago. I accepted with alacrity, partly because I was impelled toward the subject of violence for several reasons at once. Both the scholarly stakes and the political stakes seemed high. In the years just before 1972, I was figuring out how to combine classic social history with the descriptive and semiotic approaches I was learning from reading cultural anthropology, ethnography, and literary criticism. Essays I wrote in the tradition of classic social history were, for example, ‘Strikes and Salvation’ and ‘A Trade Union in Sixteenth-Century France’ on the printing workers of Lyon; ‘Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy’ on welfare reform in Lyon; and ‘City Women and Religious Change’ on women and the Protestant Reformation. Within structures of power and property, I was attentive to the social, geographical and gender origin of the actors, and to what they said or wrote or did in the form of resistance or reform or