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  3. Women on the margins: three seventeenth-century lives

Women on the margins: three seventeenth-century lives

Natalie Zemon Davis
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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.
  • Frontmatter
  • Prologue (page 1)
  • Arguing with God (GLIKL BAS JUDAH LEIB, page 5)
  • New Worlds (MARIE DE L'INCARNATION, page 63)
  • Metamorphoses (MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN, page 140)
  • Conclusion (page 203)
  • Notes (page 219)
  • Acknowledgments (page 340)
  • Illustration Credits (page 345)
  • Index (page 349)
Reviews
Journal AbbreviationLabelURL
JMH 69.4 (Dec. 1997): 804-805 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/245597
RQ 50.1 (Spring 1997): 347-349 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039395
WMQ 54.3 (Jul. 1997): 626-627 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953848
CH 65.4 (Dec. 1996): 714-715 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3170434
JSocH 30.2 (Winter 1996): 541-543 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3789405
SCJ 27.4 (Winter 1996): 1145-1147 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543950
AHR 102.3 (Jun. 1997): 808-810 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2171555
BIO 19.3 (Summer 1996): 302-304 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23539767
ISIS 87.2 (Jun. 1996): 360-361 http://www.jstor.org/stable/236103
NAR 281.5 (Sep. - Oct. 1996): 45-48 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25126059
WRB 13.9 (Jun. 1996): 13-14 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4022382
MLR 92.4 (Oct. 1997): 1016-1019 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3734286
HWJ 45 (Spring 1998): 283-290 http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289566
Citable Link
Published: 1997
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Copyright Holder: The President and Fellows of Harvard College
ISBN(s)
  • 9780674955202 (hardcover)
  • 9780674955219 (paper)
Subject
  • European: 1400-1800
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