Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, by Natalie Zemon Davis. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1995. 360 pp. $24.95 U.S.

This erudite and audacious book, like its subjects, occupies margins. Not only is it about women, a subject that a quarter century after Davis and Jill Conway created their justly renowned undergraduate course at the University of Toronto is still at the margins of most university instruction, it also appeals simultaneously to popular and academic audiences; it explores a little used genre of "comparative biography"; it crosses disciplinary boundaries; and perhaps most controversially, it challenges traditional categories of historical proof.

At one level the book is simply an engaging account of the lives of three women: German-Jewish autobiographer Glikl bas Judah Leib (the name Davis prefers over "Gluckel of Hameln"), French Catholic Marie Guyart (Marie of the Incarnation) co-founder of the Ursuline convent in Quebec; German-Dutch Protestant Maria Graff Merian, artist, naturalist, traveller to Surinam. Each woman is already well known to scholars, and these skilfully narrated but breathless accounts (each life is told in only seventy pages of text) only occasionally add new details. An entirely different book flourishes in 120 pages of scholarly notes addressing the multiple cultural contexts of the women, the provenance and accuracy of existing versions of their work (Davis has worked particularly hard to recover, and in the case of Glikl recreate through her own translation, the most accurate versions), and the genres in which each woman worked.

Ranging across half the globe from St. Petersburg to Surinam, and culturally from the Protestant Labadists to Carib and Montagnais peoples of the new world, she audaciously crosses as many disciplinary as geographical boundaries.. As she explores the effects of women's role of imperialism on the margins of gender and race, Davis moves her focus from Guyart and Merian to the subject people with whom they interacted, considering parallel ideas of spiritual narrative in the case of the first nations in Quebec and Guyart, and comparing perceptions of the meaning and uses of nature of the African and Amerindian peoples of Surinam with those of Merian. In mobilizing ethnography and anthropology of the Americas to illuminate non-European spirituality, Davis may too easily conflate the complex cultural differences between the native American peoples. Nor while the project of defining a feminine style (more sympathetic, less judgemental, less likely to adopt negative stereotype) distinguishing Guyart's from Jesuit accounts and Merian's work from those of male naturalists is illuminating, differences between women's views (for example Aphra Behn's nearly contemporary version of Surinam, Oroonoko) and between the two Maries themselves prove to be as complex as any differences between the sexes. And sadly, ultimately, the subject people are still voiceless, their images filtered through European lenses, however skilfully re&acted in Davis's analysis.

Davis's interest in genre leads her to highlight how Glikl inserted metaphorical prescriptive tales into her autobiography without comment, leaving to her children, and latterly her reader, the task of drawing the lesson. In her project of "comparative biography" Davis, like Glikl, too often merely juxtaposes, leaving to the reader the task of drawing the comparisons between the lives, a task complicated by the complex multiple differences between the women. Similarly, as Merian combined in a single botanical illustration larvae, caterpillars and moths and the plants on which they lived using the category of metamorphosis as her organizing criterion, rather than the generic categories being developed by her male contemporaries, Davis uses the historical techniques of coincidence, parallelism, and probability (often with little connective analysis) to mark points of comparison between the women, and their worlds. As she salutes Glikl and Merian for their narrative techniques as challenging the received categories of male colleagues, Davis herself challenges the categories of historical narrative and analysis, pushing on the margins of historical methodology and intention.

Some readers will doubtless find these aspects of the book irritating. Others will find them liberating. Weaving fragments of evidence together in a web of speculation is indeed one way of dealing with obstacles to writing the history of women and other archivally obscure groups. Is this how women's historians and historians of other partially documented group will push out the boundaries of the historical discipline? Or will it merely marginalize the enterprise of women's history? One wonders what Davis's energy and learning could have achieved if applied at greater length to one of these women, or better, to a woman less well known. Yet something is indeed gained by compressing these three women within the margins of one book. One comes away - and students will come away - with an enhanced sense of the huge diversity of European women's lives. That these three, peculiar in a few ways, but ordinary in most, could have lived at one time in such diverse ways and understood the world through such different eyes in itself reaffirms the value of a women's history that reveals not a single sex, but rather half of humanity.

University of Toronto Barbara J. Todd

Copyright Canadian Journal of History Dec 1996
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