The Historian and Literary Uses

Author(s): Natalie Zemon Davis

Source: Profession, ofession (2003), pp. 21-27
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595753
Accessed: 15-01-2017 00:32 UTC

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Profession

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 The Historian and Literary Uses
NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS

"What has been your engagement with literature?" Stephen Greenblatt

asked me. "Why do you keep coming back time and again to Rabelais?" I
pondered, and realized that the answer was not straightforward. I have al
ways found Rabelais a pleasure to read and have marveled at the surprises
in each new reading. But over the years I changed in my relation to those
surprises and to their use in my work. So my answer is a history, a personal
history, but one, I think, characteristic of the experience of other social his
torians of my generation or younger who began to relate to literature in a
new way.
As a graduate student and in my first decade as a social historian, I used
texts of all kinds to get at the history of the Reformation in Lyon. I wanted
to find out why printing workers, other artisans, and women joined the
Protestant movement and whether Karl Marx or Max Weber was right. I
wanted to find out whether religion played a role in the reform of charita
ble institutions the way R. H. Tawney had claimed. To these ends I looked
in archives, at tax records, militia lists, poor-relief rolls, and much more. In
the libraries I considered tracts and sermons, polemical songs, popular
plays and poems, arithmetic books, medical books?anything relevant in
the outpouring of vernacular books from the printing presses of sixteenth
century Lyon and elsewhere. And there were what I would have called the
literary texts, the fictional or nonfictional writings of educated persons

The author is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. A
version of this paper was presented at the 2002 MLA convention in New York.

21 Profession 2003

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 22 HI THE HISTORIAN AND LITERARY USES

with high craft and wide-ranging goals: the five books of Frangois Rabelais,
the stories of Marguerite de Navarre, the essays of Michel de Montaigne.
For none of these texts did I explore in any depth their crafting or their
genre or other literary matters. For the archival texts, I asked the histo
rian's usual questions: Is this a forged text? What kind of document is this?
What has been omitted? For all the texts, I asked the historian's usual ques
tion: From what point of view has this been written? That is, is it a work by
a Protestant, Catholic, or someone in between? by a man or a woman? by a
rich physician, humanist priest, or proud printing worker?
These were the questions I thought I needed to ask if I wanted to use
these texts as sources for what was going on in Lyon and in sixteenth-century
France more generally and for what attitudes people had there toward life,
religion, and social matters. The literary figures I took to be especially expert
and sensitive as observers of their times and, in their expression of opinion,
pithy and penetrating. Thus, when Rabelais had Doctor Rondibilis affirm
that men had many things they could do to control "the pricks of venery" but
women with their hysteric animal within could rarely keep themselves from
cuckolding their husbands (373; qtd. in Davis, Society 88-89), I took that as a
strong formulation of a long-held medical view. When Erasmus asked,
"What else is a city but a great monastery?" {Enchiridion, vol. 3, column 346;
qtd. in Davis 62), I took it as a powerful vision of urban life from a man at the
center of new humanist reflection. When the Lyonnaise poet Louise Labe in
1555 asked women "to lift their minds a little above their distaffs and
spindles ... to apply themselves to science and learning" (3-4; qtd. in Davis
74), I saw her as an important voice at the margins of female reflection.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I realized that as a historian I had to
add to this search for observations of events and expressions of attitude
and look at texts?literary ones and others?in other ways. Partly I was
spending time with colleagues whose work in literature had wide cultural
resonance. Among them were Barbara Lewalski, at Brown, who got me
thinking about genre, and Rosalie Colie, at Toronto, who showed me how a
form like paradox could surface in many different places. I took a first draft
of my "Reasons of Misrule" to her?a study of charivaris and carnivalesque
inversion?and she said I had to read an essay on Rabelais just appearing by
a man named Mikhail Bakhtin. Then I was at Berkeley when Greenblatt ar
rived early in his life of teaching and writing, and I followed with delight
how he drew a network of connections leading to Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
In addition, new issues were posed by the events and practices I was dis
covering in my sources. I was working on printers and printing history; I had
sixteenth-century books often in my hand. These objects could not be looked
at just as a repository of themes and observations; they were also a form of

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 NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS ||| 23

communication, a means of establishing relationships among writers, print

ers, readers, listeners. I was working on le menu peuple and peasants and
needed very scrap of evidence I could find to write their history. Oral culture
was a precious source, when I could find its traces in proverbs and popular
lore. But it became clear that the difference between the oral expression and
the printed text was not just in point of view or in content but also in how and
when a statement was made and the kind of authority it carried. This realiza
tion hit me especially when I was reviewing Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's
Montaillou. Out of curiosity, I read the early fourteenth-century Inquisition
records on which he based his remarkable portrait of that Pyrenean village. I
was struck by the detail about events long past and the narrative flair with
which the villagers answered the straightforward questions of the inquisitor:

Twenty-five years ago [said one woman], at harvest time, I was going with
my mother to cut the grain in a field belonging to my father at the other
end of the village. I said to my mother, "Where is my brother Pons?" My
mother answered that Pons had gone with her brother . . . Prades over
the hill of Marmore to see Dame Stephanie. .. . When my brother Pons
showed up at the field ... I said to him and my mother, "What is Uncle
Prades doing with Stephanie? Why, because of her, is he ruining his
household and his weaver's loom and selling his goods?" They responded
that Prades and Dame Stephanie wanted to go together to Barcelona . ..
for "les Bonhommes." "Who are the Bonhommes?" I asked, and my
mother answered that they were the men whom some called heretics, but
who were good nonetheless and sent souls to Paradise.
(Duvernoy 334-35; qtd. in Davis, "Conteurs" 70; trans, mine)

I entitled my review "Les conteurs de Montaillou" ("the storytellers of

Montaillou") and forever changed my attitude toward the uses of such texts
from the past.
Like oral culture, ritual and festive forms were another valuable source for
the life of the lower orders. But how to make sense of them? The possibilities
of the festive genre had to be explored from many angles. One had to inquire
not only what, say, the charivari said and what episode triggered it but also
what form it took, when it was done, the rules that governed it, and what differ
ence it made. Finally, by 1980,1 was starting to plan and help write the scenario
for a feature film and had to face the question of fictionalizing straight on.
Some of my questions could be clarified by ethnographic information
and interpretive approaches drawn from anthropology. All of them could
benefit from ways of thinking familiar to one or another branch of literary
studies. Therefore I added to my quest for observations and expressions of
opinion another set of goals: from now on, I would look for crafting and the
rules of genre in texts both inside and outside the bounds of literature and

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24 III THE HISTORIAN AND LITERARY USES

fiction. I would perceive all texts and acts described in texts as relational,
addressed to someone else, and received and interpreted by different audi
ences. (Even the secrets of a diary?say, the antics of a rural Normandy
gentleman ciphered in Greek letters?assumed God as a reader.)
Further, I would look not only at how information or attitudes or teach
ings circulated in society but also at how motifs and forms surfaced in multi
ple milieus?though in all likelihood with different emphases, uses, and
receptions. Though I explored the charivari primarily in the village youth
abbeys and urban neighborhoods of artisans and traders, I still could also
note that Mere Folle of Dijon had followers among the lawyers of its Par
lement. I could reflect on Erasmus's Stultitia as the Queen of Misrule, and
even wonder whether the play in Hamlet could not be seen as "a charivari of
the young against a grotesque and unseemly remarriage" {Society 123).
Finally, I could now conceive the movement to expression, oral and
written, as an innovative action in itself, one to be examined along with the
content of what was said.
As I look back on my own writings, I can recall the sense of excitement I
had when I realized how these approaches were helping me understand the
past and tell about it more effectively. With The Return of Martin Guerre, I
realized how important was the shaping of an event into a story, the story
told by the learned judge who sentenced the impostor to be burned so "his
memory would be effaced forever" (Coras 132; qtd. in Davis, Return 89, 94;
trans, mine) and the story told in the villages of Martin Guerre and Arnaud
du Tilh?all of them touched by and transforming earlier narratives. With
Fiction in the Archives, my excitement came with the idea itself of the proj
ect. We are short on sources for storytelling techniques in French villages
of the sixteenth century; the learned "collectors" like Charles Perrault and
Mademoiselle Lheritier date from the late seventeenth and early eigh
teenth century. Suddenly I saw that the royal letters of pardon or remission
for homicide, from which I had copious notes directed to discerning pat
terns of violence and popular customs in the sixteenth century, could also
provide evidence for styles of storytelling among peasants, artisans, and
others. The letter of remission was a composite construction, with notaries
and legal formulas and rules playing their role, but the pardon seeker's
voice could still be followed as it crafted a believable tale. Indeed, the story
had to be believable or at least supportable by neighbors and retellable
aloud by the pardon seeker, or the letter would never be registered.
With Women on the Margins, my new quest brought fresh insight into the
seventeenth-century women whom I had been discussing with my students
for twenty years. We had read together the autobiographies of Glikl bas Ju
dah Leib (so-called Gluckel of Hameln) and Marie Guyart de l'lncarnation,

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 NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS ||| 25

and we had looked at pictures of the Surinamese insects and plants drawn by
Maria Sibylla Merian. Now when I came to write about them, I realized what
revelations lay in their movement into expression and in how and where they
told their stories. For Glikl, the novelty was coupling her Yiddish life story
with folk tales?"that reminds me of a story"?which raised questions about
suffering and allowed her "to argue with God" (53, 59-60). If a seventeenth
century rabbi could intersperse his sermon with homilies and parables, she
could do the same in her book for her children. For Marie de Plncarnation,
the move into writing in Algonquian and Iroquoian languages allowed her to
broach divine topics thought unsuitable for a European woman.
In my current project, a study of the man known in Europe as Leo
Africanus, the tools of the literary scholar and folklorist much advanced my
understanding. The archival traces of al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan
exist but are scanty; his own writings in Italian, Latin, and Arabic are the
best clues to his ways of thinking, creating, and scheming. Composed for
Italian and European readers during his years as a Christian in Italy of the
1520s, they are full of tricks, omissions, and unusual forms of self-reference.
His account of the different regions of Africa, its peoples and customs?
published in revised form much later as La descrizione delf Africa?is fascinat
ing; but the choices he made in writing his manuscript in his foreigner's
Italian take us closer to the author living between two worlds (see Ramusio).
How have historians responded to such a literary approach? A good
number have followed the same trajectory as mine, have had similar chal
lenges in their work, and have found their own impressive literary and eth
nographic solutions. Some have reacted with unease and even outright
rejection. Lawrence Stone truly enjoyed my Fiction in the Archives about
the pardon tales, which was dedicated to him as "historian par excellence,
and storyteller too." But why did I have to spoil the title with that word
"fiction"? No matter how carefully I tried to define "fiction" as forming,
shaping, and molding rather than falsifying or feigning and to celebrate
pardon stories as a new source of evidence rather than as an undermining
of evidence, some historians still are troubled by that fluid border.
My sharpest critic was Robert Finlay, who attacked The Return of
Martin Guerre in the pages ofthe American Historical Review. He found
especially objectionable my use of the term "self-fashioning": "Pervasive
and tendentious, the concept is merely imposed on the historical record
as an ingenious assertion, a modish way of viewing sixteenth-century
peasants" (564). In my answer, I reviewed my ample evidence on peas
ants' changing their names, customs, languages, and abodes. I also re
minded Finlay that "self-fashioning" was not only a term developed
brilliantly by Greenblatt, it had also been used by Montaigne, whom I

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 26 III THE HISTORIAN AND LITERARY USES

had cited as well: "On s'y forme, on s'y fagonne . . . car la dissimulation
est des plus notables qualitez de ce siecle" (649; "Men form and fashion
themselves . . . , for dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of
this century" [505]; both qtd. in Davis, "On the Lame" 589).
Indeed, Montaigne, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and their like are
still with me as when I was young. I still go to them as privileged observers
of and listeners to the worlds around them. For my recent study The Gift in
Sixteenth-Century France, all three added important interpretations to the
gift practices that I had dug up from wills, inter vivos donations, journals,
and the like. Whenever I think I have discovered something new about the
sixteenth century, I go back to reading Rabelais: I figure that if he has not
at least caught a whiff of what I have found, I had better check again. At
this very moment Rabelais is waiting to join me in telling about al-Hasan
al-Wazzan, my crafty traveler in search of his own oracles.

WORKS CITED
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Davis, Natalie Zemon. "Les conteurs de Montaillou." Trans. Marie-Noelle Bourguet.
AnnalesE.S.C. 34.1 (1979): 61-73.
-. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France.
Harry Camp Lectures at Stanford U. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987.
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 NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS ||| 27

Ramusio, Giovanni Battista. Navigazioni e viaggi. Ed. Marica Milanesi. Turin: Einaudi,
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