Natalie (Ann) Zemon Davis - Work

Historian, born in Detroit, Michigan, USA. She studied at Smith and Radcliffe Colleges and the University of Michigan (1959 PhD), and taught at Brown University (1959–63), the University of Toronto (1963–71), the University of California, Berkeley (1971–8), and Princeton (1978). A foremost practitioner of the ‘new social history’, she engaged in almost anthropological research into the lives of the artisans, labourers, and peasants of 16th-c France, resulting in such works as The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) (which was used as the basis for French and American films).

Natalie Zemon Davis (born November 8, 1928) is an American feminist and historian of early modern France. She is professor emeritus of history at Princeton and currently adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Her main interests are in social and cultural history, especially of those previously ignored by historians. She is a leading proponent of cross-disciplinary history, which consists of combining history with disciplines as anthropology, art history, ethnography and literacy theory. For this reason, Davis feels film with its ability to tell different versions of the same story and to present multiple viewpoints could potentially explain history better than can the traditional methods of history.

Work

Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1975. ""Women's History" in Transition: the European Case" pages 83-103 from Volume 3, Issue 3, Feminist Studies, 1975. "Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France" pages 87-114 from Daedalus, Volume 106, Issue #2, 1977. "Gender and Genre: Women as Historical Writers, 1400-1820" pages 123-144 from University of Ottawa Quarterly, Volume 50, Issue #1, 1980. "Anthropology and History in the 1980s: the Possibilities of the Past"pages 267-275 from Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 12, Issue #2, 1981. "The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-century Lyon", pages 40-70 from Past and Present, Volume 90, 1981. "Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-century Lyon" pagers 47-80, Volume 8, Issue 1, from Feminist Studies, 1982. "Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-century France" pages 69-88 from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Volume 33, 1983. The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. "`Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead': Film and the Challenge of Authenticity" pages 457-482 from The Yale Review, Volume 76, Issue #4, 1987. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1987. "Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena's Life as an Early Modern Autobiography" pages 103-118 from History and Theory, Volume 27, Issue #4, 1988. "History's Two Bodies" pages 1-13 from the American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue #1, 1988. "On the Lame" pages 572-603 from American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue #3, 1988. "Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s)" pages 1-32 from Representations, Volume 32, Issue #1, 1990. "The Shapes of Social History" pages 28-32 from Storia della Storiographia Volume 17, Issue #1, 1990. "Gender in the academy : women and learning from Plato to Princeton : an exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of undergraduate coeducation at Princeton University" / organized by Natalie Zemon Davis ... [et al.], Princeton : Princeton University Library, 1990 "Women and the World of Annales" pages 121-137 from Volume 33, History Workshop Journal, 1992. "Beyond Evolution: Comparative History and its Goals" pages 149-158 from Swiat Historii edited by W. The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, University of Wisconsin Press 2000 Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press 2002 Trickster Travels 2006.