Wonderments

DC: I would like to begin our conversation with a question about the kind of history you write. At times, you stress the joy, the wonder that history brings you; that for you, history is not some cold dispassionate discipline where the historian stands outside what he or she studies. Instead, you allow a place for feeling in your search of the past. How, when, and why did you discover this feeling for the past?

NZD: I felt that wonder at the very start of my studies: I was discovering facts that I never knew existed—discovering a past that at first seemed so different from the present I knew as a high-school girl. It filled me with amazement: “Ah, so that’s what it was like in ancient Athens. What ideas they had!” Then I was amazed all the more when I came upon forms of life and institutions that seemed to resemble those of my own time: “Already so long ago, people wanted democracy!” To begin with, it was the great movements of the past rather than particular persons that aroused my sense of wonder. And even as a young girl, I was fascinated by the simple facts of history, the things that people always complain about as boring, that they hated to memorize, that turned them off from history. I didn’t find them boring at all. I enjoyed memorizing them, the names of kings, the dates of their succession, the names of presidents as well—I liked the sense of mastery I got from being able to remember and use all that historical information.

I had this pleasure of discovery from the beginning, and it lasted. I felt the same way, if not more, when I was an undergraduate at college and was studying the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. This grand history, full of troubles and violence, struck me as an example of the aspirations and tragedies of the human spirit, but also I loved reading about it because I was simply fascinated by the past: “What interesting things happened—all these events, so many of them unexpected and fortuitous!” Later on, I began to have the same feelings about the lives of individual persons and more intimate relations.

DC: It thus all began with a fascination with events and facts, right?

NZD: Yes, the great events of history and the aspirations that I thought of as “democratic,” which history seemed to reveal over the centuries. I know now that Athens had many features that weren’t democratic at all—slavery, for a start. But I remember how I felt long ago, when I first began to immerse myself in the mysteries of the past: the Athenians wanted to create an equal society, a society founded on the equality of citizens—today, of course, I’d add “male citizens.” I was attracted both by the “curious” things in the past and also by similarities and differences between the past and my own day.

DC: You’ve spoken of the sense of wonderment you felt before these “curiosities.” Haven’t you also responded with wonder to the stories you’ve read, even the musty smell of the archives, when you’ve discovered them?

NZD: Yes, that happened when I began my research in France. But even before I crossed the ocean, there was another dimension to my pleasure. I was starting to read archives—not the real archives, but books with documents from the archives—and also books printed in the sixteenth century. I loved this reading; it drew me closer to the societies and social movements of the past and now even to individuals. I wrote a seminar paper on Christine de Pizan¹—the first woman I’d ever really examined—and another on Guillaume Budé,² the humanist. I began to think hard about issues in personal lives, about the contradictions, conflicts, and tensions between intimate personal life, professional projects, and the social, political, and religious realities of the past. It wasn’t yet the “perfume” of the archives themselves, but it gave me a stronger sense for the past. I felt that I was coming to know Christine de Pizan, that I was having an encounter with Guillaume Budé.

But watch out! I’d add today. This passion to know and to understand is positive insofar as it encourages us to explore a mysterious world. But it also brings a danger—that of being possessed by the illusion of greater familiarity with the past than one really has. I hope I was taking precautions against this temptation when I was a student, and I certainly try to take them today. We must always remember to be humble toward this past that we study, this past that beckons us. Never decide things too soon—or rather, never imagine we have the power to understand everything. When we do historical research, we want to be conscious of moving into the past, into a sphere different from our own, and yet maintain an essential detachment.

But to go back to your question—I decided France would be the setting for my doctoral thesis, the social groups of the sixteenth century, artisans, workers, printers, Protestants. And so when I finally crossed the Atlantic, the pleasure of the archives coincided with my first presence in France. France held the taste, the perfume of the archives for me.

DC: What drew you to France?

NZD: Why France? It started with my studying French language, already in high school. So there was a practical aspect to my choice: I could read French. But then, as I heard about France in those years right after World War II, I found it very appealing: stories of the Resistance, the Antigone of Anouilh, which I read in college,³ the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and the new philosophical movements, and the like.⁴ As a young student, I was tantalized by the drama and the romance. And France was also the country of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, with all their transformations. I was very politically engaged as a student, and I felt that in some sense, this history was my history, even though I was a Jewish American.

DC: When did you first come to France?

NZD: I came to France for the first time in 1952. Seven years had passed since the end of the war, but one still felt its traces in Lyon every day. I immediately fell in love with France, the people, their way of living and talking, and with their food, which seemed very different from American food. The French would always say to me, “Ah, you Americans, you don’t know anything about cooking.” I remember that I even enjoyed the food at the student restaurants I ate at every day. “What good taste people have here,” I’d say to myself. I also liked the style of conversation among the French, which resembled my own: a very lively style, where people talked with their hands, very Mediterranean, you could say. I also loved the company of my new French friends, even though I spent most of my hours at the archives and libraries.

DC: So you stayed in Lyon?

NZD: That town was for me a sort of fairyland, as was France itself. I had come to France by boat on this first visit, and then taken the train down to Lyon. I discovered the French countryside looking out the train window. I was very struck by the physiognomy of the fields, so tended, so cared for and demarcated, so different from the vast, spread-out, and even untidy fields I’d see from the car window in the U.S. In a way my love of France began with looking at those landscapes, at the actual territory of France.

Today I still love France, but in a more tempered way. Back then I felt that the country I had chosen for my research was a very special place and I was lucky to be working on it. What undoubtedly reinforced that feeling was that when I returned from France in the fall of 1952, the State Department took away my passport. (I can tell you the reasons for this later on, if you want.) I could no longer leave the United States. For eight years I longed for France and those archives, which I so needed to see. France became for me a sort of dream.

When I finally was able to return in 1960, France still kept for me that image of a fairyland. And at the same time, both in 1952 and later, I had the enormous pleasure, after having to content myself with reading about my sixteenth-century people from afar, with the sources at my disposal in the U.S., to finally have access, if not to their real identities, then at least to a plethora of their words, their phrases in many settings.

DC: The documents thus transported you back in time to lives lived long ago, right?

NZD: Yes, and the fact that the men and women of the past had themselves touched these documents. I always have the feeling when I’m turning the pages of documents in the archives, “Long ago, the men and women whom I’m trying to understand wrote this down. I have before me the human traces of the past.” I recall vividly the room in Lyon where this sense of connection first took place—the dark wooden bookcases and the beautiful heavy wooden tables, little lamps that were lit only some of the time because French people were used to conserving electricity. The municipal archives were in one of the rooms of the Palace of the Archbishop of Lyon, right next to the municipal library. It’s all very different now, but I still have that feeling of connection whenever I have documents and manuscripts in my hands.

But once again, I say “Danger!” I have the impression that I’ve met, touched, seized the past. “Watch out, Natalie. You’re being taken over by a romantic fantasy.” One must always gird oneself with the certainty that one can never reach the living heart of the past from which the documents are speaking. The past always recedes. And yet, while I’m absorbed in the documents, I nonetheless have the sense of being surrounded by the persons I’m discovering, of a kind of ghostly presence.

DC: Don’t you frequently use the conditional tense precisely because of the pleasure history gives you, because you’re on such friendly terms with men and women in the past? Or when you also decide to intervene in the text in the first person to highlight that you explicitly control the narration of the past’s possibilities, a past which you both direct and create? It comes through particularly in your book on Martin Guerre, a character for whom you had very few documents upon which to rely. There are obviously the texts of Jean Coras, such as L’Arrêt mémorable, but beyond those there are just mere tidbits of information. Don’t readers instead see you fill the evidentiary void with all kinds of rhetorical tricks, such as “I would be inclined to think…”? At the same time, isn’t this “I,” when you’re forced to reveal yourself, the active agent who realizes this sense of wonderment and desire for history that captures the imaginations of those same readers? Isn’t this all an intentional subversion of a certain kind of traditional, if not old-fashioned idea of history?

NZD: The use of the conditional is a safeguard for the historian. More and more it seems I have to use it. When I started out studying large social movements, such as the relation between artisanal conflicts and Protestant commitment in Lyon, there were times when I had to venture an interpretation, a kind of guess. That is, there might or might not be a correlation between social aspirations and religious beliefs. But while working on general movements with lots of data, I had fewer instances where it seemed urgent or obligatory for me to use the conditional. And this was still the case in more recent books, such as the ones I wrote on letters of remission and on gifts, where I had lots of examples: I made interpretations, which could be open to challenge, but I could make a flat assertion.

But when I took off in pursuit of the ideas, feelings, conflicts, and dreams of particular persons, I sometimes encountered big gaps in the documentation, especially since I was often tracking people who had left no written traces. So I had to proceed with deductions from related evidence, make speculations, and use words like “perhaps” or “maybe” or “he would have thought” or—and I love the irony of this one—“surely.” In fact I enjoy the challenge of finding evidence that can help fill in a gap; the pleasure of discovery in a really difficult situation is extra strong.

Of course, we historians are not just wandering without guidelines here; we have techniques that make it possible to use the conditional, that is, to arrive at a register of alternatives. For example, if one has no precise documentation on a specific person or group or on a specific day or event, one can get evidence about the world around them. One can draw on situations, mentalities, and reactions analogous or close to those one is trying to understand. We seek whatever evidence we can find so as to be able to ask and imagine what might have been possible for a precise individual or a particular group or the outcome of a particular event. We spell out the possibilities, and try to figure out what is most likely from the evidence we have.

In my opinion, one of the richest and most fruitful sources for historical analysis is the circle one creates or recreates around the object of analysis—even when one has many texts available, even when one has the diary of the person one is working on. Even with all these sources, the historian has to seek ways to understand the feelings, the conventions, language, words, gestures, and images that define the world around his or her subject, which encircle that subject.

I hope, and I say this with a smile, that my conditionals are well supported by my research. I use all my ingenuity and years of haunting archives and libraries to find evidence that can work. The conditionals are also a way to leave my argument open, to suggest a tension between my interest in my subjects and their own thoughts and desires. And through my conditionals, I’m leaving open to my readers greater freedom to say, “But no…”

DC: Don’t you try in a way to have readers discover their own sense of pleasure by inviting them to speak directly with your text, by engaging them in a dialogue with your own inventiveness, one that leads them to share your own relationship with history?

NZD: Why not? If I could share my pleasure with my readers, even a little, it would be a great joy for me. And yet if I hope that my writing might win readers over to my historical enthusiasm, I don’t want them simply to be persuaded by the rhetoric, style, detail, or construction of my texts. Rather I want to start a conversation with my readers, a dialogue, even a dispute. I use rhetorical techniques to encourage a double reaction: to agree or not to agree with my approach, my methods, and my interpretation.

DC: In the prologue to one of your major works, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, you distinguish an initial level of conversation that puts you into contact with people in the past and thus precedes the kind of relationship you wish to cultivate with your readers. It consists of an imaginary conversation that you broach and then compose with three women from different religions, one Jewish, one Protestant, and the last Catholic. I find it most significant that you call this an “adventure,” as if, if I understand you correctly, the historian embarks on a kind of voyage into the past where she is both master and slave of her subject of study because the sources constrain the historian who nevertheless retains the capacity to choose, define, and select which problems to pursue. Above all, the historian defends her right to speak with these specters that almost come to life again in her imagination. It seems obvious that you’ve pursued this “adventure” throughout your work. You’ve never fixed on any one subject in your career; instead, you’ve island-hopped, so to speak, to include even an interest in cinema and the ways it shapes representations of the past. For you, does the historian become a sort of scientist who experiments with encounters and words, places and persons, always shifting, moving, even jumping from one place to another, from one time period to another, from one dialogue to another dialogue, from one “dispute” to another “dispute,” as you put it? Is yours a dialogical history in which one interlocutor arrives only to fade away and be replaced by another? Is it a history that craves words, craves “conversation”?

NZD: I must admit that in some ways I’m an impatient person, I’m restless. To be sure, there have been research projects I’ve put aside because I felt that I had not got to the heart of certain questions I’d posed, that there were certain central issues that I had not figured out. When that happens—as it did with my book on The Gift—I put the project on the back burner for a time. Usually I have a different rhythm. When I’ve explored a subject, perhaps not as thoroughly as one could, but to my own satisfaction, discovered as much I could, and written it up, I have a sense that I’ve reached the limits of my inquiry. I like to turn toward another subject—in fact, there’s usually one there already beckoning me.

I must say there is a contrast between my experience and that of historians who take hold of a big question—say, feudalism in the twelfth century or the humanist world of the sixteenth century—and write marvelous and deeply researched books on these themes their whole life long. I admire their work and their faculty of concentration, but it’s not my style. I take a subject and pass to another. It’s not that I get bored staying in one place, rather I get attracted by another. It’s like a jewel, a diamond that one turns, and suddenly there’s a whole other face. It’s that new face of history that I want to examine.

So after coming to Lyon to do a type of social history and finding the archives appropriate to that approach, I turned to a more cultural history, adding charivaris and carnivals to the strikes and trade unions. Next I moved beyond Lyon, an urban and artisanal center, to the countryside and the peasants, inspired, of course, by the studies of other historians. What delight! New archives, new libraries, new settings. And then I started experimenting with other forms of writing and expression, and even imagining I could use film to tell about the past.

But the biggest leap for me has been working on countries other than France. I had long been interested in other countries for purposes of comparison with the French case, but these comparisons were limited and supported by the research of other historians. So it was an exciting moment when I engaged with the three women: the German Jew Glikl; the German Protestant Maria Sibylla Merian, who spent some time in Suriname; and the French Catholic Marie de l’Incarnation, who spent much of her life in Québec. For the first time I used archives outside of France. I had to improve my reading of other languages, and learn to read Yiddish for the first time. That’s when I learned what an adventure history can be. I was just amazed at how much one could continue to learn.

DC: Does your dialogue with past lives spring from a personal urge to always amplify and renew the stock of what you know far beyond your own personal experience?

NZD: “Conversation” with people of the past requires a long and ever-renewed apprenticeship. Right now I’m working on Muslims in North Africa. At my advanced age, I’ve decided that it’s no longer possible to really learn Arabic, and so I’ve decided to use translations and translators to understand the texts in Arabic that concern the man whose real name was al-Hasan al-Wazzn (and not Leo Africanus). Most of the works he left, however, are in Italian or in Latin, especially in Italian, a foreigner’s Italian. At my age, simply to have the pleasure of reading not only his writings, but also in translation the great works on Islamic religion and law, the great texts on the history of the Arabs and Arabic literature—this has been an adventure. An adventure, because it’s very difficult to step outside of the European world, but it’s so interesting, so enriching…

DC: In Leo Africanus, what is it that pleases you beyond the simple contact with writings from the past? Are they the implications that arise for our own world today? Or is it simply restoring a past way to think and live, a way that derives its complexity from Leo Africanus’s vagabond life?

NZD: It’s both things. I must tell you that I’ve known “Leo Africanus” under the name given him by Christians since my graduate-student days because the French translation of his celebrated work, The Description of Africa, was published in Lyon in 1556 by one of my Protestant printers. I’ve known this work for a long time, but at first the book seemed important only for its place in European intellectual history and as an edition published by a Protestant in France. Later on, I became interested in the relation between French people and foreigners, especially through my study of Marie de l’Incarnation, and in questions concerning the colonial world. It was only eight years ago that the moment seemed right for me to work on a person like al-Wazzn, a man between two worlds: the world of North Africa and the world of Italy and Europe, between Islam and Christianity. That was in 1995 at a time of intense nationalist passion and rage…

DC: That’s the question I wanted to ask you. Isn’t looking at the past through a character such as al-Wazzn a way to keep at bay the uncertainties of the present? Or is it a plea against the refusal to acknowledge Otherness, against the illusion of homogeneity?

NZD: Yes, against that nationalist fury, these religious passions, that obsession with frontiers, with fixed and immovable boundaries and borders, which have become so strong in our time and which run so counter to the porousness suggested by documents of the past…and by the figure of al-Wazzn. There’s a real need to show that history has not consisted only of exclusions and exclusiveness; in the lives of individuals, of groups, and of nations, the story has been quite otherwise. The will to assign oneself a simplistic single-stranded identity, a “pure” authenticity, is negative and dangerous. So it seemed to me that al-Wazzn alias Leo Africanus was, among other examples—for I have others!—a fascinating person in whom one could explore the creative tension in “mixture,” in cultural crossings.

But as I’ve been working on the project—and I hope I’m on the right track—I’ve discovered an amusing thing about myself, about my style as a historian. Since The Return of Martin Guerre, when I wrote the story of someone who played with his identity, I think I’ve acquired a sort of style, or at least a habitual way of perceiving situations and people, that is, of always looking for questions about self-fashioning, of fashioning one’s inner and outer self, and even of imposture. This is a style that the evidence itself required of me in the case of Martin Guerre, but it continued with the three women, who fashioned and created their lives in unusual directions. I began this study of al-Wazzn without any conscious idea that I was once again going to come upon a case of self-fashioning. And here I am finding it once again. I don’t know whether it’s just me, my habit of perception, or the evidence that is exuding from this vision. I’d like to believe that it’s the documentation, but whatever it is, history is repeating itself.

DC: There’s that theme of pleasure again, right? The kind of pleasure when one communes with the objects of one’s study to see their different possible identities arising along some sort of set path? Isn’t this a way for the historian to find personal reassurance?

NZD: It’s true that one can never simply put oneself aside or on the margin of this past with which one has come to live for the moment. But my preferences or my needs, though present, must not determine my historical vision. The historian must be open to the traces of the past, to the voices of the past. That’s what must count first of all. This idea of imposture—or rather self-fashioning, for “imposture” is too strong a word for most of my cases—this principle according to which a personality can be crafted leads us to reflect on a kind of game. History is both tragic and ludic at the same time, two aspects that always coexist. My position is halfway between Rabelais⁵ and Montaigne:⁶ Rabelais for the spirit of play, Montaigne rather for the spirit of tragedy. My preference goes a bit more in the direction of laughter and play. As for the idea of “self-fashioning”—an expression we owe to Montaigne—it includes the activity of a person, like a kind of game or play, in a historical situation where he or she tries somehow to survive, to adapt, to cope, to improvise, to take the best advantage of the possibilities offered. There’s perhaps only a small space for comedy here, but that small space, in a world full of sadness, is better than nothing.

DC: Precisely how do you see the relationship between past and present? Do you find in the present world, indeed in yourself, this type of game? Isn’t a historian, even the most conscientious one who respects the basic rules of knowledge, still just someone who makes the past into some kind of game? Doesn’t a historian put this mask or that one, however knowingly, on the characters she claims to give voice to, be they major or minor figures, based on the sources or not? Isn’t a historian thus only a charlatan, a mere trickster, who should leave all of us skeptical about the historian’s craft? This is a little like what Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim wrote in the 1520s when he said that history is just a pack of fables (most of which recount, he went on, atrocities and acts of violence!).⁷ Your heroines, for example, are usually unhappy women who behave in ways that create for them an alternative, closed, and protected space that they can master, where they can exercise power and thus rise above the normative social and gender rules that label them as weak and confine them to certain prescribed roles. Don’t you actually realize that they come to you as you wish to see them, thereby avoiding a more complex reality? It’s almost as if you wanted to escape from harsh circumstances that threatened your own hopes and dreams by taking refuge in your study of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? When it comes to this moment right now, what do you see or want to see?

NZD: Yes and no. In interpreting the past, I have in fact drawn upon insights from my own experience: a family in which my grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants. That’s the American drama, a country of immigrants. My ancestors came to the U.S. in the mid- or late nineteenth century, speaking European languages or Yiddish, and with their own customs. They wanted to create for themselves an American life with a Jewish identity. As for me, I belong to the third generation; on my mother’s side, it was the first where the women went to university. I also had to transform myself, to Americanize myself, to find my own identity—but it was a complex matter, because I was very tied to France, the study of France, and to French culture. So self-fashioning was part of my own experience. And then I went on to marry a man with a very different background from my own, another pattern of self-fashioning. This transformative work on the self, my own and that of my family, does provide a link between what I write and the present-day world.

But no, I do not refashion the men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth century simply from the perspective of my own life or from my own twentieth and now twenty-first century. I am, I must be as faithful, as attentive as possible to all the remains of the past. These papers, these images—I didn’t bring them into being. They are legacies from people of long ago, and I am obliged by this gift from the past to take them very seriously. There lies my psychological engagement, my psychological contract, with the people whom I seek to know and understand. If I find things that disappoint me, too bad for me, I’ve got to make do with them and accept them.

In fact, it turns out that the difficult cases are often the most interesting—full of surprises and the unexpected. I especially had this challenge when I was writing on the three women: the Jewish Glikl and the Catholic Marie de l’Incarnation had each left autobiographies, signs of consciousness of the self. The Protestant Maria Sibylla Merian gave out only a few scraps about herself. So I was forced to question myself and the past about the significance of silence. A condition for a kind of freedom in the seventeenth century? Another form of dissimulation?

These lives of the past have taught me a lot. I think I never clearly perceived the role of self-fashioning in my own life until after I’d reflected on the lives of Martin Guerre, Arnaud du Tilh, and Bertrande de Rols. Elements from the past inform the present, and sometimes we look at the present through the prism of the past. Or to put it another way, a painful or dangerous or vital reality of the present can be examined in light of the past, even though forms and conditions change so much over time: the past offers us ways to reflect on the present with greater nuance, sensitivity, and detachment.

DC: Or more critically?

NZD: Surely—or at least I hope so. The strategies for métissage, for mixing, and for self-fashioning of al-Wazzn lead to reflection, they encourage you to look with critical eyes at the issues of religious, racist, or nationalist passion. Throughout the world, in the West and the East, doctrinaire identity movements of this kind are emerging. We need to reflect on other possibilities. Very often the past offers us the memory of possibilities—not models, not possibilities to imitate, but simply other possible worlds, other ways of living that we humans sometimes had here or elsewhere on our globe. The book I wrote on the gift in sixteenth-century France grew out of a fascinating question posed by Marcel Mauss, a question to which both anthropologists and historians have given thought. Why do we live under a religion of the market, which insists on a single mode for exchanging things between people and ignores other possibilities, other modes for the exchange of objects and ideas? I thought such an exploration could open the way to reflection on possibilities…

DC: At the same time, in your books you don’t let readers realize the theoretical implications of these calls for reflection. Does that spring from your fear of becoming too didactic?

NZD: A book is not a lesson. I don’t know of perfect solutions to all these questions. I have some ideas about solutions, some values that I’d like to see expressed in our world today, but I’m not going to preach them. I have two goals. First, that readers be interested, drawn by a historical account, amused by its comic aspects, saddened by the tragic elements, captured by the possibilities of the past; and second, that readers be aware that there could be another way of looking at things besides the one I offer. I’m not giving a lesson or a sermon, I’m offering a dialogue, as I said before.

Sometimes I imagine a dialogue with my long-dead subjects. For my first book, my husband, Chandler, wrote a poem, which served as a dedication or envoi. Already back then, he imagined me wishing for a conversation with the printer’s journeymen of sixteenth-century Lyon! I liked this poem very much and was glad to have it as an epigraph to my book since it expressed a wish to know what the printing workers would have thought of what I’d written. Maybe they wouldn’t have liked what I’d said at all. Had I caught their “truth” or had I deformed it?

DC: Let’s return to al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus. Don’t you want to turn this character into a symbol of cultural openness where an individual’s power derives from his capacity to be acculturated, to leave off his sense of self or project another one for others to see? Doesn’t this raise questions about creative agency?

NZD: Just so. We see here how a person invents procedures for accommodation when he or she is placed in a difficult situation—and I say “difficult” because al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus had been captured by Christian pirates and his arrival in Italy was not voluntary. In this difficult and dangerous situation, he found a way to learn, to gain access to new knowledge, sometimes to amuse himself, and even travel once he’d become a Christian. What especially interested me was how he associated the ideas and features of his education as a Muslim with those of his Christian life, how in some sense he stitched together the diverse threads given him by the vicissitudes of his life. His book on Africa had much success with European readers later on, but it was also a success for him. That book is his own creation, something he might never have achieved if he had not found himself in a tough spot, displaced from his world into another world. And that’s important! He became a writer—an author—when he had to write in a foreign language. He shaped himself as a person and writer out of ambivalence: out of attraction to another culture and desire to be differentiated from that culture.

DC: These are the paradoxes of individual destinies, even though he had to endure the shock of a forced dislocation that he coped with by fashioning himself into a writer who invented his own way of trying to describe a homeland he had lost.

NZD: Yes, but when I first started on al-Wazzn’s story, I underestimated the cost of uprooting, the toll it could take. Now that I’ve done research, on him and on other persons I’m studying in this project on cultural crossing, I see that things are not so simple—they never are. To put it briefly, in his book al-Wazzn said that when he returned to his home in North Africa, he wanted to write other works—on Europe and on the travels he claimed to have made in Asia. In my opinion, he would also have wished to rewrite his great work on Africa, composed initially for European readers, in Arabic and make it suitable for Arab readers. Once back in North Africa, he would have had to return to Islam, and then if all had gone as he had once hoped, he would have plunged himself into writing. Now we know he was alive in North Africa in 1532, five years after he had left Italy. But from everything I’ve been able to discover in Arab manuscript collections and from all my searching in Arabic biographical dictionaries (the tabaqat, biographies of illustrious and learned persons, a very important genre in the Arab world), al-Wazzn left nothing after his return, not a single work, not a manuscript.

DC: Were the manuscripts lost or did they simply not exist?

NZD: From what I’ve been able to ascertain up till now—and it was recently confirmed after conversations with specialists in Morocco, such as Lucette Valensi, Oumelbanine Zhiri, and Faustina Doufikar-Aerts⁸—his hope to continue writing was not realized. And yet, it could have been very interesting, one might think, for inhabitants of North Africa or for the Ottomans to have at their disposal a description of what al-Wazzn had seen in Italy.

DC: For you too!

NZD: For sure! I was left with imagining, with speculating from everything al-Wazzn said in The Description of Africa (his manuscript actually had a different title, but the printed work was entitled this way). What to think? I speculated that he was not able to write perhaps because of a lack of readers for or listeners to his story: perhaps his fellow Muslims were suspicious of him and of what he’d done in Italy even though he’d returned to Islam; perhaps he had not been able to find an important patron or protector. In my view, the answer to the question is first of all psychological. To put it succinctly, the leap he made during his nine years in Italy was both intellectual and psychological.

As I see him in Italy, during his time as a Christian, he both remained faithful to his Muslim and Arab origins and at the same time learned a great deal, enlarged his angles of vision and perceptions; he opened out. In his manuscript of his Africa book (though not in the much-edited printed version), there are literary, expository, and rhetorical signs of his state of mind, which we can detect through attentive reading. His exposition indicates a break with an important feature of the Arab and Muslim mental world. There it is expected that the writer acknowledge a line of professional transmission (reverence in regard to my teacher, the teacher of my teacher, etc.). This requirement originated in religious life and pronouncement: to have authority, what one says in the present must always go through a chain of transmission (isnad) back to the Prophet or the Companions or wives of the Prophet. Thought is supported by this kind of reference.

Now in al-Wazzn’s manuscripts in Italian and Latin, this chain of transmission is suggested sometimes for others, for example, for the great scholar Ibn Rushd (Averroës), but never for himself.⁹ He never gives the names of his teachers or the teachers of his teachers. He presents himself to Christian readers as a man educated as a Muslim, who has read many Arabic manuscripts, but who is interpreting his world and the great Muslim figures as an independent observer—cut off, liberated, detached from the chain of transmission. This expository practice, this writing practice is—so I claim—an index of a new sense of self, a new self-consciousness that is precariously solitary.

And then al-Wazzn returns to North Africa. He cuts off his relations with the great but dangerous adventure of his Italian years, years that were for him simultaneously Christian and Muslim. And then he can’t put himself back to work. Had his mental uprooting been too extreme? His desire to write seems to have dried up, or at least to write in Arabic. Alas, I am left with some wistfulness. I started this project with the naive idea, “Ah, here is the creative work of a man in the course of a complicated life.” Well, the ending turned out not to be quite the fulfillment of my first hopes.

DC: Shouldn’t you really interpret this final speechlessness as a kind of self-criticism of his own making while he was in Italy? Wouldn’t it be better to talk about remorse or even estrangement, where distance becomes a necessary condition for such discourse? Remorse or was it nostalgia? Or is it rather a fact that the tools he used—Latin, Italian, printed books—proved most conducive to express this realization? Wouldn’t he have lost one of his identities, the one he fashioned to deal with his condition as an alien, when he eventually returned home? Wouldn’t he have taken some pleasure in closing this chapter of his life? In the sixteenth century, it seems to me that an individual could choose to deploy any number of different identities; that in fact an individual’s identity developed in a plural manner. We’d have to admit that this cultural fact would have required a ceaseless accommodation of the self with respect to others. In this light, the question of contradiction becomes secondary. A person is who a person is as the result of a particular moment in time, space, and the greater human community.

NZD: Perhaps…But above all, I think the life of al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus led me to a criticism of myself. One should never begin with…

DC: Hopes too high…?

NZD: Yes, perhaps it’s always like that when one starts out on a research project—one’s ideas are too simplistic, optimistic. But I should restrain myself some here, as I’m still in the process of writing this book. Perhaps it was the world to which al-Wazzn came back that accounts for his “speechlessness,” as you call it. But I would not follow Bernard Lewis here, according to whom the Muslim world had become a closed world and that would explain why al-Wazzn could no longer be creative after his return.¹⁰ Everything I see about this world indicates this was not true, it was not a closed world, and possibilities were opening for the writing of books.

I’m reminded of an assertion I made about Marie de l’Incarnation. In her situation—that of a seventeenth-century woman who was not at all erudite, who sought her own education and fashioned her own goals—the most important book she wrote on theological matters was not in French, but in Algonquian, produced for the Amerindians. She had written other texts with religious themes, as in her autobiography, but when she wanted to treat theological questions directly, in her Sacred History, she did not do it in French. To be sure, she was not authorized to write a theological work: she was not a theologian, she had never studied theology. She had never studied Latin, and claimed that God had “infused” Latin into her head. Thus I find it interesting that it was in Algonquian that she, an unschooled woman, had the audacity to write on learned questions of theology.

This brings me back to your questions about al-Wazzn. Did his audacity in writing a great work on Africa, with its new concept of Africa itself, emerge from the fact that he was writing for Italians? I say “new concept” because though the genres he was deploying—geography, the travel account, history—had existed for centuries in Arabic literature, his concept of Africa, geographical and cultural, had new features to it in relation to the thought of Arabs and Europeans both.

DC: It’s necessary to be “outside of” to be able to…

NZD: To do it. And in a symbolic sense, in another language.

DC: Overcoming such personal inhibitions would make sense when thrusting oneself, either voluntarily or involuntarily, into another place, another culture, another language. Could you have written a book about American history before you first enlarged your own orbit to encompass the life of al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus?

NZD: It may be a little bit my own history that I’m approaching through al-Wazzn or Marie de l’Incarnation: to go to a foreign land to be able to write, or for me, first of all to find a past for myself in a foreign land and then to write. I’ve turned to America and its history only recently. Earlier I sometimes mentioned American themes, as in my study of charivaris. But in my Slaves on Screen, a book I published a few years ago about the historical vision of slavery and especially slave revolts and resistance in film, I included three American-made movies: Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus,¹¹ Steven Spielberg’s Amistad,¹² and Jonathan Demme’s Beloved.¹³ To be able to comment on these films, I had to do lots of research both on filmmaking and on slavery in America.

DC: It was as if America compelled you to examine its history…

NZD: Maybe so. I’ve certainly found it fascinating. But note that my return has taken place by the path of slavery, revolts, and Africans…I’d like to go back for a moment to al-Wazzn and the significance of his life. I have reservations about having this life end only in a tragedy, in the sorrow of speechlessness. I would like to lead up to a conclusion that is not so clear-cut, even though the story turns out to be more complicated than I had anticipated at first. I want to write a less drastic conclusion, a conclusion in which his intellectual inventiveness, his geographical discovery, and the adventure of his life are not erased by a finish without the creativity I had hoped for or that al-Wazzn must have hoped for himself.

I have a penchant, an appetite for writing lives, even unhappy ones, in the course of which the person holds on to a certain dignity up to the end, in spite of the disappointments, the things unfinished, the suffering…

DC: The life of Arnaud du Tilh, the “fake” Martin Guerre, for example, had been given to his contemporaries to read as a story, if not a fantastic one then at least one with a tragic air, which you certainly presented it as. But, in the end, through the account you reconstruct, one gets the sense that this fake Martin Guerre is almost freed, when he’s sentenced to death, from the whole confused affair he began as a game of switched identities, an imposture he slipped into so easily when assuming the character of Martin Guerre, which he then changed and refashioned in a more positive manner that in turn validated in him a new sense of self. His death would thus not be a unique event, just as his life was not (insofar as the fake Martin Guerre possessed a humane sensibility and expressed a love that the real Martin Guerre never had for the wife he had abandoned). Even when all his hopes and dreams finally collapsed, it was if this person lived life in continuous process of self-fashioning, at least as you see it.

NZD: The contemporaries of Martin Guerre envisaged the affair as a tragicomedy rather than a tragedy: after all, the impostor was unmasked and the wife could take up her life again next to her true husband. We’re the ones who bring out the tragic elements underlying the story. Yes, Arnaud du Tilh lost, but even to him I wanted to offer a release, or rather I gave him an execution with a certain quality. At the end of his adventure, he could have denounced Bertrande de Rols as his accomplice. Instead he decided to die with some dignity (I didn’t make up this ending: it’s right there in the documents; but I did stress it and write about it). Arnaud refused to take with him to death and opprobrium the woman with whom he had lived in imposture and perhaps, too, in some happiness…

DC: Was this “dignified” death perhaps tied to the possibility he was a Calvinist or at least open to Jean Calvin’s ideas¹⁴ (much as was the author of the Arrêt mémorable, Jean de Coras) and that death, for a man converted to the Reformed religion, brings an end to anguish, that it is God’s will before which man must surrender humbly and patiently, a test that God sends to him to test the strength of his faith so that he proves all his thoughts are firmly fixed on the hope of Christ, on the rock of Christ? Didn’t his self-restraint provide a chance to introduce Christians to Calvin’s teachings on Christ’s charity and love? Wasn’t there a sort of hidden message in the Arrêt mémorable about willingly accepting death with calm assurance? Man is certainly a sinner, but his consciousness of sin is regenerated when he places all his hope in divine forgiveness, no?

NZD: Conversion is certainly a strong possibility for Arnaud du Tilh, as I argued in the book, though I haven’t got sure proof. I think it very probable that he was part of the Protestant faction in Artigat, in which case your speculation would be justified.

DC: Or rather that Jean de Coras would, in some way, want to insert a subtext into his Arrêt mémorable, one about how an exemplary faith led a man to no longer fear death because death made possible his union with Christ. Leaving aside the question of knowing Arnaud du Tilh’s faith, didn’t Coras want to send an almost subliminal message to his readers? As for al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus, couldn’t we surmise that, beyond your own dissatisfaction when confronting his silence, likely his coping mechanism, his return to Islam would have forced or triggered in him a sense of fatalism? Could he really enjoy his silence without a bad conscience somehow lurking in the background? As a historian, you take something of a risk when you emphasize your own sense of disillusionment, thereby forgetting that serenity or wisdom once had other pathways than the ones you idealize for yourself and for the characters you conjure in your own mind…Can’t a person’s silence in fact bespeak their own peace of mind?

NZD: No, I believe that after his years of dissimulation and exploration—and opening out?—in Italy, he may well have been thrown off balance when he returned to Islam. Rather than fatalism, I’d suspect he would have plunged into practices of expiation. We know of other apostates who, in returning to Dar-al-Islam, left for Mecca. Why not a second pilgrimage for al-Wazzn? He himself described the conversion of the great scholar al-Ghazl, who gave up his professorship of law to become a Sufi mystic, and we can imagine that al-Wazzn, after seeing the splendors of Rome, might have done something similar.¹⁵

I’d like to tell you about another tool I’ve been using to interpret this life so full of mysteries. There’s an extremely interesting literary tradition in the Arab world, the genre of the maqmt, that is, the “assemblies,” created by two writers, al-Hamadhn¹⁶ in the late tenth century, and then al-Hariri¹⁷ at the beginning of the twelfth century. The maqmt, were always composed in a rhymed prose, full of alliteration. But it’s the hero of the maqmt who’s important here (for some scholars today he’s an antihero, but not for me!): a traveler, a vagabond poet, and eloquent speaker, who has adventures everywhere in the Muslim world and who is always in disguise. The maqmt have a typical form: there’s always a narrator, himself a voyager, who travels about as a merchant, a pilgrim, or a judge, and who tells to his friends assembled around him the adventures of the vagabond poet. In each tale, the latter puts on a different disguise, but the narrator always recognizes him at the end, especially when he begins to speak in striking metric verse, sometimes touching on theological questions. The vagabond poet always gets what he’s after, whether he’s begging or seeking money or some other benefit—he lands on his feet and leaves with his pouches full. You see how I can use this figure, this trope, to interpret my voyager—not in every aspect of his life, but at least in part.

Toward the end of al-Hamadhn’s maqmt, the tensions and contradictions in the life of this vagabond poet with all his ruses are foregrounded in a dramatic way, followed by an effort at resolution. In the maqmt entitled “Wine,” there’s a movement between delicious wine, served by a magnificent hostess, and the mosque.¹⁸ The hero, in disguise as imam, expels the wine-drinkers from the mosque (in the story, the wine-drinkers are the narrator and his buddies); and then as shaykh and love of the beautiful hostess, the hero joins these same friends and drinks in their company. Unmasked and chided for his hypocrisy, he gives a defense in verse for his behavior and his choices. The narrator is not fully persuaded by his argument and leaves the question to God. But he stays with the vagabond poet, rejoicing in his presence. I see here a possible opening toward the celebrated mystical wine-poem of the Sufi Ibn al-Farid,¹⁹ which al-Wazzn recalled often during his Italian years. I would love to have found a text by al-Wazzn where he fit together the different parts of his life as happens in the maqmt “Wine.” In fact, what I’m having to do is conjecture that he could have made use of the verses of the great poet and thinker, the Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabi²⁰—that he would have known them and meditated upon them: “My heart is open to all forms.” Here was a mystical movement that stayed within Islam, yet opened the heart to other religious sensibilities.

DC: Does this strange journey finally end in a flash of insight that completes an inner conversation giving voice to a mystic?

NZD: Maybe so. I still wish I had a text from al-Wazzn after his return to North Africa: if I could rewrite the past, there would be such a text with some sort of resolution, perhaps with poetic sensibility. As it is, it is Natalie Davis who will be deciding whether to end the life of al-Hasan al-Wazzn with the text of al-Hamadhn and the poem of Ibn al-‘Arabi.

DC: As a person who’s always loved storytelling, haven’t you wished at some exact moment in your analysis you could just escape from the confines of history based on sources? Haven’t you wanted yourself to write what the primary or secondary sources don’t provide you in order to create your own virtual reality? It seems to me that historians become too timid as a result of their attachment, even if unconscious, to this prevailing positivism. Is there some precise stage in writing, when history becomes obscured in shadows, that it’s impossible to see how to grab hold of the past, to realize a level of discourse that possesses its own coherence and logic and that develops as a kind of projection of a likely future only set in the past? All history is thus virtual in its essence and by necessity—even if there are historians who say it and assume it, as well as those who don’t say it or ignore it. Why don’t we once and for all begin to admit what we might call an “imagined” past? Take, for example, the imagined past of Leo Africanus upon his return home after a long absence, returned perhaps to die among his own people, under another sky and on another ground?

NZD: For me, the sources from the past, primary or secondary, are not a prison. They are a magic thread that links me to people long since dead and with situations that have crumbled to dust. The sources set off my reflection and imagination, I stay in dialogue with them, and I love this. This liaison with the past is the heart of my vocation as historian. The sources leave a space for speculation, and I will have to use it sometimes in my book on al-Wazzn. But I must always identify my speculations as such for my readers, and show them the bases for believing a certain thing is possible, probable, or contingent.

DC: It suddenly seems to me that historians often become too timid when faced with contingencies. Why, when a kind of interpretive wall is reached, don’t they leap beyond the limits of what their sources tell them and concoct instead a critical space rife with possibilities? It’s true that history has tended toward its own sort of marginalized discourse; but apart from the moment where the limits of the past’s admissibility are accepted, recorded, and perceived as inevitable constraints, apart from the moment where we can’t escape from the realm of the plausible or the admissible unless it’s all locked up in a vicious cycle of logical absurdity, all might be possible, for it’s this purposeful loss of control, if I can use that expression, which would be interesting to put into practice in order to try to go beyond…

NZD: The sphere of the possible or probable is very large. Indeed, things considered “prodigious,” to cite the title of Jean de Coras’s book on the Martin Guerre case, actually happen—things considered at the time “monstrous,” “beyond nature.” I want my speculative jumps to start from a springboard of documentation. And out of respect for my readers and for the past, I must interject my personal voice—“this is what I see.” But frankly, al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus is much more interesting than I am; I’m not the important one, he is.

DC: Yes, but he doesn’t exist without…

NZD: Without a biographer, without a relation to me—okay, but it’s always he who is the subject. I’m not writing an autobiography. I’m doing my best to respect the sources about him, but mysteries remain, more than in more usual historical inquiry. Or to put it another way, I’m not willing to let al-Wazzn go without asking tough questions and they’re hard to answer. My voice appears as a murmur now and then, when I acknowledge what I’ve done.

I actually wish that something similar could be developed in historical films. Serious historical films get made. But filmmakers should also find dramatic and aesthetically appealing means to suggest to viewers what part their own creativity has played in the representation of historical facts, indicate by small signs the role of the filmmaker’s invention in the film script and image. Working out how this might be achieved is a future task for the art of historical films. We need something better than the disingenuous “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” disclaimer at the end of the movie, or the naive “this is based on a true story” at the opening.

DC: You said it yourself: cinema, even when it’s obviously fictional, when it uses shortcuts, simplifications, exaggerations, it still helps you formulate a whole series of problems that remain foreign or secondary to formal historical analysis. Gestures such as actions to signal or greet, people’s gazes, the colors of clothes and props, the shape of fruit and vegetables…It insists that things be made concrete, that history be comprised of snapshots that taken together form the little moments of life in the past, that recall these moments, even the inconsequential ones that go to the very heart of past lives. The fictional, the fabricated if you’d like, aren’t these all just tricks to prompt reflection, to ask questions?

NZD: A good historical film should pose questions to the viewer. But planning and visualizing a historical film are fascinating for the historian or the historically minded filmmaker. So many situations arise for which you would not need to seek evidence if you were writing a prose nonfiction text: conversations, movements, encounters. The imagination is constantly at work here, but as I argued in Slaves on Screen, in a good historical film, the imagination will always be informed by historical research into what was possible or likely in a given situation—not just on the traditional matters of costumes and props, but on the deep matters of language, sensibility, the expression of feeling, posture, social intimacy and distance, and the like. Some so-called historical films don’t give you any sense of the past at all; they’re just full of clichés and recycled stereotypes. But when the filmmaker and those with whom he or she has worked are serious about telling a historical story, the film can bring fresh insight into the past, and be absorbing to watch as well. As for the truth status of such films, I’ve suggested we think about them as “thought experiments.”

DC: What did you think, for example, about the film La Reine Margot, set as it is in the middle of your beloved sixteenth century?²¹

NZD: Well, it had some visually beautiful moments, as in the hunting scene and in the court ceremonial. But I found La Reine Margot much more expressive of the spirit of France of the nineteenth century, or even the twentieth century, than of the sixteenth century. It is shot through from start to finish with all the fables that make up the “black legend” of the Medici and Queen Margot, a legend well studied by Éliane Viennot.²² I’d like to know what she thinks of this film! It recreates precisely the repulsive image of absolute monarchy of the sixteenth century, the bad monarchy of the Valois, which was needed by liberals of the 1830s in order to glorify the liberal monarchy of their own time.²³ The massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day²⁴ is modeled after the twentieth-century Holocaust. This is what happens with bad films: the strangeness of the past gets remade as today’s familiar news.

DC: One rightly senses that this kind of film could be a perfect counterexample to the ways in which one’s own personal opinions intrude in the making or remaking of history. It’s a film that instead mixes together Alexandre Dumas²⁵ with Patrice Chéreau,²⁶ which combines the dark romanticism of a rogue monarchy that uses poison, sex, and murder with the much rawer realism of a Holocaust memoir and the more recent memories of events in Bosnia.²⁷ The final forms arise from the grafting together of these two approaches, even though they speak with one unified voice as a tragedy, thus leaving the viewer unable to reflect upon facts, unable to think about why even the characters and events are depicted in such stark terms. In this kind of film, there’s only a story that unfolds, without any doubt or suspicion, no awareness of relativism, according to its own logic since the goal of the film isn’t history but rather to follow the parabolic arc of a narrative. The entire problem turns on the question of reception; its viewers who see history, once and for all, and rare are those of them who suspect that this parabolic path bends history to its own purposes, that it lays hold of history as one would modeling clay. While the promise of history, such as you might make it, would be a dialogue with the reader that allows him to let his imagination course from the most nefarious of the Valois to the most modest in society, which would have been the most enlightening, a dialogue that left room for suspicion…

NZD: I’d like to mention as a contrast a very good film, Alain Corneau’s Tous les matins du monde.²⁸ On the fine details about the music, the court, various objects, I’m not specialist enough to make any judgment. But the film offers much understanding of the Jansenist spirit,²⁹ the relation between life at the court and life in the country, and the ambivalence aroused by the court, both its appeal and its repellent qualities. There’s a French film that imagines the past with rich historical insight, and I certainly learned a lot from it. I’m not so sure, however, that it introduces moments of dialogue with the spectator. For that, we can turn to Ettore Scola’s La Nuit de Varennes.³⁰ The construction is completely artificial—all those people, some of them celebrities, crowded together in a coach in 1791—but it’s very informative on the different responses contemporaries had toward the French Revolution, and amusing besides. And the film, including its anachronistic ending, when Restif de la Bretonne³¹ walks up a flight of stairs into the streets of modern Paris, invites us spectators to react…

DC: I would like for us now to talk a little about a matter I raised a short while ago; namely, when you study a document, be it a letter of pardon, an autobiography, and so on, you look right away for underlying reasons to explain a particular form of writing. You state, for example, that a letter of pardon is a text whose nature is fictional enough but that also, in its means of enunciation, relies on stereotypes that lend it historical meaning because these same stereotypes are purposely structured composites. Doesn’t this example epitomize the challenge facing historians who study past fictions? Don’t they have to plumb the relationship between what a person says and how he or she says it? Aren’t a person’s rhetorical choices predicated on his or her particular situation (or that of anyone helping them) and the ends they seek, in this case regaining one’s place in society by projecting a sense of self they think others would believe?

NZD: At the beginning, when I was working on the Protestant Reformation and the workers as a pure “social historian,” I didn’t ask such questions. I was using all kinds of texts: from Calvin, Rabelais, and other humanists to pamphlets intended to be distributed in the streets and taverns and popular songs and stories. I loved this diversity. I knew you had to be careful about the “prejudices” (to use the old word) that might lurk behind these writings, but I didn’t worry about or even ask myself about their literary construction. I read the learned texts to discover the point of view of their authors, their opinions, their doctrines, whatever I needed to prop up my argument. For the popular texts, I read them for the point of view on God, on work, on strikes, on women, and the like.

In later years, I never put aside this kind of inquiry, that is, into the modes of thinking and representation embedded in a text, but I asked new questions about ways of writing and the forms and rituals of discourse. I began to look not only at what was stated or declared in a text, but also at what was suggested through expression, through performance. This happened for several reasons. First, we’re always influenced by our friends and colleagues, and many of my friends in the university milieu were in other disciplines: with Rosalie Colie³² and Stephen Greenblatt³³ I talked about many “purely” literary matters, but they also turned to history to enlarge their own analyses. Our conversations gave me a new orientation. And then, I got caught up in certain historical topics that took me beyond the usual paths of social history: the history of the book, where the question was not only the content of the book, but also the way in which the book was organized, framed, and formed; the history of oral culture and expression, where the question was not just the moral set forth—“be prudent,” “be wary,” “be a good neighbor”—but even more the way in which oral expression was given (say, so as to echo an earlier proverb, or to take on the form of an adage). And then especially, feast days, festivities, and rituals. The charivari interested me not just for what was said—for example, “don’t beat your husband” or “don’t marry a girl too young”—but for its form. When I decided to try to make a film or work on a film, I was already captivated by notions of performance.

Those were the practical problems that led me to the account, the narrative, the story. A real turning point for me was in 1979, when I was writing a review of Montaillou³⁴ for the Annales. For the fun of it and to learn more about the text Le Roy Ladurie had used, I decided to read the inquisition records of Jacques Fournier, which had been published.³⁵ Reading this document, I said to myself, “My goodness! We have here not only what these men and women were declaring to the inquisitor—and already this was complicated, because they were speaking in Occitan and it was being translated into Latin and then the Latin read back to them in Occitan for their concurrence—but also the fashion in which they spoke, and specifically the elaboration of each interrogation into a story. ‘Fifteen years ago, I was crossing the village square, and carrying a sheepskin…’; or ‘Twenty-four years ago, I saw a man in the distance, he had a beard and the color of his clothing was…’” They didn’t just give such concrete details about events long ago in this narrative fashion, they also recreated precise conversations, the questions asked and responses given. It was astonishing. I entitled my review “Les conteurs de Montaillou,” “The Storytellers of Montaillou,” because it seemed to me that this faculty of storytelling was as fascinating as the extraordinary things Le Roy Ladurie told us about the village of Montaillou and its mentalities.

With my interest in rituals, in stories, in performances—and I mean by that the techniques or dramatic modes by means of which persons carry out an action—I have taken another path, or rather I should say, I’ve enlarged my path, as I’ve never effaced the practice of social history at all. And furthermore, as you have suggested, I believe strongly that this way of looking at sources from the past does not undermine their value as documents, but rather enhances their value even while going beyond the literal statements they include.