Encounters

DC: This now leads us to shift our attention to the fact that wonderment definitely seems a bit like Ariadne’s thread which guides us from one curiosity to another. But aren’t all our various encounters also a determining factor for the course this journey takes, encounters with persons dead as well as alive? Aren’t there, in certain situations, experiences in writing that can’t be joined with persons we’ve met?

NZD: Yes, I made that link in Women on the Margins, in the dialogue that opens the book and which I like a lot…

DC: Me too!

NZD: I must say that when I first showed it to my editor at Harvard University Press, she was very dubious about it. She wanted a more “normal” preface…

DC: Maria Sibylla Merian addressed to you words that sound a little reproachful: “I have the impression, Mistress Historian, that it’s you who are looking for adventure…”

NZD: [laughter] I wanted to make fun of myself and also suggest to my readers the distance between our preoccupations (for instance, on questions of gender) and the perceptions of these women of the past. Here are my stakes in this issue; those of my heroines might be different. I thought the dialogue form would be amusing and accessible, and, besides, my subjects become temporarily alive for a time while I’m working on them—in the shadows, but alive. In the books I’ve written since then, I haven’t used any imagined or direct dialogue, but who knows what I might do in the future?

DC: In your Fiction in the Archives, you wrote about letters of pardon and remission that forgave offenses as laboratory instruments that enabled you, as you put it, to retrieve the voices of forgotten people—not just from the lower classes, but also nobles and clergymen…But it’s also true that you start from the principle that these documents have a life of their own and that from these documents you can breathe new life into these actors, actors who above all want to tell a story according their own criteria for explaining change and storytelling. This story is hardly their own, but is rather a story as it’s expected to be told, a story that’s going to win for them forgiveness! In other words, you simultaneously make your anchor point the individual who faces facts he or she wants to explain, but that this same individual allows you, after a fashion, to take stock of a society in such typical situations.

NZD: In reading letters of remission over the years, I was often astonished by and sometimes even laughed over the curious things I found there. It’s the way things are told that makes them so amusing. Who knows whether all the events described in such vivid detail really happened that way? Once I’d read Fournier and the villagers of Montaillou, I realized that the stakes were similar to those in the letters of remission: a situation orchestrated by a notary and limited by the formal and stylistic constraints required for what one must say to ask the king for pardon for a homicide. A person who’s committed a homicide must give his or her own version of what happened—extenuating circumstances of one kind or another that will make the homicide excusable—and eventually, if the pardon were to be ratified by the king’s judges, he or she would have to repeat the same story in his or her own words. The letter requesting the pardon had to be convincing, plausible, and given at least in part in the words of the pardon-seeker.

Because of these requirements, one can imagine a storyteller practicing his or her art, despite all the obligatory formulas and direction exercised by the notary. I realized that those letters of remission, which I’d been using for social-history material about crime, geographical mobility, and the like, could also let me listen to the voices of peasants, artisans, nobles (not the great aristocrats, but nobles nonetheless), women, traders.

True, there is another possible path toward those voices: the path of the collectors, who, in the sixteenth century and especially in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, collected tales from the countryside. They were followed by the folklorists and anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I sometimes take this path, but it too presents problems: you’re trying to get evidence when there’s a time gap of a century or two. In order to “backstream” successfully, that is, to assume some continuity over the centuries, I always use the later narrative as a mere possibility for the past, as a suggestion—and then I look for an earlier sign. This is what I did in my study of Maria Sibylla Merian, in regard to her picture of the great hunting spider of Suriname reaching for the eggs in a hummingbird’s nest. I could see she had represented it in the spirit of a natural philosopher from Europe, but I suspected there was also an influence from her African slaves, who told tales of Anansi the spider—the great African tales, still told in the Caribbean today. To establish this hunch, I started with the tales collected about this spider in the nineteenth century, both in Africa and among the slaves in the Caribbean. I was trying to “backstream.”

DC: A retrospective history?

NZD: If you like. Happily for me, I found an account of an agent of the Dutch West Indies Company who lived in West Africa in the late seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth—just the period I was working on—who showed that the stories of Anansi the spider were already widespread. So the retrospective jump was confirmed and justified by a document from the time.

But to return to the letters asking pardon, I had before me a historical object from the sixteenth century that was not “pure”—but what historical object ever is “pure”? Here was a situation where a notary was listening to the words of a peasant or an artisan, a notary writing things down according to juridical rules and notarial formulas, but still a situation of fundamental importance: a face-to-face encounter between a person who speaks and a person who writes. The letters did not offer a perfect mimesis or imitation, but they gave me the evidence to recreate a living moment of talk. I told my reader exactly what the conditions were for that living moment—I devoted a whole chapter to them.

The book has had considerable impact. I’m not thinking so much about reviews, but about the many persons working on similar texts in different fields, who’ve told me how helpful they’ve found it. Over the years I’ve heard from scholars in law faculties, especially those interested in the rhetoric of law, who teach the book in courses that have nothing to do with sixteenth-century France. Of course, there are those who think only a more traditional kind of history will do and who don’t like my work; they simply don’t want to use texts the way I do.

DC: There are classic examples of historical research on criminality in which letters of pardon permit us to study the times and places where violence occurred, the social groups more or less implicated in these acts of aggression, the age and sex of the victims and perpetrators…Never mind that every judicial record derives from a particular form of speech that greatly skews the kind of information it provides. And never mind, too, that a document is always a product of a specific situation in which the person who speaks is the object of writing that’s simultaneously receptive and coded, and only answers standard kinds of questions that he knows he must respond to in one way and not another!

NZD: Yes, but the classical studies on criminality are important.

DC: There are, however, methods of research that confirm the obvious, that often provide statistical proof of something already found in classic narrative sources, including novels. Some methods even ignoring that a judicial record often becomes skewed by the very ends it serves, that it’s a literary work in the sense that it recounts what must be told in very precise circumstances…

NZD: Nonetheless, their social history methods have their use, and my book was not intended to undermine them as such. That is, I did not say that because there were fictional aspects to the narration in letters of pardon, one could draw no conclusions about the location of fights in taverns or about the character of swearing and blasphemy and the like. It’s fine if people make such studies, but I wanted to enrich the possibilities in these sources in another way. I must note, in passing, that even now there are scholars who are always suspicious of everything one tries to do to discover the voice of the menu peuple, as they were in regard to the history of women in the early days of that field of inquiry, and as they are today in regard to the history of colonized and enslaved peoples. Either they say there are no sources whatsoever, or if you find them, they say that there’s nothing authentic in them: you can’t learn anything about the way peasants tell stories from a letter of remission because everything there is from the hand of a notary or a lawyer; you can’t learn anything about Amerindians from the Jesuit relations or Ursuline letters,¹ because everything there is constructed by the Europeans. They dismiss strategies for finding multiple voices in these documents. It’s especially irritating when such a reaction comes from historians who are not even working on the menu peuple and are swimming in documents because their subjects are great families, aristocrats, or kings.

DC: Do you find their attacks too reductionist because they ignore the principle of discursive dependency that lies at the center of constructing the story found in a letter of remission?

NZD: Reductionist and naïve in regard to their own body of materials, because in the correspondence and other documents in the archival treasures of the great houses—and it’s certainly nice to have such abundance—there are also codes for narration and writing, conventional rules, which can’t be ignored. The same analysis should be made here as with the pardon letters. Literary scholars know this well. They remind us that we can’t just approach the writings of Rabelais as straightforward witness of the first half of the sixteenth century. We’ve got to take account of the traditions for writing of his day, the issues of audience and publication, and the many infratexts and hidden intentions that inform the wondrous creativity of the author of Gargantua. These problems are present in all kinds of documents.

The idea that persons from a modest background or from an illiterate milieu should have no means to leave traces of themselves bothers me. I can and do sometimes write about great public figures, about queens and kings, but I’ve never felt that I was truly a historian for them. They’ve had and have their own historians. It’s the others who need me. [laughter] I especially felt this in earlier years, when not so many scholars were working on the menu peuple, villagers, and outsiders. I hope I’ve served them well.

DC: In your work, you obviously like to ferret out these vertical intersections in which you discover the shared ideas and signs that together made it possible to create the arts of speaking and writing. But there are also the horizontal intersections between people whom you group together in various ways in your books. When you try to understand, for example, how women were able to find ways to truly “exist” in a world that so stifled their capacity for self-affirmation.

If we return to Leo Africanus, are you going to have him cross paths with other vagabond intellectuals of the sixteenth century? I’m thinking among others about the visionary mystic, Guillaume Postel.² Are you going to introduce them to each other?

NZD: Yes, and all the more because Guillaume Postel knew his works: he talks of reading al-Wazzn’s manuscript on Arabic grammar. And al-Wazzn himself had contacts with humanists. He taught Arabic to Cardinal Gilles de Viterbo, a great Christian Kabbalist of the sixteenth century,³ who was one of the godfathers at his baptism. I’ve been working hard on the various relations between the two men. And then there was Alberto Pio, the prince of Carpi,⁴ for whom al-Wazzn transcribed Arabic manuscripts. I’ve been exploring the humanist circles with which Gilles of Viterbo and Alberto Pio were associated, especially the people in them interested in subjects that al-Wazzn knew about—the Ottomans, for instance, or Egyptian symbolism. This is how I’ve been trying to imagine the world in which al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus moved. Reading the sources here has been frustrating! Archival documents, diaries, letters, and manuscripts give proof of his captivity, his baptism, and role as a teacher and transcriber of Arabic. And yet some of the people he was in touch with and even dedicated manuscripts to never mention his name—and I’ve been through page after page in their writings looking for reference to the man they called Giovanni Leone. I figure he was a marginal person.

Here’s an amusing fact for you. Manuel, king of Portugal,⁵ presented Pope Leo⁶ with a white elephant from India. Another captive! That elephant is talked about in numerous places at the time and there are even pictures of him: Raphael⁷ drew his picture and painted him. There are fewer contemporary mentions of Giovanni Leone the African than there are of Hannibal, the elephant from India. [laughter] So to imagine al-Wazzn’s relations with the great figures of his day, I’ve had to use sources in an indirect way. What did they think of him? What did he think of them? I’ve had to search hard for clues. One of the most fascinating encounters or crossings for me—perhaps not a personal encounter, but a cultural crossing—is between al-Wazzn and Rabelais. Rabelais is always present in my writing and he’ll be an important person at the end of my book. Of course, if I can establish a direct connection between the author of the Tiers Livre and al-Wazzn, I’ll be delighted.

DC: Do any of the characters found in Rabelais share any resemblance with Leo Africanus?

NZD: That’s the case with Panurge. Right now I’m looking to see whether there could be any direct connections. Rabelais spent time in Italy and he and his patron, Cardinal Jean du Bellay,⁸ were in contact with Paolo Giovio and other humanists who knew the onetime convert from Islam. Perhaps Rabelais heard people talking about al-Wazzn, perhaps he even saw the manuscript of the Africa book al-Wazzn had left behind when he went back to North Africa, for one or two were in circulation. It had the Italian title Libro della cosmografia e geografia dell’Africa (later when it was published, it had the title Description of Africa).

But even if there were no direct contact, there are terrific possibilities here. For instance, we can reflect on the treatment of the Ottomans in the celebrated chapter where Panurge tells the story of his escape from his Turkish captor. It’s a comic tale, shot through with exaggerations and lies. Rabelais has Panurge claiming that his captor had prepared him for roasting and eating by wrapping him with lard (forbidden, of course, to Muslims), but then Panurge escapes, aided by other Muslims. Two sorts of Muslims appear in the chapter. Panurge, as hero in this episode, knows how to save himself, but he does not behave well at all. I’ve been wondering if there’s an echo of al-Wazzn in these lines—probably not. But I plan to make a comparison between the ruses of al-Wazzn/Leo Africanus and those of Panurge and of Rabelais.

DC: Don’t actors like these develop a certain sense of skill and craftiness…?

NZD: Yes, skill and craftiness, but also a sense of play and the use of tricks for truth-telling. Truth-telling is one of the main roles of the trickster. These are personages who practice mètis, to use the Greek term for crafty intelligence. I want to compare the games and mètis of Panurge with those of al-Wazzn over the course of his life, which for me evoke the ruses of the hero of the maqmt. I’m hoping to arrive at some cultural affinities, to discern some unity beyond the divisions of the Mediterranean. I see some ludic parallels here. And there’s Rabelais’s mysticism, the symbolism of wine and the divine bottle in his fifth book. I’d like to put that next to the maqmt of “The Wine” by Bad’ al-Zamn al-Hamadhn, and the celebrated mystical poem on wine of Ibn al-Farid, both texts important in al-Wazzn’s sensibility.

DC: Even so with Rabelais, wine, from the very start, symbolizes the Bible, for it’s the Good Book they drink, or that they can finally begin to imbibe after a long dry spell when the humanity of the giants suffered from thirst…

NZD: Exactly. Perhaps I should also reflect on Arab script, the fine calligraphy that was so prized in the Arab world, and other forms of divine symbolism. In any case, the affinities I’m looking for will be suggested not just by texts, but by certain shared ideas, certain ways of looking at the world found in both of these men of the Mediterranean.

DC: In listening to you, I have the impression that the task of analysis is always a work-in-progress beyond the desire for adventure. Of course, one could reproach you for also being in that same uncertain spot where Leo Africanus found himself, and therefore exceeded the limits of what’s possible. But isn’t it a response to the yearning that always resurfaces to push you to the very edge of overinterpretation? And then is there overinterpretation when plumbing the secrets of a person’s inner life? It means for you to not remain fixated on your object of study, for you must discover it in a larger, nearly limitless landscape, because the individual in the Renaissance is a repository of an infinite number of ways of knowing, of interconnections, of personal possibilities, and possible borrowings again and again…

NZD: What you say about “the task of analysis as always a work-in-progress” and about “not remaining fixated on your object of study” are very interesting, though I don’t see the possibilities of interpretation as limitless, neither during the Renaissance nor today. But your idea of continual movement during a life makes me think of two things.

First is an affirmation from Eugénie Droz, a very learned Swiss scholar, whom I met in 1960, when she was in her late sixties: “Tout est à faire et à refaire,” “Everything is to be done and redone.”⁹ [laughter] Droz was a tough lady, who worked on precise and intricate questions in the history of the book, printing, and bibliography; she turned out valuable articles on the history of religious propaganda in the sixteenth century. One must always remember “Everything is to be done and redone.” I say this to myself when I’ve made a mistake or misunderstood something.

The other association that comes to mind concerns my old age. [laughter] I feel fine on the whole and I don’t have the sense of being old, and yet I am! Now in the books I’ve read about old age—books written in the early modern period and today about the stages of life—old age is supposed to be the time when one finds a resolution, intellectual and moral. One looks at one’s life, one hopes for a sense of satisfaction and happiness, but at the very least there’s a dominant idea of closure. But I’ve been discovering that my old age isn’t like that at all: it’s full of complications, questions, mystification, and uncertainties—the books I read didn’t prepare me for this! [laughter] I look at the future as a continuing adventure, without a tranquil resting place where I could just be settled and feel that I understood everything. My old age is a reality for me and I accept it, but though I know much more than when I was young, I still have so many question marks. So I say to myself, “Fine. I’ll accept this stage of life as an adventure, with many questions still to ask.” Perhaps I won’t have time to find the answers, but there we are…

DC: Precisely, to the extent that history is a continual source of adventures, it’s necessary, I think, to take account of what historians of your era wrote. First to know that, when you arrived in France, you chose not to embrace the prevailing attempts to realize a totalizing history where one tried, in the confines of a province for example—Languedoc or the Beauvaisis—to capture the entire functional or dysfunctional workings of a social system at the political, cultural, and economic levels. You really had to rein in the scope of your own technique of analysis…

NZD: When I first came to France, there were no works directly on my topic.

DC: There were initially very few American historians who were interested in the history of sixteenth-century France, let alone the history of Lyon!

NZD: That’s right. But the most unusual thing perhaps was my coming to the archives, especially the archives of Lyon. Before the Second World War, most American historians working on France based their studies on published sources. Some very important work was done, but in most cases it was not drawn heavily from archives. The medievalist John Mundy,¹⁰ who was a decade older than I, went to Toulouse not long after the war and he had an experience similar to mine: people in Toulouse thought his presence in the archives was bizarre. I heard the same thing in Lyon: “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the archives in the United States?” [laughter]

After having begun my own research, I had read the great work of Richard Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIe siècle: Lyon et ses marchands.¹¹ It’s an excellent economic history, though not centered around the questions of society and Reformation that interested me, questions that linked me rather to Max Weber,¹² Karl Marx,¹³ and Henri Hauser.¹⁴ Still I learned much from his book, and Richard Gascon kindly helped me get started in the archives, suggesting useful sources.

In the next years—in the 1960s—I had varied reactions to French historical scholarship. First of all, I loved the books of Pierre Goubert¹⁵ on the Beauvaisis and of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie¹⁶ on the Languedoc. Peasants were their focus, and though I was then working on artisans, I felt close to them because we all had the lower classes as our target. I recall so vividly Le Roy Ladurie’s pages on the Protestant Reformation in the Languedoc—Les Paysans du Languedoc is a marvelous book, one of my favorites among his writings. I invited both of them to North America to give lectures: Goubert came to Toronto and Le Roy Ladurie to Berkeley. What a delight to present them to North American historians.

But initially the French historian closest to what I was doing on artisans was Émile Coornaert,¹⁷ an old gentleman who had published a book on craft guilds in 1940, just as World War II was starting in France, and who then in 1966 published a book on compagnonnages, that is, the journeymen’s organizations or trade unions that I had been discovering exciting things about in Lyon. For a number of years, many French scholars had stayed away from subjects like this, because the topic seemed traditional and saturated with the Vichyite populism of the German Occupation,¹⁸ but for me, it was part of a new study of working–class culture. Then when I read Maurice Agulhon’s¹⁹ book on sociability in southern France—La sociabilité mériodionale: Confréries et associations—which also appeared in 1966, I said to myself, “Here’s a terrific French scholar whom I admire as much as Le Roy Ladurie, and he’s working on the same subject as I and with the same approach.” I had not yet met Maurice Agulhon: he was then teaching at Aix and this was his earliest book. But I had a sense of exhilaration to find a comrade in arms. I had the same excitement in 1968, when I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World.²⁰ I came to it after I had written the first version of my essay on charivaris, and now I felt, “Here’s someone who cares about carnivals the way I do.” Bakhtin was a literary scholar, not a historian, but I still had such a sense of connection with him.

My experience is common to other historians. There are two forms of association or transmission among us. One is a vertical form linked with teaching: the professor-master, surrounded by his or her students, who go on one day to have their own students. I’m not so much a partisan of this as the privileged form of transmission, in part because I never had a real “master” myself. That is, I never had a real “doctor-father” at my university: while I was in residence there, no one among the faculty was much interested in my approach or my topic on religion and social class; and then for political reasons, I was in absentia during the actual writing of the thesis.

The other form of association or transmission grows up around the subject we’re working on: a network of people perhaps from diverse backgrounds who are drawn together by a common interest in the same questions. So for a certain length of time, sometimes a long while, you stay in contact with this informal network—exchanging ideas and bibliography about carnival or proverbs or gifts, to name only a few topics that have brought me into networks of scholarly friendship. Nowadays with the Internet, these networks are easy to establish and commonplace. But when I was young and over the decades until the 1990s, such communication was established by letter-writing and get-togethers at scholarly conferences. These communities have been very important in my own development, and have often outlasted a specific interest.

Both forms of transmission and association must exist, and alternate with each other in our lives. I certainly feel grateful to those who helped me: for instance, the literary scholar Rosalie Colie, who was not my professor in any formal sense, but who played the role of a mentor when I was the mother of young children, trying to finish my doctoral thesis and teaching a course at night school. She would be a figure in my line of transmission; and I feel very proud of my students as well. Still, I like the idea of changing groups to which one belongs: for example, you and I were drawn together by our interest in the sources and rites of violence in the sixteenth century, as was Barbara Diefendorf²¹ and also scholars studying peasant violence in the seventeenth century.

DC: Yves-Marie Bercé?²²

NZD: Yes, his work on peasant uprisings also drew us together. These informal communities seem to me at the heart of intellectual endeavor.

DC: We are all confronted, sadly too rarely, with a certain number of works that shock us, that mix reading pleasure with intellectual feeling. Which historians have most influenced you, and they needn’t be French?

NZD: I’d begin with the historians who influenced me when I was an undergraduate. I’ll never forget how enthralled I was by Giambattista Vico’s New Science,²³ especially by the way he fit the different parts of a society together, its forms of expression and values together with its economy and political structure. About the same time I read Werner Jaeger’s Paideia²⁴ and was struck similarly by how he portrayed connections, here between the educational aspirations and ideals of the Greeks and other features of their city life. Interested in Marxism as I was, I wanted to pursue such connections in the early modern period, but not in the mechanical way of those historians who reduced everything to narrow class interest. Then I read two works that pointed the way: Charles Trinkaus’s Adversity’s Noblemen,²⁵ which suggested that the precarious social status of the Italian humanists informed their claims for the importance of humane letters, and Edgar Zilsel’s “Sociological Roots of Modern Science,”²⁶ which showed the essential contribution of hands–on artisanal observation to the development of natural science. These delicate and nondeterministic treatments of “experience” were a real boon for me; they shaped the way I rethought the relation between social class and religious choice in my doctoral dissertation later on.

My last two years at Smith, I also started reading in the French school of historians, especially books in Henri Berr’s great series L’évolution de l’humanité.²⁷ What a joy of discovery this was—and it climaxed when I read Marc Bloch’s Société féodale.²⁸ The Smith College Library had the first edition published just at the beginning of World War II. I loved the book and I so admired him, his life as a great and learned historian and as a man engaged in public issues. And he was Jewish, like me.

DC: He would be for you the greatest person, the most attractive…?

NZD: Well, a very great figure. His Strange Defeat explaining the fall of France [in June 1940], his recreation of that medieval feudal world, with all its social and cultural features so linked, and his beautiful style—even though I wasn’t French, I was charmed by the way he wrote history.²⁹ And then his heroic end, killed by the Nazis for his role in the Resistance. I read other French historians at the time, but he was my hero.

A few years later, of course, I came upon the publications of Henri Hauser, your great–grandfather, who opened the doors to my doctoral dissertation, especially in his 1898 book Ouvriers du temps passé. I had never known that such documents existed on journeymen and strikes, and I realized I could follow them up and make my own study of what he had called “the Reformation and the popular classes.” Back in the early 1950s, I shared to some extent his view about the sixteenth century as the beginning of “modernity,” and with my social concerns, I was on his wavelength. Today my views about modernity are different, but I still have that feeling of affinity to him that I had when I was young. [laughter] I read more French historians in the 1960s: Goubert, Le Roy Ladurie, and Agulhon, whom I already mentioned, and also Philippe Ariès.³⁰

DC: On death?

NZD: Ariès’s book on death was interesting, but it was his earlier book on childhood that caught my attention. He was a pioneer in making children and youth a subject of historical inquiry, but he was also one of the targets for my essay on charivaris: I really didn’t agree with him that there were no separate age–categories for children and adolescents before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These categories existed in the Middle Ages and sixteenth century—the youth groups I was writing about in my “Reasons of Misrule” were one of the examples—but they were defined somewhat differently. Still I found his discussion fascinating, even if I didn’t adopt his overall theory. Later, when I met him personally, I found him a delightful and generous person. His political culture was on the right: he was a royalist, but very open in spirit. He liked people for what they were. As he said, he had “red” friends—and that would include me—and “white” friends. A few years before he died, he brought us all together for dinner and fine wine on a boat ride on the Seine.

But why am I not speaking of women? It’s partly because there weren’t any books by women historians in my fields of interest during the decades when I was getting started that could play the same role as, say, Bloch’s Société Féodale. But yes—Eileen Power³¹ had already published her innovative studies in medieval social and economic history by the 1920s and had been an inspiration for Sylvia Thrupp,³² who was coming into her own in the 1960s. I included both of them in my presidential address to the American Historical Association years later to pay tribute to them. My women teachers at Smith College were more important as role models than for their historical vision. But I’ve always had many women as scholarly friends, starting off with Rosalie Colie in the 1950s. Her portrait of literary culture and of intellectual networks taught me much, and I loved her playful and learned book on paradoxes in the seventeenth century. I took the first draft of my charivari paper to her to read in 1967, and she was the person who first told me of Bakhtin. Nancy Roelker³³ was another dear friend during those years, and we used to talk, really gossip about sixteenth-century France—she was then doing her edition of Pierre de l’Estoile’s journal of Paris life and I was deep in the printing shops of Lyon.³⁴ Printing history drew me to Elizabeth Armstrong,³⁵ whose book on Robert Estienne I so admired and whom I visited at Somerville College during my first trip to England. And Françoise Weil³⁶ and I began talking about publishing history and politics in the Geneva archives in 1960; we still email each other petitions and statements about what’s going on in Israel/Palestine and other world events. By the early 1970s, I’d become friends with Michelle Perrot³⁷ and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber³⁸ in Paris, and Jill Ker Conway³⁹ and I had begun to teach the history of women in Toronto. And this was just the start of my friendships with women scholars. All of these relations have been multifaceted: we’d talk about our research and about our families and about the politics of being women in what was in those days a male-dominated profession.

I also felt a special complicity with some of my male colleagues in different lands, by which I mean that I believed we had common goals, however different our books, either writing about people in the “lower orders” and working classes or trying to change historical practice in similar ways. Such were Le Roy Ladurie in France and Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi⁴⁰ in Italy. I read Bronislaw Geremek’s⁴¹ study of artisans and the labor market when it first appeared in French in 1968 and felt an immediate kinship with him—we had both emerged from an early interest in Marxism; I finally met him when I visited Warsaw in 1973. We shared many themes in our early works: marginal people, poverty. Several years afterward, during his first visit to the United States, I invited him to give a lecture at Princeton, and we all sat enthralled at my dinner table listening to him talk of hopes that he would later fulfill with Solidarno.⁴² In England, there was Keith Thomas⁴³—our early articles had appeared in consecutive numbers of the Journal of the History of Ideas in 1959 to 1960, his on “The Double Standard,” mine on “Sixteenth-Century French Arithmetics on the Business Life”—and the young Peter Burke⁴⁴ and, of course, Edward P. Thompson,⁴⁵ whose book on The Making of the English Working Class had such an impact. I was trying to make sense of the charivari at the very same moment that Edward was looking at its English variant, the skimmington or rough music. Independently we were examining the very same subject.

DC: Isn’t this an example of these encounters that work because they share a thematic interest that you like to cite?

NZD: Yes, a coincidence in the intellectual world of us historians. Around 1968 or 1969, when I finished my charivari essay, I sent it to Past and Present, and Edward read it—he must have been on the board of editors at the time, or one of the editors asked him to review it. He wrote me about what an astonishing coincidence this was—he was just then writing his celebrated article on the skimmington ride. My “Reasons of Misrule” appeared in Past and Present in 1971, his “Charivari Anglais” in the Annales in 1972. These things happen in our intellectual universe: despite the distance between us, we simultaneously hit on the same subject. It’s true that Thompson’s article is more somber than mine. I had stressed the comic aspect of the charivari, I suppose that’s a typical habit of mine, and his reading was tougher. For Edward, the English skimmington led primarily to exclusion, the humiliated persons being ridden out of town; for me the French charivari led more often to inclusion, the reintegration of the humiliated persons back into the community after they’d paid their penalty. There are evidently real differences between the two countries, not just different interpretations.

So often one thinks one is the only person working on a topic, and then it turns out not to be the case.

DC: But is it only a coincidence? Isn’t it limiting to see this conjuncture of interests only from this perspective?

NZD: Of course, you’re right—it’s only a seeming coincidence. These similar questions are connected with big questions or events in the air at the time: the late 1960s were a period of the carnivalesque turning of the world upside down of the student movements and the time of resistance against the Vietnam War. And in the history profession, some of us wanted to explore forms of popular action that had not been taken seriously by earlier scholars of resistance movements, who thought them archaic or folkloric.

DC: This brings us back to the question of your own personal journey. Why the rites of charivari during the late 1960s? What’s most remarkable, moreover, is that you opened the way on the American side for a powerful new school interested in the history of sixteenth-century France, since you had been to some extent the person through whom, in a manner more or less direct, these interests came to the next generation of scholars, such as Barbara Diefendorf, Mack P. Holt,⁴⁶ Philip Benedict⁴⁷ to only cite the most well known. This profusion of intellectual talent has contributed so much to rediscovering the complexities of sixteenth-century France.

NZD: I’m certainly happy to think that I might have played this role and been of use to such formidable historians as the three you mention. Barbara Diefendorf was actually my doctoral student, and I have been much impressed by the books she’s written on the religious, social, and political life of France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—giving us a new understanding of both Catholics and Protestants.

Why the rites of charivari in the late 1960s? I was quite involved in the antiwar movements of the time, as well as in the efforts to restructure the university. I had charivaris going on around me. And also I had begun to read in anthropological literature. I’ve told you about some of the historians who influenced my thinking, but by the late 1960s, anthropologists were especially important for me—that is, for my understanding of French history. The first one I read was the old-time ethnographer Arnold van Gennep.⁴⁸

DC: Isn’t it somewhat paradoxical to first learn anthropology through the biases of the author of the Manuel de folklore français,⁴⁹ when American anthropology was in full flower?

NZD: That may seem odd, but the Manuel was just what I needed at the time. I was not flailing around for grand theory, I was trying to make sense of a specific ritual carried on by Lyon printing workers and other artisans, a noisy masked demonstration often directed against men beaten by their wives. “What is going on here?” I kept asking myself. “What does this mean?” The social history of my day had no answers here: the people weren’t complaining about their wages or the price of bread or taxes. The Manuel opened the doors for me, with its ethnographic studies from all over France and its frequent use of historical documents.

DC: How did you discover Arnold van Gennep?

NZD: I had never heard of him from historians. One day I asked an anthropologist friend at the University of Toronto about the charivari, and I think it was he that told me of Arnold van Gennep. I found the many volumes of the Manuel in the University of Toronto library. What a surprise! The charivari was a widespread practice going back centuries, performed by groups of young men in the countryside who used it against marriages when there was a great disparity of age between the partners and against other violations of village norms. This was just a start for reading that took me across Europe and into other uses of the charivari, both for family matters and political matters, and into other forms of festive behavior. I discovered how important age categories were, and stages of life. That may seem obvious nowadays, but it wasn’t to a historian back then. [laughter] Van Gennep’s main contribution to theory concerned rites of passage, and it was relevant to these youth groups or “Misrule Abbeys” (Abbayes de Maugouvert), as they were called in France.

Then, in fact, I did turn to the American anthropologists and began to read Victor Turner⁵⁰ and Clifford Geertz.⁵¹ I read Victor Turner’s Ritual Process after my paper had first appeared in Past and Present, and immediately added his beautiful insights to a new version of the essay.⁵² Meanwhile, he had learned of my work and invited me to a colloquium with anthropologists. It was my first colloquium with anthropologists and I was thrilled. We each talked of a ritual of inversion, of some form of the world upside down. I spoke of gender inversion, the paper that became “Women on Top.”

DC: The rituals of inversion happen in real life when the social order becomes disturbed and thus in need of corrective action, right?

NZD: That’s certainly part of it, but they also have wider uses for playfulness, social definitions, and changes from one status in life to another. Turner talked more broadly of the liminal quality in rites of passage and inversion—he saw the pilgrimage as an example. I was dazzled by his ideas and by the debates inspired by them.

Another great encounter for me was Clifford Geertz. I read his collection of essays, The Interpretation of Cultures, right after they appeared in 1973, and I found them deeply engrossing. (In passing, I’m remembering the first time I spoke of his work to the historians at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and my listeners asked me “Why is Clifford Geertz so important?” Later on, they understood…) For me, Geertz’s work was essential, not so much for what I was doing on carnivals and festivity, but for my efforts to interpret religion. I very much liked his perception of religion as a cultural system—a system that, on the one hand, shapes our perceptions, experiences, and mentalities, and that, on the other hand, is also shaped by them. There’s a process of exchange here, which contrasts with the old one-way Marxist model of the material infrastructure determining the superstructure of consciousness. With Geertz, there’s always an exchange between experience and ideas, a principle of back and forth. Later, when I came to Princeton, I taught a seminar with Clifford Geertz, and we talked much about the relations between history and anthropology. It was a great experience.

But I can’t leave the anthropologists without mentioning Mary Douglas⁵³ from England. I read her Purity and Danger several times over in 1972 when I was writing my essay “The Rites of Violence.” What she had to say about the dangers of pollution helped me make sense of the rhetoric of violence in the sixteenth-century religious texts and the destructive and murderous practices of “cleansing” that took place during their religious riots. Later on, she came to Princeton to teach for a year and I had the delight of hearing her lecture and talking with her.

I want to stress, though, that as a historian, I never take the ideas of an anthropologist and just apply them to the historical past. Mary Douglas’s writings about our sense of the limits of our bodies and of our selves, about the dangers of pollution and our desire for protection—all that yields mere possibilities for interpretation, new questions to ask of the evidence, say, about violence. That last is a topic on which you have enlarged our field of vision, and I’ve learned much from that, too.

DC: Staying with the vantage point of an approach to history by mining the suggestive potential that other methods and ways of knowing offer, which discipline seems to you actually the most dynamic, the most adept at problem-solving to guide your own reflections? Don’t you find that anthropology has today become too narrow and it seeks to devise systems of explanation less global or encompassing than twenty-five years ago? But perhaps, before going into this, you might wish to talk about the contributions of French anthropologists?

NZD: I’ve received much stimulation from the ideas and books of French anthropologists. I read Claude Lévi-Strauss early along, and had students read Tristes Tropiques in my courses.⁵⁴ His structuralism is often too rigid and abstract for us historians, but there have been times when he’s offered me real leads for my own research. While I was writing my book on women on the margins, I was led via Marie de l’Incarnation to the people she wanted to convert: the Amerindians, especially the Amerindian women of seventeenth-century Québec. How could I understand their ideas and their ways of talking? I was facing a version of the same problem I had with the peasants in the world of Martin Guerre—how was I going to get access to the language, the speech of peasants? I wanted to imagine a possible conversation between Marie de l’Incarnation and one of the young women she hoped to make a Christian. Now I had available nineteenth-century collections of Amerindian legends, but I wanted guidance for the seventeenth century—I wanted some clues as to how an Amerindian woman of that period might tell a story, especially on a topic that would be interesting to Marie de l’Incarnation as well. You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with Claude Lévi-Strauss.

DC: I didn’t say anything!

NZD: Claude Lévi-Strauss gave me the clues I needed. In his Histoire de lynx and elsewhere, he had systematically examined Amerindian stories about abduction, specifically, the abduction of a woman by an animal; among the Iroquoian people, it was often a bear.⁵⁵ He had described the different outcomes of the abduction and the woman’s relation with her husband: you ended up with a “tale-type,” as the folklorists call it, and a sense of Amerindian style. He also suggested a connection between bearabduction stories told to the Amerindians by French fur-traders in the seventeenth century and those current in parts of France. Well, I knew that abduction was a theme dear to the heart of Marie de l’Incarnation, since her cousin had been abducted in France by a noble army officer, and Marie was worried about the abduction of her converts by non-Christian husbands. So through Lévi-Strauss’s stories, I saw the path to take. I could not simply reconstitute a conversation, but I could use some of Marie de l’Incarnation’s texts and compare them with the Amerindian ones. His writing gave me possible ways of imagining an exchange.

DC: You thus promote, when all is said and done, an intuitive approach to history where the variables don’t dictate a particular way to think about the past and people’s mind-sets, but which instead treats history as a set of possibilities that sets it along a path not bound by the signposts of the sources. Couldn’t we speak of formulating a historical inquiry that’s cross-pollinated by other scholarly disciplines that, without taking them up wholesale, still serve as fertile sources of creativity, of inventiveness? Isn’t your manner of thinking, insofar as it’s a technique that proceeds as a round of questions and answers, much like the historical subjects you study? Doesn’t it rely upon a technique of mixing and blending?

NZD: I don’t think of my approach as “intuitive,” because I take the signposts from the past very seriously indeed. But I do think we often miss those signposts, and that we can get ideas about where to look for them from other disciplines. We set up a back and forth between our sources and these new sets of questions—yes, a kind of cross-fertilization.

You ask me about French anthropologists. Others have been important to me as well. Around 1980, I became very attracted by the life and writings of Marcel Mauss.⁵⁶ I approached the whole question of the gift in sixteenth-century France through his great 1925 study, the Essai sur le don, and throughout my work on that subject, I was in dialogue with him. And then, I was interested in him as a Jewish intellectual in France: I followed his fate in the archives as a Jew “retired by the Collège de France” and in hiding in Paris during the German Occupation.

And to give another example, I was struck by the work of Maurice Godelier⁵⁷ on the charivari. Jacques Le Goff⁵⁸ and Jean-Claude Schmitt⁵⁹ organized a colloquium on the charivari in 1977 at the École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, and brought together historians and anthropologists.⁶⁰ Godelier’s paper on noisy demonstrations in societies very different from those in Europe opened a new perspective for me. I hope that exchange with historians has been equally beneficial for the anthropologists. I know that Clifford Geertz, who has been interested in change and transformation since his early inquiries, had found such exchange very fruitful. Do you think that’s the case with the new generation of French anthropologists?

DC: Don’t scholarly disciplines tend to become more and more parochial? When a historian is invited to an anthropology conference, he or she seems to me like an odd duck, almost a test subject to determine whether anthropology’s study of “otherness” extends to the past as well as the here and now. It’s in this sense that I asked you the preceding question: don’t you have the impression that anthropology has long since lost its allure for historians? Even in your latest books, we see that your references are often more literary than sociological…

NZD: Actually, in regard to my current research on Islam, I must say that some anthropologists, including Clifford Geertz and Jacques Berque,⁶¹ have done major work. Their writings are immensely useful for analyzing certain issues concerning al-Wazzn. But along with anthropology, my most important guides right now are coming from literary studies, including specialists in Arabic literature. It turns out that one of the best tests for understanding al-Wazzn is his style and habits of writing. He tells a lot about himself and his travels, but in some areas of his personal life and feeling—say, in regard to his marriage or his feeling about conversion to Christianity—he is silent. But I can use his ways of writing as a useful index: by reading the specialists in Arabic literature, I can learn about the ordinary strategies for writing, the possible ways of writing and themes found in the genres al-Wazzn chose, and then see what’s original about the way he wrote in Italian, the Italian he’d learned as a foreigner. Fascinating things have been turning up, even on matters as seemingly small as whether he uses the pronoun “I” or not.

To go back to your query about anthropology: I’d say that at least American and Canadian anthropology are going in several directions. There has been a split between those who stress the material and economic domain as the proper one for anthropological inquiry and those who stress “culture.” Moreover, for practical and political reasons, there are many anthropologists who are taking Europe or North America as the subject of their inquiry. There are no more ethnologically pristine islands in the Pacific to set oneself down in. And often postcolonial governments don’t readily welcome anthropologists from the West. [laughter] So these various factors together have increased the collaboration between anthropologists and historians: once you’re working on, say, American towns or urban settings, it’s impossible to ignore the past, to ignore history. Of course, it shouldn’t be ignored for Pacific communities either, as Renato Rosaldo⁶² long since told us for the Philippine Ilongot…

DC: You often refer to Michel de Certeau⁶³ as someone who definitely played a role in your work, that he always reinvigorated and recast your historical approach…

NZD: I miss, we all miss Michel de Certeau, but his works are a patrimony, our legacy. He was a man who went beyond the usual categories: a historian, an anthropologist, and a man of letters with a vision of the world both sacred and profane at the same time. His perspectives were very original and not always easy to grasp: his writing was intricate and very finely wrought, and one must make a real effort to understand the significance of what’s there on the pages of his books and essays. I loved his choice of subjects, a choice that I might call democratic, as with the possessed Ursuline sisters of Loudun. He treated these women with great respect, not reducing them to mere hysterics or dismissing them as mentally ill. On the contrary, he always tried to find significant meaning in what the women were saying and affirming.

As I recalled my appreciation for the life of Marc Bloch, so, too, I had much admiration for the experience, for the experiment, in Certeau’s life: his decision to become a Jesuit and the way he lived that life both within and without the brotherhood, his interest in China, his work with the Indians in South America, his great erudition and yet his opening toward the students during 1968 and afterward. He possessed an authentic simplicity, a flexibility, a way of being a historian through and through and yet being easy and relaxed…I recall one day when we had lunch in Paris in a popular non-fancy neighborhood—I go back to that restaurant from time to time in memory of him. We talked of learned matters, historical questions. He was totally unstuffy, very pleasant, and courteous toward the waitress, whom he knew because he came there often.

I could not be present at the funeral, but friends told me about it. “What boldness,” I thought, “along with the church ceremony to request that Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ be sung.”⁶⁴ I rushed right out and bought the record, and listened to it thinking of his choice. I’ve spoken of Certeau at length, as I did of Marc Bloch, because there are sometimes persons who add a remarkable human quality to the work of a whole life.

DC: Let’s return to the problems of communication and exchange with other scholarly disciplines to find inspiration. Do you think that history can today retain the same dynamism?

NZD: I think there are many possibilities for creative interchange within history itself—between social, cultural, and political history. At the moment fascinating things are going on in the history of science (physics, mathematics, etc.) and in the history of scientific knowledge. Specialists are examining the way in which “truth” is established in natural science, or rather the technologies for the production of truth that contemporaries recognize as truth. Lots of possibilities in this area of intellectual history. Also very interesting developments in the history of law. Legal scholars are turning to us for approaches in cultural history and the history of women, and are eager to reflect on the literary and social aspects of legal texts and legal events. This is different from the much older collaboration between historians and historians of law on matters such as the history of hospitals, welfare, charity, and gifts. Today it’s a question of sharing approaches, not just of looking at the history of the legal status of certain institutions or practices.

DC: These connections have become weakened in France for largely political reasons.

NZD: I don’t know this situation in France. But I would make another comment regarding collaboration. In earlier decades, works published by historians of the law, however excellent, were usually composed in very technical language: they often included the texts of laws and ordinances, but in their discussion of the evolution and interpretation of the law, they stuck closely to the language of the legal specialist. Reading on the history of the laws regarding gifts and contracts, I found the discussion very difficult, sometimes impenetrable. But today, there are changes, at least in North America. In all the important law faculties, there are young—and not so young—scholars who are studying rhetorical aspects of the law and of civil and criminal cases, and looking at the cases as “performative” acts. They are still deeply steeped in the juridical questions, but they are considering relations between systems of legal writing and expression and other systems of expression. As I mentioned a few moments ago, I tried to do the same thing with letters of remission, putting them in relation to other forms of storytelling. This new generation of legal scholars will be of great help to us historians.

DC: In light of your ability to find alternative ways to investigate historical situations and persons by stressing the need to think differently about how we pose questions, hasn’t this approach negated the initial premise that a distance really exists between you and the sixteenth century? As you noted in one of your works, when you arrived in France, you noticed that the sixteenth century was split between Catholics and Protestants, and that for a long time French historiography had been one of conflict between Catholic historians and Protestant historians, that even if their disputes over religion had quieted, they remained almost presumed or embedded in the ways these historians did history. However you, coming from another culture, from another religious world altogether, you had some distance from what was at stake in these disputes but could instead contemplate the Catholic and Protestant worldviews in the sixteenth century through a lens that avoided these exaggerated, woolly arguments that sometimes had seduced historians…

NZD: You’ve certainly caught something of my sensibility as a young historian. There was indeed a confessionalization of studies on the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation both in France and in the United States. Historians in those days were writing religious history from within their own religious frame. Protestants wrote on the history of Protestantism and published in Protestant periodicals…

DC: Didn’t departments of theology in the United States, which don’t exist in France, also come into play?

NZD: Yes, that is part of the story. And Catholics wrote on the history of Catholicism and published in Catholic periodicals. I don’t know whether I had read Lucien Febvre’s book on Martin Luther when I began my own studies, but I must say in passing that his book is exemplary of historical analysis written by someone born and baptized as a Catholic, but absolutely secular—laïque—in spirit: already in 1928, he was approaching Luther without any confessional commitment or presuppositions.⁶⁵ In any case, when I came to Lyon in 1952, I was Jewish, not especially a practitioner of Jewish laws and liturgy and not a believer in the supernatural, but still identified with Jewish culture and upbringing. I did not have religious stakes to defend in the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants of Lyon in the sixteenth century. This gave me, indeed, what you’ve called “distance.” To be sure, without being a full-blown Marxist, I did have at that time some Marxist sensibilities. That is, I was attached to a view of history in which “progressive” movements were in struggle with “traditional” movements, and if I was going to favor one side rather than the other, it was the Protestants. In that regard, I resembled Henri Hauser: in his early essays on the Reformation, he clearly had a preference for the innovating Protestants.

DC: He saw Protestants as the trailblazers of republican democracy.

NZD: For him as for me, the Protestants represented the forces of resistance against the established order. At that period, I still thought about historical movement in terms of evolutionary schemes, which I have long since abandoned. Nonetheless, I tried to maintain distance from the two sides in the religious conflict. This was made all the easier since the Protestants soon developed an establishment of their own.

DC: You had, however, around 1975, a controversy with the Protestant historian, Janine Garrisson, which actually reflected her sympathetic engagement with respect to Protestant martyrs⁶⁶ We very well see in this controversy how the point of view you defended is a step removed from the charged emotions and identity politics inherited from the past, and how Janine Garrisson—and I don’t mean this as a criticism—wished to advance a set of interpretations closely related to the struggles of the “Protestants of the Midi” in the sixteenth century out of which emerged an attitude that could be described as modern.

NZD: Though we disagreed, I want to start by saying how much I appreciate Janine Garrisson’s scholarship. Our debate concerned questions of violence, the sources and character of the violence of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres and the bloody uprisings that preceded it. In my view, Garrisson did not attend to the meanings of religion and symbolic action in this violence and diverted the socioreligious dimension of violence into the familiar socioeconomic one: popular Catholic crowds, often angry about the high cost of grain, assaulting rich Huguenots. In contrast, I saw the Catholic fear of pollution by the Huguenot “vermin” as emerging from the threats to sacred values and the power structures and identities embedded in them.

By 1972, when I wrote my “Rites of Violence,” I had already put aside my earlier evolutionary perspective and I wanted very much to understand the horrendous violence from a double point of view: not just to look at enraged Catholics killing poor Protestant victims, but to examine and compare the shape of violence on both sides, to make sense of what people said and why they behaved the way they did. Two things had changed my views. One was the impact of my reading in anthropology on my understanding of religion—not just reading, but also attending different religious services in Lyon, visiting pilgrimage sites, watching processions, etc. I began to understand Catholic sensibility and liturgy more clearly and see both Catholicism and Protestantism in a new light. Rather than a “progressive” Protestantism and a “conservative” Catholicism, I saw two alternate styles of religious life, two different “languages” I called them, for describing the world. Each of them had the capacity for change in the early modern period. (Some of John Bossy’s writings on the modern features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholic structures of power were very helpful to me here as well.)⁶⁷

The second thing that moved me away from a narrow evolutionary perspective was my work on the history of women. Serious research on that topic quickly disabuses you not only of an old-fashioned view of linear progress, [laughter] but also of the notion that there is any single site that is always better for women or always the source for improvement of their status. If the Calvinist Reformation opened certain paths for women in its early decades—the call to biblical reading, the reevaluation of marriage—it also held on to hierarchies and eliminated the Catholic celibate option, a female setting that offered space for exploration and institutional authority. There were trade-offs; each religion had its openings and limits. Each religion seemed a possible path to “modernity.” I wrote about these matters in some essays, and I didn’t change my mind when I began to add Jews to the story, as later on in my Women on the Margins.

DC: Among the three women you met and invoked, the one I find most fascinating is Glikl bas Judah Leib, the one woman whose writings in Yiddish you could not at first understand. I asked myself if, in the way you brought her back to life, she and you didn’t share some kind of elective affinity. How was it that among these three women, it was Glikl whom, as a reader, I preferred? Wasn’t it because you yourself preferred her over the others, whether you realized it or not? Wasn’t it because, in writing her life you involuntarily inserted in her an extra measure of virtue the other two lacked? And this despite your protests that you have never favored one of your “women on the margins” over another!

It’s her I prefer, because I see her acquire or, better yet, fashion for herself the most charismatic personality, the one who most embodied our own view of humanity in her disappointments and happiness. Aren’t you found out by the fact that the reader, at last…

NZD: …will be the one who decides, who senses the affinity…

DC: Yes, who decides that you, Natalie Zemon Davis, like one of them more than another. Aren’t you also found out because you’re capable of sharing a memory in common and empathizing with your historical subject?

NZD: Well, I suppose that’s possible. But from a conscious point of view—not that of my unconscious or subconscious [laughter]—I like all three and treat them in the same manner. I have no favorite. In fact, Glikl is not the first Jew who has crossed my path in my historical research. By 1971 I had started to add the history of the Jews to my studies and to my teaching, especially in my courses on women and gender. I wanted to enlarge the range of comparison in those courses, and so I assigned an English translation of Glikl’s Yiddish autobiography and an excerpt from the fascinating autobiography of Leon Modena, rabbi of Venice in the seventeenth century.⁶⁸ So through reading Glikl and Leon Modena along with Christian memoirs, the students could learn about different modes of representation, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish.

And then after 1978, when I came to Princeton, I taught a course with Mark Cohen on early modern Jewish history—Mark is a specialist in medieval Jewish history—and we decided to edit an edition of Leon Modena’s autobiography, with a translation from the Hebrew made by him.⁶⁹ I wrote one of the introductory essays for the volume; it was a first effort to do what I later did with Glikl. That is, with Leon Modena’s autobiography we had a text with certain features particular to the Jewish situation, which had to be linked to Jewish practices of self-description, but which also had to be restored to the European cultural world of the time. That was my strategy, important to me personally and as a historian: to portray Leon Modena both as a Jew and a European. So I compared his self-presentation with that of Michel de Montaigne and especially with the Life of Girolamo Cardano,⁷⁰ who was both learned and a gambler like Leon. That essay meant a great deal to me. When I came to writing Women on the Margin about three women whom I knew initially through my teaching, I had in some ways a preexisting model. I said to myself, “I can now make a real comparison between three forms of European life.” Thus, my goal was not to show Glikl as the “best” of the three women, even though studying her gave me much pleasure.

DC   Not the “best,” but the most alive, the most human…

NZD: I did not feel that way about her at the time. It is true that the woman who I felt was most different from myself was Marie de l’Incarnation, with her ascetic style and excess of mortification of the flesh. As for her desire to convert the Amerindians, I could connect with it because it was fueled by eschatology, by her messianic hopes⁷¹—and I had had a dash of such hopes when I was young, albeit not as part of Catholic spirituality. I was also impressed by Marie’s audacity and energy when she decided to leave France for Canada and set up an Ursuline house there. As a mother myself, I was very amused by the relations of all three women with their children and enjoyed making comparisons among them. And then if Glikl loved to tell stories—and I’m the same way—Maria Sibylla Merian was the most intellectual of the three. Thus, from a personal point of view, there were traits that I admired or found interesting in all three women, and this may have been in part because I sensed some resemblance between them and me. But I want to stress very strongly here that good history-writing cannot be based on perceived resemblance. Our task is to understand our subjects in their own terms and language, and not simply to read them through resemblance.

DC But isn’t Glikl the least extreme of the three?

NZD: In the rhythm of her life as a merchant woman, wife, and widow, who moved from the Jewish community in Hamburg to the Jewish community in Metz, she is typical of other Jewish women at the time. And I’d have to say that Marie de l’Incarnation and Maria Sibylla Merian, who left her husband, joined a radical Protestant sect, and then went off to Suriname to study its insects, were well beyond Glikl in terms of audacity and the spirit of adventure. Glikl’s originality lay in the innovative structure she gave to her Yiddish autobiography. But, I repeat, what was important to me was not only Glikl as a woman and a Jew, but Glikl and the Jews as part of the history of Europe. In the wake of Nazism and the barbarism that wanted to efface the role of the Jews and their existence in Europe, it was vital for me to show that Jews belong to that history. I had both this personal goal and a goal as a historian: one’s personal goals must not get in the way of one’s role as a historian, but I don’t think that happened here. I had good evidence to show that her love of storytelling was not only a Jewish trait, but a widespread interest in seventeenth-century Europe—even the stories she told in Yiddish were widely shared in other languages.

I also wanted to show through the three women that there is not one way to be “European” in the seventeenth century. There’s not one style that should be singled out as “progressive” or “good” or “authentic.” There are always multiple paths, then and now, though today the models are different from the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant in my book. In regard to the three models in the book, I must mention the response of one of my readers. She asked why I had put the three women in the order that I did. It wasn’t strictly chronological, for though they all overlapped to some extent, Marie de l’Incarnation lived earlier in the century than the other two. I put Glikl first because the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, was the book that informed her life and writing. And then the Catholic Marie and the Protestant Maria Sibylla, because of the historical timing of their religions. But my friend pointed out that this ordering could give the impression that I was setting out a “progress.” That was not my intention at all. In any case, it gave me great pleasure to work on this book, both as a person and a historian; I’m moved to remember how much it meant to me.