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Natalie Zemon Davis. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. 360 pp., illus. Cloth: ISBN 0-674-95520-X. $24.95 US, £16.50 UK.
Lovingly enriched with narrative detail and meticulously-researched cultural contexts, Women on the Margins provides what anthropologists would call a 'thick description" of the lives of three very different women: Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646/7-1724), a Jewish merchant woman of Hamburg; Marie Guyart (1599-1671), a French Ursuline sister living and working with the Amerindians of Canada; and Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), a Dutch entomologist who became well-known for her drawings of the insects of Surinam. As seventeenth-century women, all three lived and wrote "on the margins," removed from centers of political power and learning. The lives of all three redefined the margin as a place of surprising local power, as a "borderland between cultural deposits that allowed new growths and surprising hybrids" (210). Rather than a limitation, this very distance from the learning and other opportunities available to male counterparts enabled them to. bring new perspectives to bear on their own lives and work. This in part accounts for the wry real interest of the book.
Beyond their marginal positions, the three women have little in common; and if there is an unpersuasive section in this superb book, its is the conclusion in which Davis attempts to draw' them together. Much more reflective of the book's strength is its smart and willy prologue, in which Davis imagines the women as arguing with each other and with her. A devoted mother of twelve children, Glikl criticizes Marie Guy art for abandoning her son for her religious vocation; as a scientist of insects, Merian objects to her classification in terms of gender; Marie Guyart accuses both of the others of being "godless." All three turn on Davis, whose modem assumptions about gender hierarchies make no sense to them at all. Davis cleverly ends the prologue with a plea to them to give her another chance by reading the book again.
Women on the Margins is a book to read again, not because it is estranged from a modem perspective, but because it is so readable. As in her previous critical masterpiece, The Return of Martin Guerre, Davis trusts her story. Eschewing a...