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October 23, 2023

Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023)

On shaping choices

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Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

We were very sorry to hear today about the passing of the great historian Natalie Zemon Davis, best known for her book (and subsequent movies) The Return of Martin Guerre.

For Matt though, he was struck by her essay “The Rites of Violence” in which she argues for taking religion seriously. This was kind of radical in the early 1970s, but she taught at UC-Berkeley and historians there are kind of like that (Go Bears!). More importantly, in that essay Davis argued that actions in certain situations can be drawn from a repertory "derived from the Bible, from the liturgy, from the action of political authority, or from the traditions of popular folk justice, intended to purify the religious community & humiliate the enemy." (178) In other words, people gain meaning through a messy - and oftentimes personal - interplay between text and tradition, through which religion is woven. It took ideas seriously.

Natalie Zemon Davis
Natalie Zemon Davis, via her time at UC-Berkeley History

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David’s story is more meaningful though. For him, it’s a single paragraph in Fiction in the Archives that gave him a language, early in his career, to talk about what he wanted to understand about medieval Venetian hagiography, state myth, ritual, historical writing, art, and other forms of storytelling.

Davis opens the book with a dramatic and terrible story of a man murdering his wife, drawing our attention not to the story itself, but to the literary way in which the legal document told the story. She writes that we could just mine the text for what’s “true” and verifiable, but says:

“I would like to take a different tack. I want to let the fictional aspects of these documents be the center of analysis. But fictional I do not mean their feigned elements, but rather, the forming, shaping, and molding elements… I think we can agree… that shaping choices of language, detail, and order are needed to present an account that seems to both writer and reader true, real, meaningful, and/or explanatory.” (3)

On the next page she adds,

“The artifice of fiction did not necessarily lend falsity to an account; it might well bring verisimilitude or moral truth. Nor did the shaping and embellishing of a history necessarily mean forgery; where that line was to be drawn was one of the creative controversies of the day.” (4)

David wanted to understand how medieval Venetian mythographers crafted their narratives not by holding them against a standard of what parts of their texts are verifiable, what falsifiable, and what we cannot determine one way or another, but by their shaping choice. How to make a story that seemed “true, real, meaningful, and/or explanatory” to both crafter(s) and audience(s).

So David carried this quote around with him, not just in his mind, but it was one of three passages he put on a bulletin board inside his windowless office at Dominican University as a new professor. He wrote his first book, Sacred Plunder, with the quote next to him. And whatever meager contribution he made to our understanding of medieval Venice and medieval Venetians, this passage was a guide. He’s grateful for this and for all her brilliant work.

May her memory be a blessing.


UPDATE: Prof. Mary Lewis posted a link to this great essay by Prof. Davis in The New York Review of Books, taken from her acceptance of the National Humanities Medal. It ends with this:

I have wanted to be a historian of hope. We can take heart from the fact that no matter how dire the situation, some will find means to resist, some will find means to cope, and some will remember and tell stories about what happened.

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