In The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Davis takes a strange story
from 16th-century France - the trial of Arnauld du Tilh, accused of
taking on the identity of one Martin Guerre who had left his
village and abandoned his family. Martin's wife, Bernadette de
Rols, accepted de Tilh as her husband and bore him several children
- did she, or did she not, know Arnauld was an impostor? (Kirkus
UK)
The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the
learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day
in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced
Arnaud, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, and
wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the
imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries,
the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the
Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed more than 400
years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French
film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add
new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led
to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the
sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant
woman, would accept such a man as her husband, and why lawyers,
poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with
the episode.
Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people,
in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and
sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we
see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world
of traditional ideas about property and family and of changing
ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get
involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the "ancien
regime," and how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the
days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret
affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued
village impostor, a rare identification across class lines.
Deftlywritten to please both the general public and
specialists, "The Return of Martin Guerre" will interest those who
want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of
the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a
remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning
stops and lying begins.
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