Natalie Zemon Davis recreates in vivid detail the lives of three
very different 17th-century women. The first is Glikl bas Judah
Leib, a gem-stone merchant of Hamburg and Metz, whose Yiddish
autobiography combines an intimate picture of her domestic world,
which involved two husbands and 12 children, with valuable insights
into the business community of early modern Europe. The second is
Marie Guyart whose letters allow Davis to tell the remarkable tale
of how in 1639 she left her native Tours for Quebec where she
established the first Christian school for Amer-Indian women in
North America. The third is a German naturalist, Maria Sibylla
Merian, who visited Suriname at the end of the century and produced
pioneering writings on its entomology and botany before returning
to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands. In sum, we
have here three richly illuminating pictures of contemporary life
to edify the historian and three thoroughly absorbing stories to
delight any reader. (Kirkus UK)
As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves
individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto
the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century,
Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla
Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens
or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were
living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North
America, and South America. Yet these women--one Jewish, one
Catholic, one Protestant--left behind memoirs and writings that
make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative,
tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an
official history. All these women were originally city folk. Glikl
bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish
autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two
marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de
l'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the
Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for
Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of
information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois
peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and
naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based
on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of
Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical
Protestant sect in the Netherlands.Drawing on Glikl's memoirs,
Marie's autobiography and correspondence, and Maria's writings on
entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life.
She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the
same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences
of the time--childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular
literature--and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests
the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression
possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also
shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning
ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's
troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.
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