Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

By Davis, Natalie Zemon
Harvard University Press, 1997, Paperback, 372 pp., ISBN: 0674955218, $20.50

Natalie Zemon Davis 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. 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.

The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. Davis places these women in the context of their time and society and includes rich detail concerning vernacular literature, religion, and familial relationships. She also demonstrates the careers open to women of ability and determination.

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. Includes 41 halftones.

Davis (history, Princeton U.) offers an engaging account of the lives of three remarkable 17th-century women whose memoirs, letters, and paintings reveal much about the lives of women in early modern Europe.