Reseña del libro "Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (en Inglés)"
Natalie Zemon DavisAs 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. Shereconstructs 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.
Natalie Zemon Davis (1928–2023) fue una historiadora estadounidense-canadiense reconocida por su enfoque innovador en la historia cultural y social de la Europa moderna temprana. Su obra más conocida es El regreso de Martin Guerre (1983), un estudio pionero de microhistoria que ha sido traducido a más de veinte idiomas. Otras obras destacadas incluyen Ficción en los archivos (1987), Mujeres de los márgenes (1995) y León el Africano: un viajero entre dos mundos (2006). Davis fue profesora en instituciones como Princeton y la Universidad de Toronto, y su trabajo se caracteriza por combinar historia, antropología y literatura para recuperar las voces de personas marginadas en la historia.
A lo largo de su carrera, Davis recibió numerosos reconocimientos, incluyendo el Premio Holberg en 2010 y la Medalla Nacional de Humanidades de EE. UU. en 2012. También fue nombrada Compañera de la Orden de Canadá. Su legado perdura en el campo de la historiografía, donde su enfoque interdisciplinario y su atención a las narrativas personales han influido profundamente en generaciones de historiadores.
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