SOURCE: Seed, Patricia. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 3 (July 1997): 626-27.

In the following review of Women on the Margins, Seed contends that since two of its subjects participated in the colonization of the Americas and occupied relatively privileged positions outside of Europe, they can hardly be considered marginalized compared to the women of the indigenous populations.

With her customary grace, Natalie Zemon Davis recounts the lives of three seventeenth-century women, Glikl bas Judah Leib, of the Jewish community of Hamburg, Marie de l'Incarnation, a Catholic Frenchwoman, and Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born Protestant resident of Amsterdam. Each minibiography can be read separately, making this volume [Women on the Margins] attractive for use in Jewish, French, German, and Dutch history courses of the early modern era. Davis's prose flows so smoothly that the temptation to use all three together...