SOURCE: Finlay, Robert. “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre.” American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (June 1988): 553-71.

In the following essay, Finlay discusses Davis's Martin Guerre film collaboration and her book in relation to the various versions of the Martin Guerre story that preceded those texts.

While most Renaissance popes and princes have been forgotten by everyone but the historical specialist, one peasant of the sixteenth century, from a village near Toulouse in the foothills of the Pyrenees, remains well known. Martin Guerre—or rather the impostor who took his wife and birthright—has entered history. This is a remarkable fact, for generally the world of peasants lay outside what the elite of Europe in the past considered significant. Peasants were viewed within the comforting contexts of proverbial wisdom and pastoral buffoonery.¹ The personalities and perspectives of rural people usually were recorded only when peasants ran into trouble with the law...