Natalie Zemon Davis Critical Essay | Critical Review by Charmarie Jenkins Blaisdell

Critical Review by Charmarie Jenkins Blaisdell

SOURCE: Blaisdell, Charmarie Jenkins. Review of Society and Culture in Early Modern France, by Natalie Z. Davis. American Historical Review 81, no. 3 (June 1976): 599-600.

In the following review, Blaisdell recommends Society and Culture in Early Modern France for its treatment of the lives of ordinary people in sixteenth-century France whose stories are largely neglected in conventional histories.

As a collection of essays on peasants, artisans, and the illiterate populace of the cities of early modern France, this book [Society and Culture in Early Modern France] should interest historians who are not directly concerned with the period or with popular history. Through what she calls “case studies” of the menu peuple, Natalie Davis demonstrates her impressive and wide-ranging research not only into little-known or used documents of her period but also into the scholarship of the social sciences in general. Though five of these essays have appeared in periodicals,...
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