SOURCE: Dewald, Jonathan. Review of Fiction in the Archives, by Natalie Z. Davis. Journal of Social History 22, no. 4 (summer 1989): 767-69.

In the following review, Dewald maintains that Fiction in the Archives exposes readers to narratives fashioned by men and women from the sixteenth century.

In all her scholarship, Natalie Zemon Davis has sought to restore our direct contact with voices from the sixteenth century, and her new book represents her most extended and sophisticated effort of this kind. Fiction in the Archives examines requests for pardons which accused criminals directed to the king of France. To obtain a royal pardon, the petitioner needed to supply a full description of what he or (more rarely) she had done. Legal experts played little role in shaping these narratives, Davis shows. As a result, the requests offer a relatively direct expression of the ways in which sixteenth-century men and women narrated...