Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (review)

Reviews NATALIE ZemON DAVIS, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 352 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-674-95520-X. This book represents a very significant contribution to both the fields of history and biography. It does so by redefining the reader's expectations regarding the discursive and narrative forms that define both of these fields. For the narrative order of the three women's lives depicted in this book is different from the chronological order of history, while the emblematic and textured story of their lives from the margins of seventeenth-century historical facts eschews their facile assimilation to mere biographical studies. The lives represented in these studies are exemplary not because of their centrality to history, but rather because each figure discovered and refashioned the margin, "reconstituting it as a locally defined center" (210). Rather than be defined by and through history, each of these women sought to overcome the marginalization of her position, through autobiographical, religious, or artistic narratives and practices that constitute in and of the margins a place for refashioning female identity. This is no mere biographical account, since instead of imposing a master narrative upon her subjects' lives, Zemon Davis resorts to a form of telling that is informed by each individual subject's own efforts to represent, refashion, and thus reorganize the modalities and forms of their particular existence. The result is exemplary not by an appeal to universality, but by its success in particularizing the specific virtues, initiatives, and faults that form and inform the texture of seventeenth-century European women's lives. While certain common motifs run through all three studies—that of melancholy, of an enhanced sense of self, of curiosity and eschatological hope—what is remarkable is the fact that each subject is captured through the unique articulation of her religious aspirations and her worldly activities and practices. The most important similarity drawn among these women is in their manner of work, their abilities to combine the artisanal REVIEWS 303 and the commercial, extending their knowledge as household managers to the greater encounters with trade, credit, and accounting in the larger social sphere. Removed from the centers of political, social, and civic power, since all three women are from non-aristocratic castes, these women distinguish themselves as active producers, rather than mere products of tiieir time. Their sense of craft is evidenced in the attention they devoted to their writing and describing, a reflective attentiveness that sought invariably to position the observer in relation to the larger European culture, and in some cases extended to embrace non-European counterparts. Two of the women described were actual voyagers to the New World: Marie de l'Incarnation founded an Ursuline convent in Canada, and Maria Sibylla Merian travelled and recorded the insect life in Suriname. It is interesting to note, however, that the book opens with the study of Glikl bas Judah Leib, whose own position as a Jew in the larger European culture was often tenuous and fragile. For Glikl, capacities to negotiate in the public sphere are all the more remarkable, given her marginal social position as a Jew in Germany and later a widow, as well as her familial obligations, encompassing the responsibilities of raising twelve children (out of fourteen pregnancies). More notable still is her effort to write her autobiography, the first of its kind by a Jewish woman, after her husband's death. Mixing memoirs with storytelling, this remarkable document does not present a "personal trajectory," as does Christian confessional autobiography. Instead it reflects the patterns of Jewish confessional autobiography , a "history of Yahveh's chosen people, the individual life repeating and recombining the rhythm ofTorah, sinning and the sufferings of exile" (21). It is this larger sense of Jewish identity, which is inflected in Glikl's case with her particular limitations, since her gender restricted her access to both more elaborate forms of learning and religious expression. Mixing moral lessons, storytelling, personal wisdom, and lament, Glikl bas Judah Leib captured her struggle for patience and meaning, a "struggle that is not ever wholly won" (53), as a spiritual space for a never-ending dialogue with God. A similar dialogue with...