The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (review)

This brief but fascinating book has been germinating for nearly two decades. Ever since Natalie Davis finished The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), she has been occupied with several other projects, most notably Fiction in the Archives (1987), Women on the Margins (1995), and Slaves on Screen (2000). It is clearly worth the wait, however, as she has forced us all to rethink the historical process of gift-giving and receiving in early modern France. She opens the book with a summary of the seminal work of the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who in 1925 first categorized gift-giving in pre-modern societies as a significant social and cultural act. Before the rise of the modem state or commercial systems of exchange, Mauss argued, societies used the process of gift-exchange both for the transfer of goods as well as to create and cement bonds of social solidarity. Seemingly offered voluntarily and freely without expectation of reciprocation, gifts were normally expected and even required, according to Mauss, and they created bonds of obligation, tying the recipient to the donor in explicit ways. Davis spends the rest of the book testing Mauss’s ideas, sometimes expanding on them, sometimes developing them, and occasionally even showing their limitations. What she does best of all, however, is to historicize them, showing how the historical context of the Reformation and religious wars was crucial to the ways that gift-giving functioned in sixteenth-century France.

Davis goes to great lengths to show us how deeply imbedded gift-giving was in French society of the period. At the very top of society the king used the gift of patronage to obligate his nobles to him in a variety of ways. Farther down the social ladder gifts served to create ties of obligation between people of humble origins and their betters. A gift by a peasant, for example, might be given to establish protection or increase the chances of advancement. In their own way, certain taxes called dons were a gift to the crown that worked the same way. In return for a monetary donation the crown offered its own protection against a host of enemies, from foreign troops, to famine and inflation. In this sense gift-giving worked to create ties of national community and solidarity by forging mutual bonds of attachment and obligation.

The most original chapter in the book, in my view, is the one called “Gifts and the Gods.” Here Davis shows us that the advent of Protestantism offered a serious challenge to the functionalist system of gift-giving already described. For Catholics the entire culture of salvation rested on gift-giving. God had given the human race his only son Jesus as a means of salvation through his own grace, creating a debt that no human being could possibly repay. All that could be offered out of obligation was Christian charity toward God and toward others. These acts of charity, or good works, not only obligated those who received this charity, but they also obligated God to reward the donor with his promise of salvation. In essence, the theology of the medieval church was based on a system of gift-giving that was entirely reciprocal. As Davis points out, this mutual reciprocity between God and the human beings he created, as well as between those who gave and those received charity on earth, served to bind all humankind together as a social astringent.

This model was seriously challenged, however, by the theology of Calvinism, which rejected the Catholic concepts of reciprocity and obligation. Calvin, like Luther before him, argued vehemently that God’s gift of his son to humankind was offered freely and graciously without any obligation implied. Entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven could not be earned through good works, but was a reward and free gift from God bestowed only on those whom he elected to receive it. Thus, Calvin explicitly rejected the notion that anyone could obligate God...