A Passion for History: Natalie Zemon Davis, Conversations with Denis Crouzet (review)

Seven years ago, Natalie Zemon Davis sat down with fellow historian Denis Crouzet to reflect on her life as a historian. The resulting A Passion for History is a highly personal reflection on Davis's life as a Jewish-American girl, daughter, student, woman, academic, wife, mother, and teacher, who forged a personal and professional path for herself. A reviewer has no choice but to respond in a similarly personal way. Indeed, as a doctoral hopeful currently combating thesis-related insecurities, reading this book helped revive my own passion for history.

Davis reflects on how her passion for history developed as a schoolgirl: 'I was fascinated by the simple facts of history, the things that people always complain about as boring. ... I enjoyed memorising them, [and] I liked the sense of mastery I got from being able to remember and use all that historical information' (p. 1). The fascination continued into her college and university years and she recalls the sense of 'wonderment' she felt when delving into the archives for the first time: I was reminded of the tingle of excitement I felt when the librarian placed the first volume of the sixteenth-century Hôtel-Dieu accounts in front of me. 'It wasn't the "perfume" of the archives themselves', Davis recalls, 'but it gave me a stronger sense for the past. I felt that I was coming to know Christine de Pizan, that I was having an encounter with Guillaume Budé' (p. 2).

Davis has continually reminded herself, over the years, to 'watch out' for 'this passion to know and to understand [that] is positive insofar as it encourages us to explore a mysterious world ... [but] it also brings a danger - that of being possessed by the illusion of greater familiarity with the past than one really has' (pp. 2-3). (A timely reminder for all historians!) Davis stresses how important it is to respect the 'mental universes of the past' and 'draw on situations, mentalities and reactions analogous or close to those one is trying to understand' when narrating the past. As she says, 'I want to be a storyteller, not a cannibal' (pp. 122, 5-6).

Over the years, Davis's passion was drawn toward the lives of women and the menu peuple. Her research was focused by her 'mission', which is 'to save or preserve people - women and men - from obscurity, from the hidden, and give some dignity or sense to their lives, even when they end tragically' (p. 118). She expresses her disappointment with historians who have 'reductionist and naïve' attitudes, 'who are always suspicious of everything one tries to do to discover the voice of the menu peuple', and explains her sense of responsibility for those 'persons from a modest background or from an illiterate milieu [who] have no means to leave traces of themselves'. 'It's the others who need me,' she explains (pp. 32-34). This brought to my mind comments made some years ago about the detrimental effect female historians - with their partiality for unimportant feminine topics such as social history and the history of women - have had on the discipline of history. Certainly, Davis's own body of work gives the lie to the idea that the discipline of history is best served by male historians, who focus on the more palatable and masculine topics of politics and the manly pursuits of great men.

Davis's acclaimed and prize-winning published works demonstrate a diversity of subject matter, issues, and themes, ranging from the journeymen printers of sixteenth-century Lyon, to the lives and writings of early modern women. In her career as a teacher and collaborator with her male and female colleagues, she has demonstrated a similar diversity of interests. Davis recalls that her passion for history was ignited by the traditional...