Crossing Boundaries

Natalie Davis’s histories are vivid, experimental and always surprising. Her new book is a wonderfully innovative engagement with the life and writings of Al-Wazzan, known in Arabic as Yuhanna al-Assad, also known as Al Hassan Al-Wazzan – in Latin as Johannes Leo – and in the English-speaking world as Leo the African. The historical details of Al-Wazzan’s biography are very thin, but Davis uses the events of his life and his writing to anchor questions and speculations about connections and encounters between Renaissance Europe and Islam and, most significantly, to investigate Africa as it has been imagined by Europeans since the early modern period.

Natalie Davis’s last major book, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (1995) was a composite biography and social history in which Davis sought to understand the beliefs that motivated three independent women, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l’Incarnation and Maria Sibylla Merian, who traversed Europe and the Americas, encountering other cultures in Quebec and Suriname. The book gives a vivid portrait of the belief systems of Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Christian, using the narratives of these individual lives to convey the broader histories of margins and minorities within Europe, and of early European encounters with the peoples of the Americas. The lives and experiences of these women also provide a compelling entry into the gender history of seventeenth-century Europe.

There is something of Women on the Margins in Trickster Travels. In her new book Davis has turned from women on the margins to seek another character on the margins of Renaissance and Enlightened Europe. Together with the current subject of her research, John Stedman, a Dutch Scots soldier married while in Suriname to a mulatto woman, ‘Al-Wazzan’ forms part of Natalie Davis’s ‘braided lives’ project which she has pursued since Women on the Margins.

In her earlier writings, Davis brought the eye of the cultural anthropologist and the techniques of the literary historian to the individuals and episodes discussed in Society and Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (1975), and then to the lives of ordinary sixteenth-century French villagers in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983). We know her best for narratives of people’s lives; the individual has been her route into great themes of social and cultural history. It is through narrative and personal experience, albeit always engaged with theoretical issues and methodologies, that Davis has made her way through the great movements of the Annales School, Marxism and social history, women’s and gender history, poststructuralism and postmodernism. She has integrated microhistory and individual experience into the big issues, reconstructing lives of conflict and dissimulation, of self-fashioning and cultural interchange, of margins and metamorphoses in remote sixteenth and seventeenth-century worlds.

Trickster Travels, with its enigmatic protagonist, brings her into altogether new territory – the history of Islam and Africa. Most of what is known about Al-Wazzan comes from the circumspect and brief biographical details he provided at the opening of his most famous book, La Descrittione dell’ Africa, published in 1550. Al Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad Al-Wazzan was born sometime between 1486 and 1488 in Granada, a mainly Muslim city of 50,000, but with significant minorities of Jews and Christians. As a small child he went with his family to Fez, a city of twice the size with a mixture of Arabs, Berbers, Jews, Turks, Andalusians, as well as European and African slaves. He became a student, traveller, merchant, soldier, emissary then ambassador to the sultan of Fez, Muhammad Al-Burtughali. His travels, though probably not quite so extensive as those of Ibn Battuta at the end of the fifteenth century, nevertheless took him back and forth along the North African coast, and across the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains into the so-called ‘Land of the Blacks’. He travelled over the Atlas and Rif Mountains into the Songhay empire, centred on Gao and Timbuktu; he...