Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives

by Natalie Zemon Davis

Book Overview

As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the 17th century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living on the margins in 17th-century Europe, North America and South America. Yet these women - one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant - left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067495520X
• ISBN13: 9780674955202
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Three fascinating lives

Davis takes the reader deep into the lives of three quite different European women of the 1600s, showing how they courageously face family and career challenges. Each story is amazing. Catholic widow Marie Guyart goes to the wilderness of Canada to help found the Quebec branch of the Ursuline teaching order. Jewish mother of 14 children, Glikl von Hameln is a successful business woman, both as her husband's chief assistant and as a widow. Divorced Protestant Maria Merian supports herself and her daughters through her engravings based on her own ecological observations of caterpillars native to Europe and northern South America. I particularly enjoyed learning about Merian because I have been impressed by her elegant work which I have seen in a number of museums including the National Museum of Woman in the Arts in Washington, D.C.