In Memoriam

Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis, “our” honorary fellow, died last week at the age of 94. She was, of course, a protean figure, among the most famous and celebrated historians of the past century. She is often identified as a founder of the modern field of cultural history and as the most distinguished practitioner of what became known as microhistory. And she was and remained amazingly productive across a long career. At a celebration for her 90th birthday in Princeton, she took the stage to talk both about the books and other works (including a play and an opera) that she was completing, but she also wanted to let her audience know that there were at least two new projects that she was beginning.

Although she might not have called herself a legal historian, Natalie Davis’s life and her scholarship was deeply enmeshed with the law. Early on, when a graduate student and a young mother, her husband, the distinguished mathematician and later on poet, Chandler Davis, went to prison because he refused to sign a loyalty oath. He went to prison, it turns out, also because he had quietly funded a pamphlet that Natalie, his young wife, along with a friend, had drafted that detailed the wrongs of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. (In my last communication with Natalie, shortly after Chandler’s death last year, she sent me a copy of the pamphlet.) Because of her legal situation, she wrote a dissertation that relied only on printed French sources, she could not get a passport to travel outside the country legally. Throughout the rest of her life, she remained both engaged politically and passionate about civil liberties and free speech.

In her scholarship legal sources are everywhere and are mobilized in extraordinarily creative ways. Her most famous book, The Return of Martin Guerre, is both an exemplary story and a sustained reflection on a trial and on how historians might read a trial transcript. Her book on gifting in early modern France is a transformative study of the ways gift relationships and contractual relationships intersected and interacted with one another. It includes a sustained reflection on what is and is not a legal obligation (For example, if an employer regularly gave his servants a Christmas goose, when did that “gift” ripen into a contract, into a legal duty on the employer’s part?) And the book illuminates how the mysteries of the legal status of gifts shaped and defined an early modern legal culture. Later on, she turned her eyes to the enslaved and the enslaving and free peoples of Suriname. She began that project well into her eighth decade and taught herself Dutch. The results included a fascinating essay about how Jewish people who moved to Suriname could live lives fully free of the legal constraints imposed everywhere on Jews in the European world while they also embraced the possibilities of becoming enslavers, of engaging in the slave trade and in plantation slavery. She wrote an even more eye-opening piece for our own Law and History Review. It is an article I return to often. It begins as an unsettling but perhaps conventional exploration of the tortures and other punishments that white enslavers imposed on enslaved peoples in Suriname for imagined and real crimes. But then, in classic Natalie Davis fashion, the piece shifts its focus to how those same enslaved people would have understood criminality. To answer that question, she examines an amazing range of sources. It is a chilling and characteristically brilliant work. And from my standpoint, an exemplary exploration of the legal pluralist imagination.

In person, Natalie Davis was a remarkably sweet and generous presence. To be graced by her attention was transformative for many of us. Because of her kindnesses and her thoughtfulness, and one might say her sunny disposition, and because she often wrote in a way that made her subjects likable (the wife in Martin Guerre, tricksters, learned women), it is easy to forget how dark her understanding of legal and social life could be. From her early essay on why Protestants and Catholics in France liked to kill one another, to the late pieces on Suriname, she never avoided what Robert Cover called the jurispathic. Law was often expressive of the worst in human nature in her work, even as she also remained committed to law as potentially liberatory.

I will miss her voice, and her always engaged and helpful emails, not to mention visits to her house in Toronto. I suspect that legal historians will continue to learn from Natalie Davis’s writings for generations to come.

Dirk Hartog

Princeton University