Few historians have combined the political commitment, popular appeal, and academic significance of Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023). A conviction runs through her work: it is necessary and important for historians to speculate, to empathise, and to craft stories of wonder that do justice to the lives of workers, women, outsiders.
For Davis, speculation was a political necessity born out of her identity as a secular Jew, as a woman and feminist, and out of her left-wing commitments. The historical subjects she chose were in a very clear relation to the causes she fought for in her own lifetime. Davis herself understood her interests as stemming from her Jewishness, growing up among non-Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. In her interviews and writings, she commented on her admiration for the historian Marc Bloch, also Jewish, who was forced out of his university position during the Vichy collaboration. Bloch was forced out of the Annales, the journal he had cofounded with Lucien Febvre, too, and eventually executed for his role in the resistance.
Davis paid a different price for her left-wing commitments. In 1953, while she was still finishing her doctorate, her husband Chandler Davis, then untenured at the University of Michigan, was questioned by the House Unamerican Affairs Committee. He was almost immediately fired. The couple spent the next five years waiting for a Supreme Court hearing about his refusal to testify on First Amendment grounds: Chandler was sent to prison for six months. During those years, neither could find stable employment in an American university. But – a remarkable testament to her way of seeing the world – not only did they have three children during that period, but joy was the word Davis used to describe this time in their lives, in her conversation with Denis Crouzet published as A Passion for History. Perhaps even more astonishingly, both she and her husband subsequentlyforged careers in academia, Chandler taking a job at Toronto and she taking an appointment first at Berkeley, then later Princeton. She remained frank about the challenges of wanting a university career not only as a woman, but as a mother. In 1992 History Workshop Journal published her surgical account of how Lucien Febvre and the brotherhood of the Annales sidelined their wives and lovers, reducing them to typists or abandoning them.
These socialist and feminist commitments underpinned the subjects Davis found it necessary to imagine and to speculate: women, workers, peasants. Such historical actors so rarely leave historians sources in their own words. When they do, they are always mediated. Imagination imposes itself.
In A Passion for History,Davis declared that ‘My wish 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’. She insisted that ‘these lives counted for something… they made a difference. I had a very strong sense of the humanity of these people, and that they once existed as I do now, and I wanted to recapture that.’ A self-described ‘restless’ historian, Davis did not stop with studies of workers and then women. Increasingly, towards the end of her career, she took up questions of race and cultural difference, first in her book on al-Hasan al-Wazzan, Trickster Travels, and in her unfinished work on Suriname.
This politics of the imagination was focused on the subjectivity of individuals, unlike the comparable work of English historians of ‘the crowd’, such as E.P. Thompson. Individuals, but never simply in the service of biography. Most famously in the film and book about The Return of Martin Guerre, Davis was interested in the extraordinary sixteenth-century case of Bertrande de Rols, the woman married to Martin Guerre who appeared to accept the impostor Arnaud de Tilh as her husband. This was not just a gripping story, but an entry point into peasant women’s identities in general at the time: their power to act in their own lives, their creativity, their resources and choices. Impostures and masks like false Martin’s were a privileged site to study self-fashioning. Such individual lives, for her, were always an ‘opening toward the society’ around them.
Her writing constituted the tools of speculative methods. She employed a style that was playful and honest, that used the basic grammatical tricks of the imagination: the conditional, the perhaps, a heavy use of the first person. In a defence of The Return of Martin Guerre, she described how she wanted to open a ‘gap between what I hoped to accomplish and what the sources could yield with absolute certainty’. In this method, nothing in the historical sources is as simple as it seems: she was one of the avatars of the apogee of the hermeneutics of suspicion among cultural historians. Paul Ricoeur used this phrase to describe how Sigmund Freud, as well as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzche, promoted methods of interpretation that looked beyond the surface meanings of texts, to the meanings hidden below.
‘I see complexities and ambivalences everywhere. I am willing to settle, until I can get something better, for conjectural knowledge and possible truth; I make ethical judgements as an assay of pros and cons, of daily living and heroic idealism.’
For Davis, historical documents were always doubled, ambiguous, unresolved.
Where there were absences, she was compelled to bring meaning. In A Passion for History, she noted, ‘I’m trying to turn silences into a plus, a silence that signifies’. A storied silence, even. For Carlo Ginzburg, Davis was a general in the battle for the ‘competition for the representation of reality’ fought between history and the novel. Rather than rejecting the novel’s methods, her importance, Ginzburg argued, was to adapt them to history. Martin Guerre is deliberately written like a detective story, to be read in one sitting.
And what a story! The enduring popularity of Martin Guerre stands as a reminder that readers enjoy imagining along with historians. In A Passion for History, Davis laid out her goal:‘I want to start a conversation with my readers, a dialogue, even a dispute.’ She was adamant that: ‘A book is not a lesson.’
And never in any of this did Davis sacrifice a commitment to the differenceof the past. Her speculative methods were always grounded in evidence, and a desire to ‘Let the past be the past.’ A political necessity, but also, she came to reflect later in her career, an area of particular risk: ‘But watch out! I’d add today. This passion to know and to understand …also brings a danger—that of being possessed by the illusion of greater familiarity with the past than one really has.’
Today, it has perhaps never been easier for historians to imagine the inner lives of the humble. As Julia Laite has pointed out, the age of Big Data does not mean historians need to zoom out. The availability of digitised records from archives around the world also allows historians to write ‘small histories’ of exactly the kinds of overlooked and forgotten individuals Davis was interested in.
Speculation and imagination continue to flourish on the edges of historical practice. But where Davis and many others once drew their inspiration from the social sciences, more recent histories have often turned to creative writing. ‘Speculative biographers’ echo Davis’s arguments, suggesting that queer and subaltern lives demand imagination. Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘critical fabulation’ takes these ideas in other directions, similarly drawing on creative writing to amplify and embroider the lives of Black and queer subjects in America and in the Atlantic slave trade. And like Davis, Hartman’s work continues to appeal to a broad public who want to imagine along with historians.
The historical imagination has always had its critics from within the academic discipline, and talk of speculation and fabulation invites concerns about ‘making things up’. (These critics, as Davis wryly noted in A Passion for History, ‘weren’t numerous, but they were vociferous’). Davis was always open-minded about the possibilities of different ways of telling stories, and not just in writing. In her work on the film about Bertrande de Rols and Martin Guerre, and in her book about Slaves on Screen, Davis was an early advocate of asking what purposes historical fictions and historical serve, foreshadowing a closer alliance between research and entertainment. The broad cultural transition that David Shields christened ‘reality hunger’ – the memoir boom, mockumentaries, reality TV – has seen the entertainment industries paradoxically turn to ‘reality’, including ‘historical authenticity’, but in a playful way. As Karen Harvey has pointed out with the example of Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurd 2018 film The Favourite, there is no evidence that Queen Anne kept pet rabbits, as the film depicts. Yet, with its echoes of the historical case of Mary Toft, the inclusion of this detail in the film opens a ‘space where we can reflect on the intimate experiences of women’s bodies’, about which historians have precious little direct evidence.
Urgent and principled, yet also entertaining: this is Natalie Zemon Davis’s politics of the historical imagination in action.
This is a fantastic article. I find myself constatly going back to Zeamon-Davis’ Fiction in the Archives for my own research when considering how both ‘ordinary’ people and elites sought to fashion and refashion their identities and past experiences, constantly reminding myself as Davis argued that sometimes its how these stories were constructed rather than whether or not it was ‘true’ that can prove the most fasciating.
One minor correction. Natalie first taught at the University of Toronto where she had an appointment in the History Department. She later moved to Berkeley and Princeton, while Chandler remained at U of T. She returned to Toronto after retiring.