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“... to the last. Before his film was made, Daniel Vigne discovered that the Princeton historian Natalie Davis was also interested in the drama of the Guerres, and he enlisted her services as an adviser. ‘Watching Gérard Depardieu feel his way into the role of the false Martin Guerre’ made Professor Davis want to ...”

“... Like good detective novels, the letters of remission which are the subject of Natalie Zemon Davis’s most recent book usually start with a corpse which requires to be explained. Other offences – tax riot, heresy, the defloration of a virgin – could be the occasion for the ‘pardon tales’ such letters contained, but the procedure was most often resorted to by someone who had been the cause of someone else’s death ...”

“... by the late Lawrence Stone, and next to another chair once occupied by the happily not late Natalie Davis. As against both of them, he has pursued a roughly Warburgian path of investigating the 16th-century intellect. That may suggest Foucauldian overtones, and indeed we can find him juggling with the master’s Renaissance episteme, the cosmos of ...”

“... or alleged suicides or to the living people connected with them – the source that provided Natalie Davis with rich narrative material for her Fiction in the Archives. There are distinct signs of generosity here. In the case of Michelet le Cavelier, who, like Testard, killed himself by jumping out of a window, this time in the rue de la Ferronnerie ...”

“... are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or ...”

“... When does the history of personal identification technology begin? The history of fingerprinting, photographs, retinal scans, DNA testing? Of the many situations in which we are called on to prove who we are, and of the many places in which our identity is recorded? Some accounts start with the French Revolution and the needs of modern states and colonial empires ...”

“... as well as a cluster of eminent Jews, such as Maimonides. But Leo’s literary afterlife is not Natalie Zemon Davis’s chief concern. Davis has a considerable reputation in the field of early modern history. She has tended to specialise in cultural history and marginal subjects (or at ...”

“... In the last few years we have seen some interesting experiments in historical writing – by Natalie Davis, for example, in The Return of Martin Guerre, by Norman Davies in his Heart of Europe, and by Jonathan Spence in a number of studies of China. Their innovations in narrative form – making ordinary people protagonists, telling a story ...”

“... nowadays worry as much as oral historians do about how to interpret what they’re told – and as Natalie Davis noted in a review of Montaillou, Ladurie’s key witnesses were nothing if not fine conteurs. There’s a world of difference between the modern informant in the village and the medieval suspect under interrogation in the inquisitor’s ...”

“... historical study depends on discovering meaning without inventing it. When, however, Professor Natalie Davis wrote about ‘fiction in the archives’ she made an important and valid point, although not all her fellow historians have chosen to grasp it. When Elton wrote that the Tudor martyrologist John Foxe did not invent a myth but recorded a truth ...”

“... aloud or on paper, resonates with others, have been raised by scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis, both always alert to the politics of utterance. How far, for instance, did a particular medium – gossip, say, or an ambassadorial report or a political pamphlet – shape or transform the contents? What ...”

“... the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie Zemon Davis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really be catalogued – as it is here – as feminist history? Women’s history is essentially an attempt to describe the past of ...”

“... to Greenblatt’s intuitions, as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems ...”

“... recent historical writing are converted into Post-Modernists – Simon Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis and Orlando Figes. But Evans never cites an instance of these authors even borrowing the Post-Modernist label, let alone one showing that they conceive of themselves as working on behalf of an intellectual ...”

“... are alive with the names of its owners and readers, alongside scribbles and devotional jottings. Natalie Zemon Davis described books as ‘carriers of relationships’, and that’s exactly what we see here as we follow the signatures of Daniel Stanger, Edward Stanger, Jannet Thompson et al. On a blank page a note records ...”