Dr Natalie Zemon Davis 1928-2023 |
Dr Natalie Davis was a Jewish American Historian and as such gravitated towards the "progressive" side of American politics. Unlike the radicals of today whose radicalism is expressed primarily in a radicalized aesthetic, Davis and her husband, Chandler, face the raw brutality of the American State during the McCarthy Era when a campaign to root out "communist" subversives was pushed through with the same passion with which the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda is today being touted today. Davis and her husband who was a Professor of Mathematics were stripped of their passports and Chandler even spent six months in Prison for refusing to accept a subpoena and pleading the fifth. Certainly her politics was progressive. In 1959 she took her PhD for the University of Michigan and spent the rest of her life at Princeton University. Her Culture and Society in Early Modern France, Return of Martin Guerre, Fictions in the Archives and Trickster's Tales are important contributions.
Today the field of History has declined into a morass of post colonialism with the subjective and the unverifiable elevated as categories of understanding the past. Narrative and event oriented analysis of reality has given way to dense "thick descriptions" cast within a cultural/anthropological construct are seen as alternatives to the grounded histories that the Historical Method and its application creates. Memory, Culture, Society are the banners under which the New History associated with Carlo Ginsberg, Natalie Zemon, Ladurie and others marched. But these broad and almost undefinable concepts stretched Historiography almost to breaking point and in the cracks various kinds of splintered Histories sprouted based on identity, ideology and ideas. Dr Davis has not directly confronted these "post colonial" challenges.
Davis served as the President of the American Historical Association and her address History's Two Bodies remains a classic. Her death is a loss to the profession in the true sense.