by Natalie Davis
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The seminal work of cultural history, 2005-04-07
Judging from the title, Natalie Davis has set the bar rather high for her book. Society and Culture in Early Modern France is a collection of eight essays, written by Davis between 1965 and 1975. The essays address a wide spectrum of topics, including the role of printers and class in Reformed Lyon, the relation between women and the Reformation in the same city, traditions of role reversal in sixteenth century Europe, and the spread of literacy and printed books in France among different economic classes. Examining such a broad array of subjects means that Davis does deliver on the implicit promise of the book's title. The reader leaves with enough snapshots of the social and cultural milieu of sixteenth century France to construct a general image of the experiences of the people of the time and place.
Davis has been hailed as one of the "new breed" of historians, those using the social sciences as a lens for history. While Davis's goal may be a traditional objective for historians - generating and understanding a detailed account of everyday existence at a certain place and time in the past - her methods are new. Applying knowledge of disciplines as diverse as sociology, anthropology, and textual analysis, Davis looks at the past in an attempt to divine the meaning of events, actions, and people. As she herself states, "[a] journeymen's initiation rite, a village festive organization, an informal gathering of women for a lying-in or of men and women for storytelling, or a street disturbance could be `read' as fruitfully as a diary, a political tract, a sermon, or a body of laws" (xvii). Davis is less interested in putting together a causal flowchart for history to spell out the whys and wherefores than in looking for meaning in certain "cultural artifacts" (xvi).
To illustrate this point, three examples are particularly useful. When discussing the actions of Protestant journeymen printers in Lyon, Davis explains their Psalm singing by saying that "[t]heir numbers and the activistic fellowship of their singing not only helped them brave arrest, but also allayed more profound fears of death and human isolation" (5). This slightly verbose method of describing the old adage of "safety in numbers" is clearly an anthropological reading of the artisans' actions. Later, in the essay City Women and Religious Change, Davis compares the iconoclasm of Protestant rioters with the same singing printers, because "...like the armed march of the psalm-singers, the iconoclastic riot was a transfer of the joint political action of the grain riot in the religious sphere" (88). Finally, in the somewhat enigmatic essay Women on Top, when discussing the importance of cross-dressing during European agricultural festivals, Davis tells the reader that "[a]ll interpreters of this transvestism see it... as a fertility rite - biological or agricultural - embedded into festivities that may have had other meanings as well" (138). Clearly, Davis seeks to find the underlying meaning behind these actions in an attempt to illustrate how members of the societies of early modern France saw themselves and their environment.
Society and Culture in Early Modern France is a work of admirable scholarship, all the more so when it is considered within the time these essays were first published. Application of cultural anthropology and semiotics to the stuff of history was novel forty years ago, and even today the Annales school delivers fresh interpretations of familiar topics. Setting aside questions of belief in the determinative aspects of economy, geography, or political systems, Davis's book doesn't so much deny the influence of those and other factors, but instead makes it explicit that what Davis finds most interesting is the relation between action, actor, and meaning.
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