Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.

Schutte, Anne Jacobson

This book charts the intersection of public and private in the lives of the Ashkenazi business woman and autobiographer Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646/7-1724); the Ursuline educator in New France, Mere Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1671); and the German entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). It is the "purest" narrative work that Natalie Zemon Davis has ever produced, in the sense that only in her conclusion (203-16) does she suggest what draws these diverse biographical trajectories into "a common field." In each case, she writes, "a woman's version of an artisanal-commercial style" complicated and enriched the life-cycle events (marrying, bearing and rearing children, suffering the loss of offspring and spouses) that shaped most women's lives in early modern Europe. Within their respective religious traditions, each encountered a reformed or revolutionary current. Finally, all three confronted "the other": peoples whose styles of life and systems of belief differed radically from their own.

Of this trio, Glikl emerges as the most fully realized character, perhaps because Davis finds her particularly congenial and certainly because her memoirs provide direct access to her milieu and mind. Working from a Yiddish edition published in 1896, Davis corrects mistranslations and restores omissions that mar subsequent German and English versions. Exemplary tales, through which Glikl and her Jewish contemporaries made sense of their experiences in an ambiance separate from yet intimately connected with the Christian world that surrounded them, receive especially full and sensitive treatment. Drawing on extensive research in manuscript and printed sources and intelligent exploitation of modern works on Jewish social and economic life, theology, and folklore, Davis vividly and movingly represents both the constraints and the considerable room for maneuver in this seventeenth-century woman's life.

For several reasons, Marie de l'Incarnation proves less accessible to the author and her readers. One obstacle is the nature of available personal documents: a "relation" of her life written in 1654 at the behest of spiritual directors; a version of it refashioned by her Benedictine son into a conventional saintly vita; and a corpus of letters (the editorial fortune of which Davis does not explain) sent from Canada to Marie's fellow Ursulines, other supporters, and her son in France. Oddly, having paid close attention to Glikl's linguistic and literary resources, Davis refrains from thoroughly investigating and speculating about Marie's. Passing reference to contacts with Jesuit confessors cannot account satisfactorily for the ability of a bourgeoise who came late to her formal religious vocation - a woman functionally literate in French but not systematically trained in Latin - to master and embrace such sophisticated mystical concepts as the Incarnate Word. Alluding with a verbal smile to Marie's claim that her knowledge of Amerindian tongues was miraculously infused, Davis does not sufficiently probe the crucial matter of language acquisition by either natives or nuns in the Ursuline compound at Quebec. Hence her suggestive comparison between Marie's optimistic, "universalizing" view of Amerindians and the Jesuit missionaries' pessimistic and perhaps better informed opinion is less persuasive than one might wish.

Reconstructing Merian's inner itinerary presents a formidable challenge, since the meticulously illustrated books about the metamorphoses of insects and a few surviving letters of Merian unquestionably a "learned lady," though we are told nothing about her acquisition of Latin - contain almost no intimate references. Davis seeks to meet this challenge by positing as the critical turning point Merian's conversion to Pietism, her departure from her husband, and her retirement for five or six years to the Labadist community at Wieuwerd in Friesland. That this experience freed her to settle independently in Amsterdam and then to pursue her entomological quest in SurName appears likely. Davis's contention on the other hand that Merian's attraction to and subsequent disenchantment with Pietism precipitated not only a decisive shift in her attitude toward God's governance of the natural world but also an unusually sympathetic view of indigenes in the Dutch colony strikes this reader as forcing possibilities beyond the margins of plausibility.

Notwithstanding the belated statement and strained application of the thesis and shortcomings in the second and third sections, both general and scholarly audiences will find Women on the Margins, like Davis's previous books, a marvelous read. In her accustomed lucid and eloquent fashion, she maps three terrains hitherto familiar only to specialists in one or another of them. By pursuing leads in her copious endnotes - not an easy task, given the lack of a bibliography and the exclusion of modern authors' names from the index - students and scholars will be able to undertake explorations of physical, intellectual, and psychological terrae that, thanks to Davis, are no longer virtually incognitae.

ANNE JACOBSON SCHUTTE University of Virginia