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Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays
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392 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1975
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About the author
Natalie Zemon Davis
54 books92 followersNatalie Zemon Davis was an American-Canadian historian of the early-modern period.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 13, 2013
An interesting, granular look at the way certain cultural issues “played out” on the ground, so to speak. Zemon Davis discusses, among other topics, the relationship between workers’ strikes and religion, “proverbial” wisdom, religious violence and poor relief. All her summings-up are proceeded by examples from the lives of those living in the areas she discusses. I’m not doing a very good job of describing the book but it is interesting and would be to anyone interested in cultural history.
January 22, 2014
This is great...I wish I had found a copy to buy instead of getting this from the library. I'll keep looking for it at used bookshops. This is an idea book, rather than an argument-driven monograph. Eight essays that are fun to read, and each one has its own thing to say, but they also all work together too.
These essays can be examined separately by anyone interested in a particular facet of early modern French life. Some would be useful to historians attempting comparative studies of particular cultural or social practices, like costumed mischief or mob violence. Specialists in early America, for example, might find Davis’s argument about the meaning of cross-dressing and the “complex license accorded the unruly woman” fascinating when compared to the rise of Indian costume among mobs in late eighteenth-century New England. But the essays work together too. Some arguments build on each other, which helps make one essay about the motivations of mob violence during the wars of religion particularly convincing. And all the pieces are in the service of an overarching idea: that changes in culture and society in France grew out of the actions of French people, and these actions were not determined by factors like “sex, or…relation to property and production.” Davis is making an argument that goes against a sort of vulgar Marxist determinism. French men and women did not become Calvinists, or decide to support poor relief, or choose to massacre their neighbors because of their spots on the social ladder or their relationships to the means of production. They were independent actors who made rational decisions based on what they understood to be possible and appropriate in their society.
And there are all kinds of great little stories that Davis uncovers, and old French proverbs in her essay about proverbs. The one about religious violence is great, and really gets one thinking about what motivates people to do awful things to each other.
These essays can be examined separately by anyone interested in a particular facet of early modern French life. Some would be useful to historians attempting comparative studies of particular cultural or social practices, like costumed mischief or mob violence. Specialists in early America, for example, might find Davis’s argument about the meaning of cross-dressing and the “complex license accorded the unruly woman” fascinating when compared to the rise of Indian costume among mobs in late eighteenth-century New England. But the essays work together too. Some arguments build on each other, which helps make one essay about the motivations of mob violence during the wars of religion particularly convincing. And all the pieces are in the service of an overarching idea: that changes in culture and society in France grew out of the actions of French people, and these actions were not determined by factors like “sex, or…relation to property and production.” Davis is making an argument that goes against a sort of vulgar Marxist determinism. French men and women did not become Calvinists, or decide to support poor relief, or choose to massacre their neighbors because of their spots on the social ladder or their relationships to the means of production. They were independent actors who made rational decisions based on what they understood to be possible and appropriate in their society.
And there are all kinds of great little stories that Davis uncovers, and old French proverbs in her essay about proverbs. The one about religious violence is great, and really gets one thinking about what motivates people to do awful things to each other.
December 30, 2012
Read long ago - A remarkable book -- collection of very granular studies of the social and economic life of late Medieval/early modern France - esp. on premodern saturnalia and misrule festivals... A tour de force.
July 16, 2016
Society and Culture in Early Modern France is Davis' first book, it is not a monograph but assembles eight articles written between 1965 and 1973 which had previously appeared in different history journals. They are quite divers in style, scope and method but what they all share is a profound interest in the lives, conditions and imaginations of the menu peuple (the little people).
The first two articles have a very tight, almost micro-historical focus on the French printing town of Lyon during the reformation. Later on she broadens her perspective to include other examples, from France and also, in some cases, comparisons with other countries.
She makes use of a wide variety of sources, more traditional ones like criminal and judicial records, welfare roles, notarial contracts, financial lists, playlets, poems, pamphlets, paintings, illustrations, political tracts, diaries and sermons, but she is also interested in less tangible cultural artifacts like initiation rites and celebrations (especially carnivalesque inversions of power). There are some themes that run through several of her articles, for instance the role of women and how it interacted with reformation, charivari and other gender and social inversions and how language and literacy affected the dissemination of ideas and knowledge.
Strikes and Salvation at Lyon examines the Griffarins, the secular brotherhood of the printer journeymen, and how social and religious factors interacted to make them embrace Calvinism, before returning to the Mother Church. Unfortunately Davis does not address the sources she used and therefore there also is no link between sources and the development of her argument.
Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy traces the involvement of two Humanists in the establishment of the Aumône-Générale (institution to aid the poor) and how, within the context of religious competition, ecclesiastical charity was transformed into a secular welfare system. What I would criticize here is the long enumeration of secondary sources without engaging their arguments enough.
City Women and Religious Change looks at how the reformation affected the role of women and at the reasons and motivations that moved urban women to convert. The most startling insight this article provides is that even as Calvinism seemed to offer women a more important role in the religious community through the abolishment of the Saints it also deprived them of the most important identification figure, the Virgin Mary.
The Reasons of Misrule is, in my opinion, a somewhat misleading title. Because what this article actually does is examine charivaris and other carnivalesque celebrations and feasts and show how they not only questioned the existing social order by mocking it, but at the same time strengthened it by providing mostly young men an outlet to act out their grievances. In her argument Davis draws heavily on the work of Russian structuralist, semiotician and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who worked out these structures of inversions on the basis of literary works.
Women on Top continues the theme of role reversal introduced in the previous article. But whereas there the focus was on class and generational conflict here it is on the inversion of sex roles. Davis exemplifies her argument with many examples from literary and pictoral sources. Women especially appear more transgressive in literature than in practice, while men don female garb in practice more often, either as part of festivities or to escape responsibility.
The Rites of Violence begins with two long quotes, one by a Calvinist pastor and one by Catholic preachers. It looks at pre-industrial crowd-violence by examining not only sermons, but the accounts the religious communities produced about the violence committed by the other side, also paying special attention not only what is written about but also what is not mentioned and the language that is used. Davis can convincingly refute the structuralist claim that correlates the outbreak of religious riots to social unrest (here rising grain prices serve as an indicator). Instead crowds see themselves as an extension of government: people feel they have to do what their local authorities fail to do. This belief is also expressed in form of the violence, they often mimic government procedures, like for instance mock trials are held. The riots are usually triggered by religious worship, services and rituals. The language of pollution and purification helps to explain the brutality: the victims were not conceived of as people that were tortured and killed, but as vermin that had to be eradicated.
This is, in fact, my favorite article, because the sources not only flawlessly support the argument but they and the conditions of their production are also reflected on.
Printing and People looks at the spread of literacy and books in urban and rural communities within the framework of religion, gender and class. The most important book, and often the only one people owned if they owned any, was the Bible in the vernacular.
In Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors Davis is interested in the changing relations between learned and popular culture. She examines two, quite different, corpora of texts, collections of proverbs on the one hand and compilations of medical errors on the other hand. The medical texts are expressions of the fight about who had authority in medicine, whereby learned physicians tried to legitimize their authority against surgeons, midwives and other people involved in health professions. The impetus for the collections of proverbs was an interest in recording proverbs of rural communities, because it was believed that their language reflected their mentality.
Davis points out that the shortcomings of these materials accrue from the fact that the contemporary compilers were not interested in "popular culture" for its own sake, but to advance their own agenda and also considered the material they collected as inferior (as compared to their culture). Moreover it was also taken out of context. Her reflections on the conditions under which the materials, that we as historians use, are produced are very thought provoking. But as a linguist I was very bothered by the juxtaposition of these two types of text, because the medical texts are only looked at with regard to their content whereas the language in the proverb collection plays a much more important role, since they were often culled from local dialects but then translated into a more standard version of French. So here then also comes in the whole question of the standardization process and the prestige attached to different dialects.
On the whole I feel that Davis conception of a history of the "little people" differs from the one that was employed by German (speaking) historians of the same time. In German historiography we see a much stronger influence of sociology, whereas the Anglo-Saxon tradition grew out of, on the one hand, the reception of the Annales School (remember article four, where she takes issue with Ariès about the existence of "childhood") and, on the other hand, literary theory (the heavy reliance on Bakhtin, also in article four) and throughout she refers several times to E. K. Chambers, a literary critic and Shakespeare scholar, whose magnum opus is an examination of the history and the conditions of English theatre from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
This affinity to literary studies is also expressed in Davis interest in language, on how language influences our perception, as we have seen in articles six and eight.
Since the articles, as stated in the beginning, are quite divers, I find it difficult to offer a general criticism. Where I had issues I tried to state them in my close reading of the individual articles. Overall I think that what can be considered a weakness, is also a strength: Davis not only brings together secondary texts from different fields, but draws on a wide variety of sources and offers examples from different times and places. This helps to anchor her argument in a larger context but it also sometimes leaves the reader lost as to where he is in time and space.
The first two articles have a very tight, almost micro-historical focus on the French printing town of Lyon during the reformation. Later on she broadens her perspective to include other examples, from France and also, in some cases, comparisons with other countries.
She makes use of a wide variety of sources, more traditional ones like criminal and judicial records, welfare roles, notarial contracts, financial lists, playlets, poems, pamphlets, paintings, illustrations, political tracts, diaries and sermons, but she is also interested in less tangible cultural artifacts like initiation rites and celebrations (especially carnivalesque inversions of power). There are some themes that run through several of her articles, for instance the role of women and how it interacted with reformation, charivari and other gender and social inversions and how language and literacy affected the dissemination of ideas and knowledge.
Strikes and Salvation at Lyon examines the Griffarins, the secular brotherhood of the printer journeymen, and how social and religious factors interacted to make them embrace Calvinism, before returning to the Mother Church. Unfortunately Davis does not address the sources she used and therefore there also is no link between sources and the development of her argument.
Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy traces the involvement of two Humanists in the establishment of the Aumône-Générale (institution to aid the poor) and how, within the context of religious competition, ecclesiastical charity was transformed into a secular welfare system. What I would criticize here is the long enumeration of secondary sources without engaging their arguments enough.
City Women and Religious Change looks at how the reformation affected the role of women and at the reasons and motivations that moved urban women to convert. The most startling insight this article provides is that even as Calvinism seemed to offer women a more important role in the religious community through the abolishment of the Saints it also deprived them of the most important identification figure, the Virgin Mary.
The Reasons of Misrule is, in my opinion, a somewhat misleading title. Because what this article actually does is examine charivaris and other carnivalesque celebrations and feasts and show how they not only questioned the existing social order by mocking it, but at the same time strengthened it by providing mostly young men an outlet to act out their grievances. In her argument Davis draws heavily on the work of Russian structuralist, semiotician and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who worked out these structures of inversions on the basis of literary works.
Women on Top continues the theme of role reversal introduced in the previous article. But whereas there the focus was on class and generational conflict here it is on the inversion of sex roles. Davis exemplifies her argument with many examples from literary and pictoral sources. Women especially appear more transgressive in literature than in practice, while men don female garb in practice more often, either as part of festivities or to escape responsibility.
The Rites of Violence begins with two long quotes, one by a Calvinist pastor and one by Catholic preachers. It looks at pre-industrial crowd-violence by examining not only sermons, but the accounts the religious communities produced about the violence committed by the other side, also paying special attention not only what is written about but also what is not mentioned and the language that is used. Davis can convincingly refute the structuralist claim that correlates the outbreak of religious riots to social unrest (here rising grain prices serve as an indicator). Instead crowds see themselves as an extension of government: people feel they have to do what their local authorities fail to do. This belief is also expressed in form of the violence, they often mimic government procedures, like for instance mock trials are held. The riots are usually triggered by religious worship, services and rituals. The language of pollution and purification helps to explain the brutality: the victims were not conceived of as people that were tortured and killed, but as vermin that had to be eradicated.
This is, in fact, my favorite article, because the sources not only flawlessly support the argument but they and the conditions of their production are also reflected on.
Printing and People looks at the spread of literacy and books in urban and rural communities within the framework of religion, gender and class. The most important book, and often the only one people owned if they owned any, was the Bible in the vernacular.
In Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors Davis is interested in the changing relations between learned and popular culture. She examines two, quite different, corpora of texts, collections of proverbs on the one hand and compilations of medical errors on the other hand. The medical texts are expressions of the fight about who had authority in medicine, whereby learned physicians tried to legitimize their authority against surgeons, midwives and other people involved in health professions. The impetus for the collections of proverbs was an interest in recording proverbs of rural communities, because it was believed that their language reflected their mentality.
Davis points out that the shortcomings of these materials accrue from the fact that the contemporary compilers were not interested in "popular culture" for its own sake, but to advance their own agenda and also considered the material they collected as inferior (as compared to their culture). Moreover it was also taken out of context. Her reflections on the conditions under which the materials, that we as historians use, are produced are very thought provoking. But as a linguist I was very bothered by the juxtaposition of these two types of text, because the medical texts are only looked at with regard to their content whereas the language in the proverb collection plays a much more important role, since they were often culled from local dialects but then translated into a more standard version of French. So here then also comes in the whole question of the standardization process and the prestige attached to different dialects.
On the whole I feel that Davis conception of a history of the "little people" differs from the one that was employed by German (speaking) historians of the same time. In German historiography we see a much stronger influence of sociology, whereas the Anglo-Saxon tradition grew out of, on the one hand, the reception of the Annales School (remember article four, where she takes issue with Ariès about the existence of "childhood") and, on the other hand, literary theory (the heavy reliance on Bakhtin, also in article four) and throughout she refers several times to E. K. Chambers, a literary critic and Shakespeare scholar, whose magnum opus is an examination of the history and the conditions of English theatre from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
This affinity to literary studies is also expressed in Davis interest in language, on how language influences our perception, as we have seen in articles six and eight.
Since the articles, as stated in the beginning, are quite divers, I find it difficult to offer a general criticism. Where I had issues I tried to state them in my close reading of the individual articles. Overall I think that what can be considered a weakness, is also a strength: Davis not only brings together secondary texts from different fields, but draws on a wide variety of sources and offers examples from different times and places. This helps to anchor her argument in a larger context but it also sometimes leaves the reader lost as to where he is in time and space.
June 8, 2023
Cinque saggi sulla Francia del 500; molto interessanti e scritti bene quelli sulle lotte religiose, in particolare sulle dinamiche che portarono alla Notte di S. Bartolomeo, sia da parte cattolica che protestante; presente una bella critica anche alla storiografia marxista sui lavori della Lione del 1550.
November 12, 2021
The strength of this book is certainly that it is a classic in the field of social history and was groundbreaking in its day, providing many ground layers that became foundational to social history. As a collection of essays, each essay takes on a different dimension of life in the early modern era and as individual topics, they are interesting and captivating. They are also now dates as other scholars have built on many of these topics, including notions of gender, guilds, poor relief, violence, etc. Thus, while the collection is still valuable and well-written there are other more recent treatments on these topics that demonstrate the work of intervening years of scholarship.
March 8, 2021
This collection of essays tackle various aspects of life in early modern France. The sixteenth century and the religious upheaval it contains loom large in these essays, although wider time frames do emerge at times. I particularly enjoyed the essays on women and their roles within society, although at times what was deemed a "woman's role" and acceptable (like beating a wife) definitely made me cringe. I find this period fascinating and I appreciated this volume. If you're interested in how ordinary people lived during this period, I would recommend this book.
June 15, 2018
It is interesting to read about the innovation and tradition among the lower orders in sixteenth-century France. This book, consisted of essays (academic), is a great read to understand how society changed and developed, as well understanding the mechanisms within society. Great read
May 19, 2020
This is an excellent collection of eight essays, which deal with different aspects of social changes that occurred in France during the 16th century. Highlights include her examination of the motives and characteristics of religious riots, changes in attitudes on welfare and poverty, and the effects of increasing literacy and printing.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews