Natalie Zemon Davis, CC (November 8, 1928 – October 21, 2023) was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels (2006), views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus’s pioneering geography.
(By 2023, the text had appeared in six translations.) Davis’ books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two for The Return of Martin Guerre. She was the second female president of the American Historical Association (the first, Nellie Neilson, was in 1943).
Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and National Humanities Medal and was named Companion of the Order of Canada.
Books in order of publication:
Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, Stanford University Press, 1975.
The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit, Berlin: Wagenbach, 1986.
Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France, Stanford University Press, 1987.
Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Remaking Impostors: From Martin Guerre to Sommersby, Egham, Surrey, UK: Royal Holloway Publications Unit, 1997.
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds New York: Hill & Wang, 2006.
Leo Africanus Discovers Comedy: Theatre and Poetry Across the Mediterranean. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021.
Listening to the Languages of the People: Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2022.
Oak Lawn Library Friends 