This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
...Lazăr Șăineanu (1859-1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame.
Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, Șăineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the origins of that language. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an “intruder,” into his old age.
I started out in the 1950s as a historian of Europe, thrilled to be doing a new kind of social history where I sought connections between French working people and Protestant religious change in the ...sixteenth century. In the years since then, my intellectual adventure has been the expansion of my world of historical actors--to include women as well as men, to follow Jews and Catholics and now Muslims in their historical trajectories. I had the joy of assigning my first major text in Jewish history in 1971, when I had my students read Glikl Hamel's autobiography for my new University of Toronto course entitled Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe. Finding sources for early modern women was a challenge, when so many of them could not read or write. I located autobiographical writing by Protestant and Catholic women, but what to do about a Jewish woman? By good fortune, a literary friend--the late Rosalie Colie--had seen reference to a book entitled The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646-1724, Written by Herself.
“Two negroes hanged,” John Gabriel Stedman wrote in his Suriname journal for March 9, 1776, and then two days later, among his purchases of “soap, wine, tobacco, and rum” and his dinners with an ...elderly widow, he records, “A negro's foot cut off.” Stedman expanded on these events in the later Narrative of his years as a Dutch–Scottish soldier fighting against the Suriname Maroons:
And now, this being the period of the court sessions, another Negro's leg was cut off for sculking from a task to which he was unable, while two more were condemned to be hang'd for running away altogether. The heroic behavior of one of these men deserves particularly to be quotted, he beg'd only to be heard for a few moments, which, being granted, he proceeded thus––“I was born in Africa, where defending my prince during an engagement, I was made a captive, and sold for a slave by my own countrimen. One of your countrimen, who is now to be my judge, became then my purchaser, in whose service I was treated so cruelly by his overseer that I deserted and joined the rebels in the woods . . .”To which his former master, who as he observed was now one of his judges, made the following laconick reply, “Rascal, that is not what we want to know. But the torture this moment shall make you confess crimes as black as yourself, as well as those of your hateful accomplices.” To which the Negroe, who now swel'd in every vain with rage replied, holding up his hands, “Massera, the verry tigers have trembled for these hands . . . and dare you think to threaten me with your wretched instrument? No, I despise the greatest tortures you can now invent, as much as I do the pitiful wrech who is going to inflict them.” Saying which, he threw himself down on the rack, where amidst the most excruciating tortures he remained with a smile and without they were able to make him utter a syllable. Nor did he ever speak again till he ended his unhappy days at the gallows.
Remembrances of Chandler Davis (1926–2022) Rosenthal, Peter; Benedetto, John J; Bhatia, Rajendra ...
Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
8/2023, Volume:
70, Issue:
7
Journal Article
This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of ...globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of "decentering" history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and "subaltern classes"; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non-Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of "decentered" social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth-century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non-European figures such as the Muslim "Leo Africanus" (Hasan al-Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
These splendid papers bring us new insight into the entangled motives which account for the movement between Protestant and Catholic polities in the seventeenth century, when some form of religious ...coexistence was possible either within polities or in nearby polities. Evidence from the late sixteenth century is drawn on in these papers, too, but their major emphasis is on the decades when the Edict of Nantes allowed both Roman Catholic and Reformed worship and institutions in France, and Prot...
The clever peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost won his case when a man with a wooden leg swaggered into the French courtroom, denounced du Tilh, and reestablished his claim to the identity, property, ...and wife of Martin Guerre. This book, by the noted historian who served as a consultant for the film, adds new dimensions to this famous legend.
The essay analyses the hitherto unexamined role of women in the historical scholarship of the first generation of the Annales, starting with Lucie Varga’s work and the unpaid assistance given to the ...publication by Simone Vidal Bloch and Suzanne Dognon Febvre. It then explores the education and careers of women somehow connected to the Annales from its founding in 1929 through World War II: the two who contributed articles (the historian-ethnographer Lucie Varga and the economic-historian Thérèse Sclafert); those whose books were reviewed or served as reviewers (the economic historian Yvonne Bézard, the linguist-mythographer Marie-Louise Sjœstedt; the Egyptologist Germaine Rouillard); and the Renaissance scholar Eugénie Droz, who published one of Febvre’s books. The École pratique des hautes études turns out to be a welcoming setting for women’s higher education. Yet, rather than university posts, they established careers as a librarian, archivist, publisher, or professor to women at Sèvres. The essay concludes with a consideration about the intellectual tributes paid in their works by Lucien Febvre and Frank Borkenau to their spouses, Lucie Varga and Suzanne Dognon.
Jewish History in a New Key DAVIS, NATALIE ZEMON
The Jewish quarterly review,
07/2018, Volume:
108, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Elliott Horowitz first entered Davis's life with his characteristic brilliance and brio at the 1980 meeting of the Association of Jewish Studies. Together with Mark Cohen, Theodore Rabb, they were ...presenting their Princeton course on the Jews in Early Modern Europe, into which they had introduced topics from the new social history within a comparative European perspective. A distinguished elder scholar from Jerusalem rose from the audience to state that the course disfigured Jewish history and, eyeing her, that the field did not need contributions from outsiders. Whereupon a student from the Yale doctoral program came forward and defended their course as the wave of the future. Horowitz saved the day for them, as many of the younger listeners took copies of their syllabus. Over the decades since then, Horowitz helped shape that future through his pioneering contributions to Jewish history and historiography and, thereby, to European history more generally. Often in correspondence with each other, they shared several thematic interests: youth as a stage of life; rituals that mark the end of life; the social dimension of liturgical piety; gender styles and the character of religious violence and its relation to the carnivalesque.
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