Women on the margins : three seventeenth-century lives
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Women on the margins : three seventeenth-century lives
Harvard University Press, 1995
Available at 27 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
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  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
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  Tokyo
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  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
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  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
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  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the 17th century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in 17th-century Europe, North America and South America. Yet these women - one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant - left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history. All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder to the first Christian school of Amerindian women in North America.
Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands. Drawing on Glikl's memoirs, Marie's autobiography and correspondence,and Maria's writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time - childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature - and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in 17th-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centres of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.
Table of Contents
- Arguing with God, Glikl Bas Judah Leib
- new worlds, Marie de l'Incarnation
- metamorphoses, Maria Sibylla Merian.
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