What Natalie Zemon Davis, pioneering scholar of early modern Europe, owes to her husband, and Martin Guerre
By Rachel Gordan for Tablet Magazine
The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider. Sidelined during the early years of her career, her husband, the mathematician Chandler Davis, was arrested for creating and distributing Communist literature. In fact, in 1952, as a graduate student, Davis herself had done much of the research and writing for a pamphlet attacking the unconstitutional actions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was published anonymously by the University of Michigan Council for the Arts, Sciences, and Professions. As Davis later reflected, “the sexism of the House Committee members worked to my advantage in this instance: like legal authorities in early modern Europe, they assumed that if a married couple did something together, only the husband was really responsible.”
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