Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Damy na Obochine)

Natalie Zemon Davis is a renowned historian, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, and the author of numerous works on modern culture. Her celebrated book, 'Ladies on the Margins' (1995), brings to the forefront three 17th-century European women, very different in their life and intellectual experiences, but similar in their uniqueness, determination, and independence. Neither the Jewish Glückel bas Judah Leib, nor the Catholic Marie Guyart del Encarnación, nor the Protestant Maria Sibylla Merian were royalty or noblewomen. Rather, they lived 'on the margins' of 17th-century Europe. However, their diaries, letters, and travelogues, Davis argues, give us a far more accurate picture of early modernity than official court history. The author meticulously reconstructs the life and creative strategies of these women: how, due to different cultural traditions, each had to find her own response to the challenges of the era (marriage, motherhood, religion, women's status in society). This triptych-monograph describes the full spectrum of opportunities for female self-realization in the 17th century, which could only be achieved far from the centers of power, on the periphery of the European ecumene.