Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800: Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis.

This volume is a mixture of festschrift and conference proceedings that is blessed with more coherence than is usual in either genre. It originated in a symposium "Dialogues with the Past" held at Boston University in November 1990 to honor Natalie Zemon Davis, and the influence of that distinguished historian pervades and unites the twelve contributions. They fall into three groups of four, dealing in turn with spiritual, social, and cultural identities. As the overall title indicates, the essays range widely in time and in space, though more than half deal with France, Davis's own particular territory. They are unified by the adoption of her methodology which, by encouraging people of the past to speak with their own voice, investigates how they defined themselves in relation to their family, community, and polity. A lucid preface by the editors outlines the theoretical framework and summarizes the contributions; the volume ends with a bibliography of Davis's work which reveals, among other nuggets, that her masterpiece, Society and Culture, has been translated into nine assorted languages, as has her celebrated account of The Return of Martin Guerre.

An important and original essay that crosses the boundaries between the spiritual and the social is Andrew Barnes's on the transformation of the French parish clergy; this explores the consequences of the post-Tridentine insistence on seminary education for incumbents, which isolated them from their parishioners; Barnes argues convincingly that the earlier breed of parish priest was more in tune with the needs of rural devotional life. Keith P. Luria studies the contrasting marginalization of French Protestants by dramatic and stagey rituals of conversion during the Counter-Reformation, a dismal triumph of bigotry over humane conciliation after the Edict of Nantes. No doubt this undermined the sense of a Huguenot identity so painstakingly established in the previous century with the help of the translated psalter, the theme of Barbara Diefendorf's contribution. If this essay essentially confirms previous assumptions, Virginia Reinburg's erudite ad fontes study of pre-Reformation devotions, based on that strange best-seller, the Book of Hours, challenges easy platitudes about superstition and idolatry. Another concise treatment of far-reaching topics is Jodi Bilinkoff's study of Counter-Reformation biographies of spiritually advanced women, whose authors, usually the women's male confessors, often took the opportunity to argue their own theological (and autobiographical) cases.

Some essays on social and political identities are less wide-ranging; the minutes of Roman artisans' meetings (Laurie Nussdorfer), the records of a suburb of Barcelona (James S. Amelang), and the belligerent antics of cross-dressers in the Ariege in 1829-31 (Peter Sahlins), provide material for essays of more limited appeal. In the most traditional of the categories, cultural identities are pursued by way of an eclectic variety of genres, ranging through a manuscript love letter which curiously mixes spontaneity and stylization (Elizabeth S. Cohen), midwives' handbooks that betray professional and gender rivalries among physicians and various paramedical groups (Alison Klairmont Lingo), and the historical fiction of Louise de Keralio which resists the sexual categorizations of post-revolutionary ideology (Carla Hesse). These microhistorical studies are joined by Jonathan Dewald's "Deadly Parents" which probably needs a broader stage on which to prove conclusively that seventeenth-century French tragedy reflected the incompleteness of paternalism's apparent triumph in the age of Louis XIV. An interesting mixture, then, of close-ups and panoramas, linked by the conviction that portrayal of the past cannot ignore the past's own perspectives.

Michael Heath KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON