The Return of Martin Guerre

This was another book I had to read for my graduate historiography class at Adams State University. I had never heard about this story/event until this class. The first part of this book was a page turner until it switched to talk about the history of how the case was remembered/recorded. It is a fascinating story and the author got a lot of flack with how she handled the story. During the time of the event women were not held highly and it was believed that they could easily be duped and taken advantage of. Instead, Davis looked at the story assuming that women were not as stupid as men would have liked to think they were. She wrote this when historians were re-looking at women in history and how they had been portrayed by men. It was a retelling from a different perspective. I actually enjoyed this book for the most part. 3 stars out of 5 or a C. Below is a more detailed book review I had to do for the class.

Sometimes there are legal cases that are just intriguing, and some of these cases do not get pushed aside with time. The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis takes a look at how an imposter was able to assume another’s identity and even ‘fooled’ his wife that he was the real Martin. Then during a trial to verify the identity of the replacement Martin, the real Martin Guerre returns in time to change the ruling. Davis tries to fill in gaps of information with other research she did on peasant life during the same period. She also goes into the life of Coras, who wrote about the trial right after it happened. Davis tries to cover not only the events that directly relate to the case, but also includes a lot of information on cultural practices during the time period to help explain why/how the events happened. She is up front about how she had to combine different sources and types of material in order to make the most complete presentation of the events.

Natalie Zemon Davis focuses her historical research on France and approaches that history from a social/cultural lens.[1] Like many other historians she also taught at the college level and has won several awards. Davis’s approach to history is not focusing on major players in history, but instead she tries to focus on the common people.[2] This impacted her approach to the events she was writing about. At the start of the book she acknowledges that she is blending historical research and cultural material to turn the events into more of a story. She was trying to show how peasants lived and a lot of her focus was on how women lived. When Davis was writing this book, the modern women’s movement was still developing and she was trying to tell history from this perspective. Since the movement to focus on the common people was still relatively young, she was having to fill in gaps with information from other source types. She then smooths all of this together with her writing style to make a story for her readers.

            One of the key things that supports the authenticity of her work is that she did go back to the original French documents and did not just rely on translations. The base of her story was Coras’s Arrest Memorable which was his account of the case. A large section near the end of the book actually focused on Coras. At first it was a little confusing as to why she was talking about him, but she goes into detail about his life and how this could have influenced his account of the case. This was actually very interesting because she was basically analyzing one of the primary sources for her readers. This approach is not often used and actually helped to explain some of the bias that could have influenced even the documents from the time period of the case. Her sources come from many different time frames ranging from just after the events took place (1561) to 1981. This meant that she had hundreds of years’ worth of perspective on the subject from different writers. Her supporting documents to help fill in the gaps in the events also come from the same timeframe of the events. One of the interesting ones in her notes was when she looked at marriage contracts and dowries with some of them ranging from 1542 to 1585.[3] Even with these types of sources, some of her fellow academics did not like her approach to the subject.

One of these disapproving academics was Robert Finlay writing for The American Historical Review. Finlay appears to be very dismissive in his analysis of Davis’s female approach to the events. This can be clearly seen when he says’ “Davis fails to show that her view of women in peasant society is relevant to the case she is examing”.[4] (Finlay, 557). Finlay saying this was very weird to me because this situation happened to a woman. You cannot fully understand what happened without taking this into account. It seems that he is stripping these key facts from the story and supporting the male dominated view of history. I think Finlay did not like her version due to Davis trying to look at it from a different angle then what traditional historians had done. His perspective on the subject is interesting because his speciality is early modern Europe, which is nowhere near the timeframe that Davis was looking at.[5] He also entirely seemed to have missed one of her notes where she actually found that one of the earliest people to think that Bertrande was an accomplice dated back to 1772.[6] This meant that her perspective on the subject was not entirely new, but was expanding on those who had come before.

At the same time there are other academic reviewers that see this work as an asset to the historical field. Olwen Hufton called it a “gold mine for anyone interested in the history of women” even when one takes into account Davis’s “interstitial evidence, asides and assumptions.”[7] A direct contrast to Finlay’s review came three years before his review and was also in the American Historical Review. A. Lloyd Moote said that even with her ‘conjecture’ that “she has surely given us a splendid example of mature social history.”[8] When you compared Moote to Finlay you see some key differences. First, Moote seems to be the more prestigious historian and he also specializes in time frames closer to the time that Davis was writing about.[9] This means that people who are more closely related to her as a peer see the quality of her work when others seem to miss it. Personally I agree with her supporters. If you take into account the time when this book was released, it was an amazing departure in its approach to both women and commoners in history.

                This book is very significant to the study of cultural history. Davis showed that events could be better broken down and understood when combined with an understanding of the customs of the common people during the same time. Not only did she show the story from the traditional male dominated side, but she used local customs to show how the story could be seen from the female perspective. Davis also took a court case that may have been a very dry subject, and when mixed with the cultural aspects of the time she was able to make a historical story that could draw non-historians to it. Even though this book was written in the 80s, it is still being used today in education to spark historical conversations.    

Bibliography

“A. Lloyd Moote: History Professor.” Prabook. Accessed July 5, 2020. https://prabook.com/web/a.lloyd.moote/144398 

American Historian Association. “Natalie Zemon Davis Biography.” Accessed July 4, 2020. https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/natalie-zemon-davis/natalie-zemon-davis-biography 

Davis, Natalie Z. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. 

Finlay, Robert. “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (1988): 553-571.

Office of the Securetary to the Governor General. “Natalie Zemon Davis, C.C.” The Governor General of Canada. Government of Canada, January 11, 2018. http://www.gg.ca/en/node/151.

Hufton, Olwen. “Coming Back.” History Today 34, no. 4 (1984): 55.

Moote, A. Lloyd. “The Return of Martin Guerre.” The American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 943. 

University of Arkansas. “Emeritus Faculty.” Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences. Accessed July 5, 2020. https://fulbright.uark.edu/departments/history/directory/emeritus-faculty.php

 

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[1] American Historian Association, “Natalie Zemon Davis Biography.”

[2] Office of the Securetary to the Governor General, “Natalie Zemon Davis, C.C.”  

[3] Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 137.

[4] Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” 557.

[5] UoA, “Emeritus Faculty.“

[6] Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 130.

[7] Hufton, “Coming Back,” 55.

[8] Moote, “The Return of Martin Guerre,” 943.

[9] “A. Lloyd Moote: History Professor.”