SOURCE: Adams, Christine. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. Journal of Social History 30, no. 2 (winter 1996): 541-43.

In the following review of Women on the Margins, Adams finds that its individual stories of three women are interesting reading, but feels the book would be stronger if greater comparisons were made between their individual lives.

Natalie Zemon Davis opens her new book [Women on the Margins] with an imagined dialogue, in which the three women of the title challenge Davis' interpretation of their lives, and her decision to include the three of them together in the same book. Davis justifies her project, urging her subjects—and the reader—to take a closer look. (p. 2)

The reader might indeed ask what these three women had in common. Davis, with customary virtuosity, explores the lives of Glikl bas Judah Leib, a Jewish merchant woman; Marie Guyart, known as...