SOURCE: Todd, Barbara J. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. Canadian Journal of History 31, no. 3 (December 1996): 444-45.

In the following review, Todd claims that Women on the Margins has both academic and general appeal.

This erudite and audacious book [Women on the Margins], like its subjects, occupies margins. Not only is it about women, a subject that a quarter century after Davis and Jill Conway created their justly renowned undergraduate course at the University of Toronto is still at the margins of most university instruction, it also appeals simultaneously to popular and academic audiences; it explores a little used genre of “comparative biography”; it crosses disciplinary boundaries; and perhaps most controversially, it challenges traditional categories of historical proof.

At one level the book is simply an engaging account of the lives of three women: German-Jewish autobiographer Glikl bas Judah Leib (the name Davis prefers...