SOURCE: Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 1 (spring 1997): 347-49.

In the following review, Schutte recommends Women on the Margins while at the same time suggesting that Davis's interpretations of the individual narratives are in some instances implausible.

This book [Women on the Margins] charts the intersection of public and private in the lives of the Ashkenazi business woman and autobiographer Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646/7-1724); the Ursuline educator in New France, Mère Marie de l'Incarnation (1599-1671); and the German entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). It is the “purest” narrative work that Natalie Zemon Davis has ever produced, in the sense that only in her conclusion (203-16) does she suggest what draws these diverse biographical trajectories into “a common field.” In each case, she writes, “a woman's version of an artisanal-commercial style” complicated and enriched the life-cycle events...