SOURCE: Ranum, Orest. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 808-10.

In the following review of Women on the Margins, Ranum reports that Davis does not offer more than a surface analysis of the relative powerlessness of her three subjects despite the fact that their powerless state informs every aspect of the book.

In 1941, Jacques Barzun published Darwin, Marx, and Wagner, a modernist genre-breaking work of history; in 1961, Fritz Stern took up the triadic model in the Politics of Cultural Despair to discern critiques of modernity in the thought of what were hitherto seemingly discrete German lives. Other works in the triadic model have appeared since Stern's, but it is Natalie Zemon Davis who has taken up and extended Barzun's bold innovation by writing a radically modern history of seventeenth-century gendered acculturation.

Before this book [Women on the Margins], it...