SOURCE: Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Review of Women on the Margins, by Natalie Z. Davis. Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 804-05.

In the following review of Women on the Margins, Kupperman contends that since Davis offers no conventional interpretation of her subjects' lives, she invites readers to formulate their own interpretations.

This remarkable book [Women on the Margins] examines the lives of three seventeenth-century women: Glikl bas Judah Leib, born in Hamburg in 1646 or 1647 and died in Metz in 1712; Marie Guyart de l'Incarnation, born in Tours in 1599 and died in Canada in 1672; and Maria Sybilla Merian, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1647 and died in Amsterdam in 1717. Each made a remarkable spiritual and physical journey, and each left a legacy in ink and paper meant to inform those they left behind. That legacy makes possible the reconstruction presented here by Natalie Zemon Davis.

None of the three can...