SOURCE: Leonardo, Dalia M. Review of The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, by Natalie Z. Davis. History 29, no. 2 (winter 2001): 76-7.

In the following review, Leonard finds The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France a valuable resource for students and professional historians.

Natalie Zemon Davis, a professor of history emerita at Princeton University and an adjunct professor at the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, has written a fine study of the relational “gift mode” that continued to thrive in early modern France in conjunction with an expanding market society [The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France]. Davis examines a culture where gift giving encompassed the familial, political, economic, and religious spectrum, and in its most positive incarnation could ease and sustain all types of social connections. Conversely, the coercive influence of certain gift relationships often resulted in conflict and animosity, thereby placing undue pressure on the entire gift system and...