SOURCE: Powis, Jonathan. “The Favours of Others.” Times Literary Supplement 38, no. 5116 (20 April 2001): 38.

In the following review of The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Powis compares Davis's treatment of the subject of gift-giving to that of her predecessors.

Among the vivid virtues of Natalie Zemon Davis's new book [The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France] are the glimpses it provides of early consumerist profusion. The inhabitants of sixteenth-century France gave one another the same sorts of present as their forebears: food, drink, animals and birds as game or pets. But the worldly goods of the Renaissance meant that some, at least, could buy into fashion garments or mechanical objects or printed books. Just as today, a variety of motives no doubt triggered specific gifts: affection, perhaps, but also habit, whim, guilt, infatuation. And we might at least ponder the questions now asked by economists about modern giving: its role in the overall...