SOURCE: Miller, Peter N. “Past and Presents.” New Republic 224, no. 4502 (30 April 2001): 38-44.

In the following essay, Miller discusses the historical context of The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France and reviews earlier literature on the subject of gift-giving.

I.

Walter Benjamin, who perished in September 1940 at Port-Bou in the shipwreck of Europe's Jews, once wrote that “when a valued, cultured and elegant friend sent me his new book and I was about to open it, I caught myself in the act of straightening my tie.” The reviewer of a new book by Natalie Zemon Davis ought to feel the same. She has been one of the most innovative historians working in North America in the past four decades. Without any self-promoting fanfare, Davis's works have set many of the fashions now followed by other historians.

Since her dissertation on the printers of Lyon, Davis has been interested in class, books...