Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023) : A Remembrance

It is difficult to summarise in a few pages the stature and scholarly output of Natalie Zemon Davis, who passed away in Toronto on 21 October 2023. This contribution aims to broadly trace the intellectual profile of the great scholar starting from the generous testimony of herself that she offered in the famous interview with Denis Crouzet L’histoire tout feu tout flamme of 2004. Tracing her scholarly interests and militant engagement in the field of history and historiography, a portrait emerges of a curious historian, pioneer and teacher in the field of social history, attentive to the marginal actors and actresses of history as well as to multiple identities : Martin Guerre, Leo the African, and ‘her’ Women on the Margins are the best-known figures among those she investigated with acumen and, at the same time, with a taste for narrative invention, expressed in a kind of direct dialogue with those personalities from the past. In between the review and the homage, we look, again, at the experimentation in historical writing and the language of cinema that have made Zemon Davis an absolute protagonist in the analysis and storytelling of both the early modern age and our global contemporaneity.