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As she did with Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living "on the margins" in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America.
Yet these women - one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant - left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis' deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.
All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de L'Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America.
Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname.
The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe's troubled and ambivalent relations with other "marginal" peoples.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Biography, Jewish women, Protestant women, Women missionaries, Women merchants, Women, Women, biography, Marie de l'incarnation, mere, 1599-1672, Protestants, Women, history, modern period, 1600-, Biographies & autobiographies, GeneralPeople
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), Glueckel of Hameln (1646-1724), Marie de l'Incarnation mère (1599-1672)Places
Germany, Québec (Province), Surinam, SurinameTimes
17th centuryEdition | Availability |
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1
Mujeres De Los Margenes (Feminismos)
June 30, 2004, Ediciones Catedra S.A.
Paperback
in Spanish
8437617391 9788437617398
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WorldCat
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2
Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives
April 25, 1997, Belknap Press
Paperback
in English
0674955218 9780674955219
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3
Women on the margins: three seventeenth-century lives
1995, Harvard University Press
in English
067495520X 9780674955202
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- Created April 30, 2008
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October 24, 2023 | Edited by Tom Morris | Merge works |
August 18, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |