Society and Culture in Early Modern France. by Natalie Zemon DavisReview by: J. H. ElliottThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Apr., 1976), pp. 113-114Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2539643 .

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Book Reviews 113

A few minor criticisms will be mentioned. First, Pullapilly uses certain phrases without fully explaining their meaning: "the unity of the Western Church" (xi), "the Lutheran revolt in Germany" (7) and "the Lutheran position of the complete denial of free will" (90). Secondly, although one of the many strengths of the book is its reliance on primary sources, there are no such references to the works of Luther when Luther's positions are alluded to. Thirdly, the influence of Thomas Aquinas' view of divine provi- dence is too readily identified with Baronius' own views (175); certainly the two differ on the role of human agency vis-a-vis divine providence.

All in all, Pullapilly has made a necessary and vital contribution to the life and times of one of the foremost leaders of the Counter-Reformation; his book deserves a wide reading, not only for the erudition it displays but also for the historical portrait it paints.

John Bigane Marquette University

Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Natalie Zemon Davis. Stanford University Press, 1975. 362 pp. $15.00.

Professor Natalie Davis' Society and Culture in Early Modern France is a dialogue across the centuries. Only the accident of time makes it impossible for Dr. Davis to engage in conversation with the printers of sixteenth-century Lyon, or to take out mem- bership in one of those youth-abbeys whose activities she so lovingly documents. But it remains for her an accident - tiresome because it prevents that spontaneous participation in the popular life of past societies at which she would so obviously excel, but no more than another of the many impediments which can be overcome by persistence and inge- nuity. No historian of our time has a more immediate and vital sense of the past than Dr. Davis, and none has been more ingenious and persistent in putting the smallest piece of evidence to work in order to recover the sights, the sounds and the sensations of a world that we have lost.

Society and Culture is a collection of eight essays which gain their unity from the society with which they all concern themselves, and from a common and distinctive approach. Dr. Davis' society is that of sixteenth-century France, especially sixteenth-cen- tury urban France, and notably Lyon. Her approach is that of the historian who has realized the opportunities which have been created for historical research by modern anthropology, and is sufficiently at ease with recent anthropological work to range across interdisciplinary frontiers and find the insights that she needs. Thus she draws on Victor Turner's African researches to gain a deeper understanding of the purpose of sixteenth- century carnivals or of sexual inversion on St. Stephen's day in France. This kind of approach is ceasing to be a novelty in modern historical writing, but it is not always pursued with the restraint and discretion employed by Dr. Davis. Almost invariably her anthropological examples illustrate rather than obtrude, and she does not push them further than the evidence can bear. Any reader of this book who comes to it with mingled curiosity and apprehension about the relationship of history and anthropology is likely to finish it with an enhanced respect for the possibilities of interdisciplinary history as a means of coming closer to those great areas of life and thought in Early Modern Europe which so easily slip through the more traditional historiographical net.

Inevitably some of these essays are more successful than others. It is hard, for instance, to know how much significance to read into the study of 'Women on top'. Phyllis riding Aristotle was an old medieval joke, and its continuing popularity may not really tell us very much either about the sixteenth century or about women. When Dr. Davis writes (p. 143), "As literary and festive inversion in preindustrial Europe was a product not just of stable hierarchy but also of changes in the location of power and property, so this inversion could prompt new ways of thinking about the system and

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114 The Sixteenth Century Journal

reacting to it," we need more evidence to link changes in attitude to changes in social organization and habits than she here provides.

But Dr. Davis is almost always suggestive rather than dogmatic, and, at her best, how suggestive she is! There are problems about relying too heavily on the evidence provided by Lyon, not the least of them being the fact that it was only under Calvinist control for a year, from 1562-3, so that the relationship of religious change and social movements may well not be the same in Lyon as it was in other French towns exposed to a longer period of Protestant domination. It is for this reason among others that one would like to see the full-scale study of Lyon in the context of French religious change and civil war that Dr. Davis is uniquely equipped to write. But tentative suggestions and casual asides are sometimes worth more than the most solid monograph, and Dr. Davis certainly gives value for money. Any historian of the sixteenth century, for instance, who reads what Dr. Davis has to say about pollution and defilement (pp. 157-161) should emerge with fresh ideas about the nature of the Reformation and the aspirations of the age. The capacity to stimulate new thinking is the hallmark of the creative historian, and about Dr. Davis' creative capacity this lively collection of essays can leave no possible room for doubt.

J.H. Elliott The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands. E. H. Kossmann and A. F. Mellink, eds. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974. xii + 295 pp. $17.50.

The revolt of the Low Countries in the sixteenth century remains a subject re- markably opaque to those who do not command the Dutch language. Motley's grandiose Rise of the Dutch Republic, its partisanship only too obvious now, is still useful for its wealth of material; Wedgwood's biography of William the Silent is more subtle and readable than Rachfahl's long and incomplete life-and-times in German, but does not really get much below the surface. Geyl's Revolt of the Netherlands, the best we have, was translated from the first volume of his Dutch original, Geschiedenis van de Neder- landse Stam, first published in 1930; but it was conceived for an audience familiar with the story and was intended more to revise the accepted account than to inform readers for whom it was all pretty much new. J. W. Smit's chapter in the Forster-Greene collec- tion, Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Times, in very brief scope combines a remarkably fresh vision of the revolt with explanations drawn from behavioral science. Some of the key documents are translated in this reviewer's The Low Countries in Early Modern Times: A Documentary History, but they could do no more than whet the appetite of anyone deeply interested in one of the most important events of the six- teenth century. Now, for the first time, a truly adequate selection of documents comes to us from two distinguished historians at the University of Groningen. There are 67 texts in all, culled from various sources, principally the great collection of pamphlets in the Royal Library at The Hague (one manuscript source is reproduced from an unpub- lished doctoral dissertation at the University of London), and translated from Dutch or French by the editors. They are primarily official documents, selected partly to illustrate events and partly to present the political doctrines of the rebels. For the focus of the work is clearly upon the rebel side; those who want a full exposition of Philip II's side and that of his adherents in the Netherlands will have to go elsewhere (but they will have nothing as condensed and convenient as this collection, certainly not in English and in fact in neither Dutch nor French). As a presentation of one side of a dialogue, this book is very well done. The translations do raise a question. They do not seem to me to have solved the problem of rendering sixteenth-century Dutch or French prose in adequate

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