![]() ![]() This is the sort of book that lingers in the mind. ![]() Davis begins with a fictitious dialogue between herself and the three women whose lives she has chronicled, an imaginative risk few scholars would care to take. Her book can be read as a way of writing history which does not collar the reader with direct argument or interpretation, but which seeks instead to provoke the imagination. Where early modern historians insist on the ubiquity of patriarchy, Davis presents us with hard-working, bread-winning women, never submerged in motherhood and never obliterated as wives… All that Davis writes springs from careful, critical consideration of the mass of theoretical writing that has recently appeared on women’s writing and historical anthropology: none of it clutters her text… For Davis, the historian is a teller of stories. Where feminist historians have often inveighed against writing women’s history in order to supply us with heroines, Davis gives us three rounded portraits of strong early modern women with whom we are certainly encouraged to identify, and whose dilemmas are not unlike our own. ![]() “ Davis’s work has always reached beyond fashionable trends to communicate with a wider audience. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |