Toronto Historian Wins the Prestigious Holberg International Memorial Award
Martin C. Winer
www.goodnewstoronto.ca
May 2010
Prof. Natalie Zemon Davis, has won the prestigious Holberg International Memorial Prize for her numerous contributions to the field of History.
It almost seems criminally reductionist to impose a thesis on the life’s work of historian Prof. Natalie Zemon Davis, but if pressed, the theme of ‘self fashioning’ emerges. Self fashioning, succinctly put, is the ability to craft one’s own destiny. A favourite renaissance philosopher of Natalie’s, Pico della Mirandola notes that “man could fall to the level of beasts but also rise to the level of angels.”
Ironically, the theme of self fashioning is also central in Natalie’s personal history. Natalie was born in Detroit in 1928 upper middle class Jewish immigrant parents. During the darkness of the war years (WWII) in school Natalie remembers finding solace in the study of history: “I had never realized the extent of human aspiration in the past, the hope to make things better, an important counter-weight to the war waging across the Atlantic.”
In the process of self fashioning her academic career she faced several challenges. She attended schools which had quotas on the number of Jewish pupils. Into graduate school, Jewish, female and studying history she was always in the minority and always caught between worlds. When her teacher heard of her plans to be married Natalie recalls that “she feared my marriage tolled the knell of my history career, … [My teacher’s] generation had taken a different path; how could I ever be a scholar if I were traipsing after my husband amid the clutter of children?” Despite the academic risk, she married mathematician Prof. Chandler Davis after courtship of only 6 weeks; Natalie was 19. She would have 3 children and juggled career and family by becoming a master of the “instant transition from sand-pile to study room, from reading a Calvinist tract to Pat the Bunny.”
Natalie lived through another dark chapter in history: the American Red Scare (the McCarthy years). In the 50’s her contribution to a pamphlet inveighing against the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) resulted in her passport being and her husband being imprisoned after refusing to cooperate with the HUAC. After Chandler’s prison term lapsed, he was offered a post at the University of Toronto.
Natalie began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1968 and began 38 years of teaching — a practice she reveres as “central to a scholar’s life of learning.” She co-organized the first woman’s history course in Canada in 1971: “Society and the Sexes in Early Modern Europe and in America”. She went on to teach at Berkley and then Princeton where she established a Woman’s Studies Program and taught one of the first Jewish Studies courses. In 1987 she was appointed the president of the American Historical Society (the second woman to ever hold the post).
Throughout her career Natalie has written many well respected books and frequently cited papers. One celebrated book, The Return of Martin Guerre was tells the story of an imposter in the Pyrenees which was dramatized in a movie by the same name (1982). Natalie’s key contribution to history is her multidisciplinary approach blending narrative, empirical historical data, and anthropology to breathe life into the dusty archives of ages past. Her distinctive style has won her the Holberg International Memorial Prize worth $768,000 which she will receive this June in Norway.
Awards and publications aside, most striking about Natalie is, in her 81st year, her continued wonder and fascination with learning. She describes history much like a bright eyed child describes a new toy – ‘amazing’ and ‘fun’:
“The study of the past has been a constant joy, a privileged realm of intellectual eros. The necessary constraints under which the historian operates—to find evidence for every affirmation—I have accepted freely: that quest is what makes it so much fun.”
