Rural Life Comparison: 16th Century France vs. 17th Century China Natalie Zemon Davis' book The Return Of Martin Guerre is an excellently detailed, understandable and well-researched account of the famous Martin Guerre and ... Dissimilar to the emphasis on the inequities of the Chinese social structure and the ways in which it could be manipulated in the name of moral justice, Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return Of Martin Guerre is also a deeper historical chronicle of changes in the shift from French Catholicism to the 'new religion' of ... able to emphasize the inequities of the system, and ...

• Word Count: 1444
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Objectivity versus Relativity An Analysis of Natalie Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre In his book, That Noble Dream, Peter Novick discusses the argument, in the historical profession over the noble dream of historical objectivity. The historical ... hallowed notion of objectivity on the defensive, it did cause a significant disturbance in the historical profession as more and more young historians flocked to the relativist banner (Novick 16). In Natalie Zemon Davis's book, The Return of Martin Guerre, about the famous case of a French peasant's identity theft, she employs both objectivist...

• Word Count: 1819
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... an entire community of people living how she thought they would have by the information she had gathered from other sources. Since the story of Martin Guerre is so old, Natalie Zemon Davis probably had to use a substantial amount of guesswork to fill in gaps of the story which may have been lost over the years. The story itself is an ... they had to go by in the 1500's. Such things as photographs, ID cards, lie detectors, handwriting specialists, fingerprinting, and DNA tests simply did not exist in the 16th century. Natalie Zemon Davis wrote this novel by collecting what she knew of th...

• Word Count: 1323
• Approx Pages: 5