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“... When does the history of personal identification technology begin? The history of fingerprinting, photographs, retinal scans, DNA testing? Of the many situations in which we are called on to prove who we are, and of the many places in which our identity is recorded? Some accounts start with the French Revolution and the needs of modern states and colonial empires ...”

“... Like good detective novels, the letters of remission which are the subject of Natalie ZemonDavis’s most recent book usually start with a corpse which requires to be explained. Other offences – tax riot, heresy, the defloration of a virgin – could be the occasion for the ‘pardon tales’ such letters contained, but the procedure was most often resorted to by someone who had been the cause of someone else’s death ...”

“... are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie ZemonDavis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe ...”

“... as well as a cluster of eminent Jews, such as Maimonides. But Leo’s literary afterlife is not Natalie ZemonDavis’s chief concern. Davis has a considerable reputation in the field of early modern history. She has tended to specialise in cultural history and marginal subjects ...”

“... aloud or on paper, resonates with others, have been raised by scholars such as Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie ZemonDavis, both always alert to the politics of utterance. How far, for instance, did a particular medium – gossip, say, or an ambassadorial report or a political pamphlet – shape or transform the ...”

“... to Greenblatt’s intuitions, as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie ZemonDavis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which ...”

“... the scholarly study of cartoons), on Phyllis Deane, the economic historian, and indeed on Natalie ZemonDavis? And, while I am labouring this particular point, should women’s history really be catalogued – as it is here – as feminist history? Women’s history is essentially an attempt to describe the ...”

“... recent historical writing are converted into Post-Modernists – Simon Schama, Robert Darnton, Natalie ZemonDavis and Orlando Figes. But Evans never cites an instance of these authors even borrowing the Post-Modernist label, let alone one showing that they conceive of themselves as working on behalf of an ...”

“... are alive with the names of its owners and readers, alongside scribbles and devotional jottings. Natalie ZemonDavis described books as ‘carriers of relationships’, and that’s exactly what we see here as we follow the signatures of Daniel Stanger, Edward Stanger, Jannet Thompson et al. On a blank page a note ...”

“... or declared common project; only the blurb on the subscription form, written by the historian Natalie ZemonDavis, gave any inkling of a consensus, and that was woefully vague. What we were getting, she wrote, was a ‘strikingly original set of voices’ ranging across various boundaries in pursuit of the ...”

“... the centrality of bloodshed in French political culture, but his close attention to what Natalie ZemonDavis has called the ‘rites of violence’ reveals some enduring historical patterns. As he puts it, episode after episode of ‘almost choreographed violence’ followed the ‘same basic scenario’. The ...”

“... narrative’. This, pioneered in French by Le Roi Ladurie (Montaillou, 1975), and in English by Natalie ZemonDavis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984), involves giving a detailed description of events in the lives of ordinary people and is almost always based on ...”

“... theoretical accounts of the role of gift-giving within early modern culture, such as those by Natalie ZemonDavis and by the father of gift theory, Marcel Mauss. Scott-Warren looks in detail at the settings within which Harington wrote, dedicated and donated his books, and finds each act of giving to be a precisely ...”

“... story. The best of these microhistories – Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie ZemonDavis’s The Return of Martin Guerre – succeed in making their stories what Kenneth Burke calls ‘representative anecdotes’, reflections of reality that are inevitably selections of reality. The ...”