Dan Snow's History Hit - ‘One of Our Greatest Living Historians’

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

Natalie Zemon Davis is a legend. One of the most influential and versatile contemporary historians. A pathbreaking scholar of early modern European social and cultural history, she has also explored the Mediterranean world as seen by Leo Africanus and the culture of slavery in Suriname.She was born on 8 November 1928 and she is still working. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in Canada. Her work originally focused on France, but has since broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, Trickster Travels (2006) views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts of North Africa and West Africa through the lens of Leo Africanus's pioneering geography. It has appeared in four translations, with three more on the way.She is a hero to many historians and academics, as "one of the greatest living historians", constantly asking new questions and taking on new challenges, the second female president of the American Historical Association (the first, Nellie Neilson, was in 1943) and someone who "has not lost the integrity and commitment to radical thought which marked her early career"As a Canadian and a lover of history- this was a very special podcast for me.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, signup to HistoryHit.TV. Use code 'pod3' at checkout.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got a living legend on the podcast today, not every day I can say that, a living legend. Natalie Zeman Davis was born in the 1920s. She is an adjunct professor of history and anthropology at the University of Toronto, a professor of medieval studies there as well. Toronto is my second hometown, it's where my mum is from, I'm half Canadian, so I've got a natural, natural inclination to celebrate anything from Toronto. But that inclination is not required when it comes to Natalie Zenon Davis, because she is a living legend. She's been described as one of the greatest living historians. She was the second ever female president of the American Historical Association, and she is a brilliant communicator of history, a brilliant writer, and a brilliant scholar. I had her on the podcast, deep into her 90s, talk about why she's still

doing history, why she loves history. What's the point of history? What can we learn from it? I asked her, in all those decades of doing history, has she changed anyone's mind about anything, in any helpful way? She was brilliant. Her brilliance did not extend to knowing who she was talking to, quite rightly, who the hell's Dan Snow. So she decided to call me Ted Snow all the way through. And we've left that in because I want you own name, I think, is a height of bad manners. You can see all the work we're doing on History Hit TV, which Natalie Zeman Davis very kindly refers to. You can go and check that out on History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. We're building it. It's online. We've got hundreds and hundreds of history films up there. We're making more every time. We're hiring new staff. It's very, very exciting. If you go to historyhit.tv, the code pod6 you get

six weeks completely for free so please please head over and do that we're growing all the time we're getting better all the time we're doing it with your support so thank you very much and thank you also to everyone who's rated this podcast we're high on the charts because of you guys it's so ridiculous it's not about how many people listen it seems to be a lot about how many people are rating us so there you go thank you for doing. It's a total pain and I'm very grateful. Five stars and good reviews. Thank you very much. See you later, everybody.

Here is Natalie Zaman-Davis. Natalie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This is an honour. It's a pleasure to be with you, Ted Snow. Well, that's very kind. So I'm reading your article of doing history at 90 years old. It is hugely inspiring. Are you 90 now? I'm 91. Since I wrote that several months ago, I've passed that border. And still going strong? Still going. Well, I hope so. I'm still loving it.

Well, that's what I want to talk to you about. Such an eloquent, passionate defense of history or a rallying call for history. What is keeping you going? Age 91, you could be enjoying yourself, drinking gin down at the tennis club. Why are you doing history? It's a pleasure to continue to discover the past, to try to unearth its mysteries. I don't claim I always do succeed in it, but to try, and to tell stories about it. I think I'm not only a person on a quest, but I'd like to be a storyteller as well. And it's that joint pleasure of sharing what one can discover and both suggesting the unraveling of mystery,

but also pointing to some of the problems that we have yet to figure out. So you're someone who believes that the historian's craft is about definitely shining a light onto the nooks and crannies of the past, but also telling it, narrative is important to you, you think? Yes. It's not that history is only to be told in narrative forms. I'm very much interested in sort of, if you must, painting that as just describing the character of a society

or the character of a life or the networks that people have. So it's also description. You might see a form of word painting that you put together from all the documents that you find and all the texts and stories from the past. So it's that as well as narrating the way things move. The historian's challenge, of course, is to try to find the right words and maybe pictures too, to put it all together, to collect all the material, which I love to do.

I just think, just, oh, maybe I can find something else. Maybe I can find something else in the archives or in some documents or some books. And then trying to figure out how it all fits together, both diachronically and synachronically, to use those clumsy words, that is both what the pattern is and what the movement is, what the change is. And you write that it also, you do think it's important to study bits of history that feel like they matter in the present. Well, yes, I think there are two things. First of all, the historian's own curiosity must be the impulse to start. When I was a girl and a young student, I especially wanted to find out about people who weren't famous,

who weren't the queens and the kings and the movers and shakers, as they were called, the more modest people, the working people, ultimately also the working women. To begin with, it was my curiosity to find out about them. And yes, I would use the phrase matter, because I felt that their lives were not only fascinating, but they mattered to the future. I'm reminded along this line of a witty phrase put by one of your most distinguished English historians, John Eliot, after I, much later in life, wrote a book about a peasant, Martin Gare, which was connected with a film and then had a certain wide readership.

And John Eliot very wittily said, We are at quite a pass, things are quite amiss, if Martin Gare is going to be better known than Martin Luther. And I thought that was a very witty and telling remark. And I wrote something to explain that in a way, Martin Gare, the peasant about whom stories became known because somebody took his place during a war in the 16th century and for three years seemed to fool the wife, that he was really Martin Gare, the disappeared Martin Gare, but that in a way, a story about a peasant could matter

in as much as a story about a famous mover and shaker like Martin Luther. Martin Luther put a reformation in place, but he couldn't do it without the support of peasants. And indeed, peasant revolts were both troubling and important for the success of the reformation. And similarly, the life of a peasant, in this case a peasant where there was imposter and dissimulation, is telling, is important for the whole kinds of procedures that led to religious change. Indeed, when people wanted to attack Martin Luther, the great reformer, they would attack him as an imposter. So the concept of a peasant imposter turns out to be

not irrelevant to understanding some of the great religious debates. Well, I've jumped from my initial interest in history that might matter too much later in my life, so I would just sort of pull it together by saying that it's a combination of one's own excitement and curiosity about a quest. It's something that to you seems intriguing and worth studying, but that you hope can make a difference to the way people think about their own time, the way they think about the possibilities in their own time, the way they might think about cruelty or generosity, about justice or injustice, that it doesn't determine your ideas on those big problems and big themes, but hopefully it can help.

I share that hope most fervently. Looking back now at seven decades of writing and researching history alongside all these wonderful, illustrious people that you count as friends and colleagues. Do you think history has had that effect? Do you think that, because too many people are a bit depressed about the state of the modern world at the moment and the rise of political extremes,

the coarseness of discourse on social media, the worrying strands of the re-emergence of the far right in Europe and elsewhere. Do you think that historians have helped, are busy trying to create a better kind of public square at the moment? I do think that historians, and I think of the wide range of them, are writing texts that could matter. I do think those texts are out there. I think of work that has been done by Mark Mazower, Balkans of World War II. I think of work that has been done by Mark Mazower, Balkans of World War II. I think of work that has been done by Margaret Macmillan on World War I and the

Treaty of Versailles. I can think of many examples of excellent historians who have given us resources to look at the current situations. In some of my own work, I hope that writing that I have done most recently on Muslims and a 16th century Muslim who tried to explain his world of Islam to Europeans, a man named Leo Afrikanis, I hope that the perspective in that book could help people not familiar with Islam about the range of sensibilities and thought

in the world of Islam and is seen in the past as well as today. Whether it has had an impact is another matter. Who our readers are, who those who see us on podcasts or listen to us or on television, it's a very wide group. And the people that I hear from, I know do take these ideas seriously. It does affect the way in which they perceive the world in which they live. I do think that it's made a difference, for instance, in some of the dialogue on matters of immigration. The political discourse, I think, is enriched when people have drawn upon historical examples to show the range of possibilities, enriching possibilities, economic possibilities, cultural possibilities, that come from a country that knows how to welcome immigrants and showing the range of immigrant lives. Whether this is determining in the consequences, political consequences, as opposed to affecting a small number of people, I'll just say, I hope so. I hope it helps. You only can do what you want. You try to reach out to people and hope it can make an impact.

You try to reach out to people and hope it can make an impact. I have, in my own case, have tried to enlarge the audience that might be reached by the kind of work I do. First, years ago, by working on a historical film, and then more recently on collaborating and being an assistant on a play, an historical play, but one that is set in pleasant day Jerusalem and has both Jews and Arabs in its cast of characters, a sensitive, politically important theme. And I was very pleased to hear the kinds of thoughtful discussion of the audience. After the play, I would always listen to an intermission or afterward. People were asking questions and thinking in a way that I thought was more open-minded about relations between Jews and Arabs, and that's something one can hope for. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. New episodes every week. Well, we certainly do hope for that.

What about your career? It's now stretching back into history. Yes. We have a lot of discussion around the world at the moment about the struggles that women have faced in the academy, well, of course, in any professional context, but how do you look back on your first year? Was it a struggle to break into the elevated circles of internationally recognized historians? And is it

easier now, do you think, for young women, young students that are coming through that you're mentoring? Well, I started, yes, back in the 1950s, long before you were born or many of your listeners. And there were very, very few women in American history departments at that time. But I, first of all, I loved doing history so much. I kind of didn't care. And secondly, I had huge support for my husband. I got married when I was an undergraduate at university. And so I had huge support from him. And I guess I had a lot of chutzpah or something. I just thought it's going to be okay. I had challenges.

I don't mean that I didn't, I walked into a situation where there were no challenges, but I just wanted so much to teach that I was in good spirits. But the second thing I'd say, and I advise this to all of my students, both women and men actually, but I immediately, when I started my first teaching at Brown University,

I immediately looked for other women in the departments at Brown, there weren't many of them, and had a network from the very beginning of other women who was interested in their scholarship, but just we supported each other. And there were always a few men in the department, a few, who welcomed the presence of women. So that made it a little bit easier. It's true that every job I had at Brown, at Berkeley, at Toronto, and at Princeton,

I did have to go through the same thing. That is to get people used to there being a female in an apartment, finding a network of women, sticking together, talking to the dean if we had to. And in my case, I, after a while, began to teach the history of women. That was not to begin with gender, and women was something that took me a while to come to in my own work. But when I did in the early 1970s,

to come to in my own work, but when I did in the early 1970s, that also was, I thought, an advancement in not only scholarship, but in making familiar the presence of women on the campus. Is it easier today? There are certainly many more women in all the departments that I know, more women and men the departments that I know. More women and men, people of transgender and so forth. That is certainly the case. I by no means think that thinking about gender or working toward comfortable relations is finished. Almost every generation needs to think about this. And this is a creative thing.

This is just a problem. It's great. It's one of the wonderful challenges of life to think of what gender means, about how we relate to each other. Here, I think the history of women is an enormous resource. And in the classes that I taught and that continue to be taught here at Toronto to large audiences, including audiences with many first-generation young people, the many immigrants, families that supply their wonderful students to our university. I think that teaching the history of women and gender, sexuality, gender relations, is an enormous resource in thinking about how we relate to each other today. I'm so glad about that possibility. So yes, things are better in

terms of gender relations. No, the problem is not resolved. We should embrace it as a creative challenge in our life and think about ways that men and women, transgender, whatever, relate to each other and can contribute to creating a better society. Speaking of contributing to better society, I understand the humanities, particularly in the US, are suffering at the moment. We know they are in the UK. We're being told we need to concentrate on STEM subjects and computer coding and engineering and things. What can you say about the young people, the students that are coming through studying history? Are they changing in their complexion and their ambition? Are there fewer? Is it a struggle to get hold of good

students these days? Well, I'm retired at 91, although I continue to sit on doctoral theses and go to many of the meetings that they have. The history here continues to do quite well, maybe because of certain fields, such as the gender courses are very large. The history of the book, the history of literacy, the history of the book is one of the largest programs at the University of Toronto. I think

partly because it's connected with the movement from manuscripts to books to digitization to the whole world of communication. So if you think of it in a very wide scale, it may be declining in relationship to the business school or the technical programs, but it's a very substantial part of the humanities. And I think that it's being taken in very interesting new directions, especially, as I say, if you widen it. The other important thing here is the interest in global history, that is, history that is not only connected to Canada or North America, which, of course, continues to be important, but it's looking at history in the wider world. I think that continues

to be important, non-Western history, and I'm very myself committed to that. But to come back to your problem about the future of the humanities, I think that the importance of digitization and the new kinds of social media have a real possibility for the humanities, for the world thought, a philosophy of storytelling. I think that that can be an answer to those who think that the only way to get a job is to go on in hard sciences and the sciences, as much as I respect those. So I think we should respond to decline in humanities enrollment by expressing the possibilities that they have, the immense importance of holding on to areas where values, sensibilities, ideas, and to go back to what we started with, storytelling

are at the center. And to use our creativity, as I think you have with your podcast, to find ways to reach people with these stories. So I won't give up. Speaking of not giving up, tell us, you work on such a dizzying array of topics and periods and ideas. Early modernist, is it fair to call you in general? 16th, 17th century is your first love? I started out there. You know, it's the century of Shakespeare and of François Rabelais. To begin with, those were my first interests. I thought, wow, this is a century that has men, people, men like that in it. I later discovered some quite wonderful women in the same period. I was initially deeply interested in it because it seemed to me, this is when I was a graduate student long ago, that it seemed to me

a period that was so important in the generation, the creation of the issues that face us today. And, of course, this is back in the 50s, and I was thinking about capitalism and socialism, and this is not right after World War II, and issues of individualism and competition. So many of those issues seem to me to be created out of the particular cluster of economic and social and religious change in the 16th century. I still continue to find that an interesting period.

My Muslim, my Leo Africanus, is another fascinating example of cultural crossing, Muslim, Christian, in that period. I still find it fascinating. I think any period is interesting. I'm also doing some related work on the 19th century. I've become interested in slavery in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the 17th and 18th century. To me, it's the human issue, the problem, the form of behavior. I come across a fascinating document in the archives, a trial record of a kind. One of them recently was involved, a relationship between a Jewish settler woman in Suriname and her indigenous slave. They had an intimate and perhaps loving relationship, and it led to a court case.

perhaps a loving relationship, and it led to a court case. What a story! To find that in the early 18th century archives, I find that I think, what's going on here? So wherever you find it, it can be of value. I just happened to have started in those centuries. I wandered in my geography, having started in France. I'm now off in North Africa with my Muslim or off in the Caribbean Atlantic with my Suriname slaves. I'll go wherever history calls. That's a great title for the autobiography. So there's lots of young history students listening to this and some historians, they'll be thrilled to hear that they have chosen a career and chosen a hobby or chosen a passion which they can pursue forever. There is no age bar on history.

And I know the young are doing wonderful work, so I salute them. Thank you so much for coming for coming on this podcast and reigniting my love of history. And you're an inspiration. So thank you very much indeed.

Thank you, Ted Snow. Thank you. an inspiration so thank you very much indeed thank you ted snow thank you hi everyone it's me dan snow just a quick request it's so annoying and i hate it when other podcasts do this but now i'm doing it i hate myself please please go on to itunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review it really helps basically boosts up the chart which is good and then and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.