Natalie Zemon Davis, who died on October 21 just short of her 95th birthday, was probably the best-known and most well-regarded of North American historians since the 1970s. She published her first book, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, in 1975 and was writing the final pages of her last book in the weeks before she died.
Her early work on the popular culture and religious mentalities of artisans and labourers in the 16th century captured imaginations, and she led the early teaching of women’s history at the University of Toronto. But it is her distinctive methods and contributions to what came to be known as microhistory that are best remembered.
