I REMEMBER NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS

Everybody who knew Natalie Zemon Davis feels a distinct sense of loss because she was such a charismatic, attentive and insightful person. She listened, and when she did, you could feel validated by her curiosity, her questions about your work, your ideas and your view of the world. She also wielded a gentle but strong authority, as a scholar of early modern history and culture who had made the forgotten and the ignored her subject matter and her cause.

She was a constant innovator in her use of anthropology, folklore, legal testimony and records to recreate whole lives and ways of living.

When I was an undergraduate in history at the University of Toronto, between 1965 and 1969, she and her husband, Chandler Davis, were the most exciting and glamorous academic pair on campus: Chandler because he had refused to testify or incriminate anyone in the McCarthy hearings, Natalie because she was a champion of the social history from below, the history of women, workers, the marginal and the excluded, and this strand of history was just entering its most exciting period.

Natalie had a long association with Central European University, including serving on its Board of Governors from 2001 to 2008. By the time I became rector there in 2016, its Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures had attracted some of the great names of the historical profession, and her visits to Budapest with Chandler to attend the lectures had become an important date in the calendar. She never took the lectures as a merely honorific occasion: The lecturer had to be ready for her questions, in public, after the lectures, and her questions, always polite, precise and probing, were an example to us all about what academic exchange should be like.

I’ll really miss her.