Analysis Of The Return Of Martin Guerre By Natalie Zemon Davis

How to tell a story that has been told so many times that people assuming they have known the plot brush it off immediately they hear just the name of the protagonist? Martin Guerre may be one of those names, but it figures prominently in the title of the book The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis. Banal though the title sounds, the historian never intended to regurgitate what the reader may have known but to engage in “a different way of telling about the past.” Her revisionist interpretation of the story of Guerre, however controversial, stems from her firm grasp of primary sources and undoubtedly provides some illuminating insights into French rural society in the 16th century when the saga of the missing man unfolded.
When she embarked on the book project in the early 1980s, Davis – now 89, an emeritus
It is not to dismiss historical imagination altogether, for a reasonable imagination is what “gives the historical narrative or description its continuity.” But historians have to stay alert when they feel tempted to give free rein to their imagination. In the case of Davis, she crafted a unique and fascinating account of Bertrande’s “double game”, though the convolution of which is not sufficiently supported by any sources. The historian appeared to have let her imagination run wild from the moment she said Bertrande began colluding with her fake husband to trick the judges. Yet all the calculation and paradoxicality of Bertrande seem to have only one purpose, that is, to rationalise why she gave up on the imposter — whom she loved so much as “a kind of hero, a more real Martin Guerre” — in no time when her real husband showed up. In view of such weakly supported hypotheses, the reader has to take the interpretation by Davis, however compelling it may sound, with a pinch of