The Restless Historian: Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis Paul Cohen As a historian, mentor, and friend, Natalie Zemon Davis had an uncanny gift for questions. To be her student, colleague, or interlocutor was to enter into a conversation in which she offered neither pronouncements nor answers, but questions. These served a double purpose: first, to satisfy Natalie's own sincere yet insatiable curiosity; and second, to inspire others to probe their own research subjects in new, more interesting, and more productive ways. Natalie's was above all an incomparable gift for interrogating the past with novel questions—questions that opened up new vistas for historical under-standing, blazing heretofore unsuspected trails through the past, bringing as yet neglected historical phenomena to scholarly attention, questions so sugges-tive, so packed with meaning, that they seemed in the mere asking to conjure up innovative methodologies and trace novel pathways toward fruitful answers. To spend time with Natalie's work is to appreciate how each of her projects begins with a question, one skillfully calibrated to advance our understanding of the historical problem she is examining and brimming with possibility for thinking about human experience more broadly
And @paulecohen.bsky.social here with the essay-length explanation for why this video (m.youtube.com/watch?v=hwiR...) is such a great encapsulation of how NZD researches and why that is so invigorating.
🫶 www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... #NZD4Eva
