The Return of Martin Guerre
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- Excellent binding.
Product Description
The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had nearly persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer’s day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud, and reestablished his aver to the identity, property, and wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told and retold over the centuries, the tale of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the fraud was executed more than 400 years ago.
Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a new French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives and lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries: we are led to ponder how a common man could become an fraud in the sixteenth century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her spouse, and why lawyers, poets, and men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode.
Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a sparkling way that reveals the hidden attachments and sensibilities of nonliterate sixteenth-century villagers. Here we see men and women trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional thoughts about property and family tree and of changing thoughts about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, and how judges struggle to choose who a man was in the days before fingerprints and photographs. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law and the honey-tongued village fraud, a rare identification across class lines.
Deftly written to please both the all-purpose public and specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest persons who want to know more about ordinary families and especially women of the past, and about the creation of literary legends. It is also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops and lying starts.
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This book has got to be the worst! If you want to know the tale of Martin Guerre, then excellent for you, but learn about it from somewhere besides this book. Natalie Zemon Davis obviously needs to go back to writing school. Journalistic type entries are touchingly interwoven within the tale. It really deprives the reader of hearing the base tale of what happened with Martin Guerre and drawing their own conclusions from it. There is so much French interwoven into the book, that you nearly need to be bilingual to know what is going on. But, it is brilliant for book reviews since it obviously lacks so many things.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The book was an accurate dipection of life in the Middle Ages. I fervently recomend this book to any on that is interested in the Middle ages
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
this brilliant analysis provides the truest basis for the new musical “martin guerre”. you can catch it in los angeles. next stop broadway.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
a very fleeting novel that describes the common man’s life on the boarder between france and spain in the mid sixteenth century. in addition a excellent tale that the movie sommersby was based on.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
A excellent read if your into peasant life and such, history buffs too, otherwise, it’s a pass.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5