Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

In this volume of essays first delivered as lectures, Natalie Zemon Davis has contributed both to the historical and anthropological study of gift practices as well as to the specific study of her long-time interest, sixteenth-century France. She describes her undertaking as an "ethnography of gifts" and a study of what she calls the "gift register" or "gift mode" discernible in sixteenth-century France (p. 9). As in all her work, Davis goes beyond rich descriptions of practices, based though they are on deep familiarity with printed and archival sources, and enhances our understanding both of French history and of the historical questions she treats.

1

Davis surveys the anthropological and historical literature on gifts, beginning with the classic work of Marcel Mauss. She notes the development of arguments about the importance of the gift among historians (Georges Duby and Gareth Stedman Jones, among many others) who first emphasized the archaic quality of the "gift mode" in European culture. Gifts as a structuring force in human relationships were displaced over time by commercial relations, from as early as the thirteenth century, they have argued. Davis adds her work to that of other scholars who have recently argued for the continued importance of gift relations even into modern times; gift giving remained a essential form of human relations alongside commercial exchanges as well as alongside modernizing political relationships, in which gratitude and obligation were no longer the preeminent ordering forces. Davis charts the complex relationships between gift-giving behaviors and these more "modern" forms of relationship and argues that the "gift register" remains a permanent part of human interaction. Indeed, Davis argues, we cannot fully understand the "modern" practices without seeing how they were affected and inflected by the persistent expectations and habits around gift giving.

. . .