Listening to the Languages of the People by Natalie Zemon Davis

Listening to the Languages of the People by Natalie Zemon Davis

This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lazăr Șăineanu (1859-1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was among the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame. Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, Șăineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the language of Rabelais. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an “intruder,” into his old age.

"Davis quotes Sainéan’s own assessment of his situation at the end of his long career: ‘indeed, here, in regard to social relations, I am always still “the intruder”’One of the virtues of her book is that she does not seek to hide her subject’s foibles—including a somewhat thin-skinned insistence on his own rightness, a certain defiant self-regard, a pragmatism that didn’t always do him much good. Rather, Davis goes constantly in search of more complex motives behind Sainéan’s scholarly preoccupations and life choices: this renders us a very human figure, whose story serves as a litmus for the atmosphere of the times through which he lived." (The review is complemented by the author's response.) https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2472 -- Alex Drace-Francis * Reviews in History *
"This book is the final intellectual legacy of the renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023), often identified as a pioneer of microhistory. Zemon Davis’s latest publication reaffirms her exceptional talent for storytelling expressed in the masterly treatment of figures with complex and elusive identities." https://doi.org/10.1080/14725886.2024.2324182 -- Nicola Perencin * Journal of Modern Jewish Studies *

Natalie Zemon Davis is Professor Emerita in the History Department at the University of Toronto.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9789633865934
ISBN 10	963386593X
Title	Listening to the Languages of the People
Author	Natalie Zemon Davis
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Central European University Press
Year published	2022-10-15
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.