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Original Title:	The return of Martin Guerre
ISBN:	0674766911 (ISBN13: 9780674766914)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Martin Guerre, Arnaud du Tilh

The Return of Martin Guerre

Natalie Zemon Davis

Paperback | Pages: 176 pages

Rating: 3.7 | 3244 Users | 228 Reviews

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Title	:	The Return of Martin Guerre
Author	:	Natalie Zemon Davis
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 176 pages
Published	:	October 15th 1984 by Harvard University Press (first published 1983)
Categories	:	History. Nonfiction. Cultural. France. Academic. School. European History

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In the autumn of 1560 Arnaud du Tilh was executed in front of the house, deep in southern France, where he had lived for the past three years. He had been found guilty of impersonating one Martin Guerre, a local man who had walked out of his marriage and life in the village over ten years previously, and had not been heard of since. Du Tilh had succeeded in convincing Guerre's uncle, sisters and wife that he was in fact the long lost Martin Guerre. His testimony in court was convincing, he had the scar on the forehead and the warts on his fingers that Martin Guerre was said to have had and when the real Martin Guerre turned up hobbling on a wooden leg (view spoiler)[ true to his name, gained in war (hide spoiler)], the imitator was found to have a better memory of the intimate details of Martin's marriage prior to his disappearance than the real Guerre.

The case was so striking and extraordinary that Coras, the investigating judge, and La Sueur, a lawyer from the region both had books out in press about the case within a year. These were printed and reprinted in French and Latin in legitimate and bootlegged editions.

Working on the film Le Retour de Martin Guerre the author was troubled by its necessary departure and simplification of the historical background and that experience led her to write this book.

I'm not sure that it is a micro history in the style say of Montaillou, it is rather a reconstructed tapestry with missing sections filled out by "must have's" and "would have's" (view spoiler)[ this region's court documents from this period are lost (hide spoiler)]. The twist is that Coras' amazement was in part at how wrong his own judgement had been "here was a case where the "best" witnesses turned out to be mistaken, hearsay evidence turned out to be true, and the judges almost went astray (p106), and the same realisation of the uncertainity of judgement then applies to this book. All the careful and well reasoned inferences, the must haves, the would haves, the differences in attitudes between the Guerre family with their Basque background and their neighbours, and the influence of Protestantism are just that, insubstantial inferences. The only difference is that this time there is no real Martin Guerre who can turn up at the eleventh hour to stomp through them all on his wooden leg.

Michel de Montaigne turned to the case in his 1588 published essay On the Lame, the uncertainty of our ability to judge and the difficulty of knowing the truth about things were central to his outlook which gave him a starting point to criticise Coras for his original presumption that du Tilh was innocent. The case of the return of Martin Guerre is one of the odder examples of the provisional nature of knowledge, yet this emphasis on the point of view of the judging outsider overlooks something else that the author pays attention to: the role of Martin's wife Bertrande de Rols.

De Rols was herself at risk during the trial as a potential adulterer if she had been aware of the deception. The delicacy and precision of how she positioned herself as a deceived person and an innocent victim is carefully brought out. The same attention is brought to how refusal to seek an annulment of her marriage to Guerre during the long early years of their infertility, or possibly just his, impotency (she was to say that they were both bewitched), and her later acknowledgement of du Tihl as her husband were decisions that worked for her and made sense in her social context. She emerges as, if not a winner, than as one who came closest to making the most of the circumstances in which she found herself, which is no more maybe than we all try to do with varying degrees of success.

Very short, very readable. Not an exploration of the spread of Protestantism in Southern France in the middle of the sixteenth century nor of the structure of the rural economy , but a singular, very human, story.

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Ratings: 3.7 From 3244 Users | 228 Reviews

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better to leave unpunished a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.it took me forever to finish this one, enjoyed it just enough to finish it, would've prefered to read it as an audiobok I think.

In The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis recounts the fascinating history of a sixteenth-century imposter who duped a wife and her inlaws into believing he was Martin Guerre, her husband of fifteen years and their brother and nephew who had disappeared 10 years earlier. For three years, everyone was content to believe the man was indeed who he claimed he was. But after some time, relatives began to notice the man remembered remarkably little of his Basque heritage, their language and

Zemon Davis's subject matter is fascinating but her analysis is cautious and doesn't truly address her questions. I'll sound like the worst history nerd ever, but skip the book and watch the movie. She was a consultant on the film and it's well done and in many ways more rigorous than the book.

Goodreads Review: The Return of Martin Guerre by Diandra RiveraWithin the return of Martin Guerre which one could talk about it being the earliest account of a sex scandal around the sixteenth century in the rural part of France, which would be called Basque, meaning its southern France which it has many rural settings that one could see like that of plains on plains of land, people milling for wheat and grain and other means of resources at this time period of the late 1500, along with that of

Review originally posted at Eve's Alexandria, 2013.--This book," says Natalie Zemon Davis at the start of stranger-than-fiction popular history The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), "grew out of a historian's adventure with a different way of telling about the past." Her telling concerns a wonderfully odd little legal case from 16th-century Languedoc, centred on an imposter named Arnaud de Tilh. De Tilh successfully posed as a missing man named Martin Guerre for several years - even living in

The Return of Martin Guerre was written by Natalie Zemon Davis. The Return of Martin Guerre was published in 1983 by the Harvard University Press in Cambridge Massachusetts London, England. Davis wrote the book because she was part of the production of the movie based on Martin Guerres life and she felt the movie diverted from the actual historical content of what happened during the trials of Martin Guerre. This book allows the reader to understand the culture and lifestyles of people in the

An interesting look at a little slice of life, crime, & the courts in France in the mid-1500s. I think the author did good research based on what was written about the case at the time (including an account written by the trial judge of the case), as well as the small amount of general info that was available about the life of an average peasant during that period & in that location. From those info sources, she then tries to draw some lines & infer motivations & further details