Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis Book

This is great...I wish I had found a copy to buy instead of getting this from the library. I'll keep looking for it at used bookshops. This is an idea book, rather than an argument-driven monograph. Eight essays that are fun to read, and each one has its own thing to say, but they also all work together too.
These essays can be examined separately by anyone interested in a particular facet of early modern French life. Some would be useful to historians attempting comparative studies of particular cultural or social practices, like costumed mischief or mob violence. Specialists in early America, for example, might find Davis's argument about the meaning of cross-dressing and the "complex license accorded the unruly woman" fascinating when compared to the rise of Indian costume among mobs in late eighteenth-century New England. But the essays work together too. Some arguments build on each other, which helps make one essay about the motivations of mob violence during the wars of religion particularly convincing. And all the pieces are in the service of an overarching idea: that changes in culture and society in France grew out of the actions of French people, and these actions were not determined by factors like "sex, or…relation to property and production." Davis is making an argument that goes against a sort of vulgar Marxist determinism. French men and women did not become Calvinists, or decide to support poor relief, or choose to massacre their neighbors because of their spots on the social ladder or their relationships to the means of production. They were independent actors who made rational decisions based on what they understood to be possible and appropriate in their society.
And there are all kinds of great little stories that Davis uncovers, and old French proverbs in her essay about proverbs. The one about religious violence is great, and really gets one thinking about what motivates people to do awful things to each other.