Writings by white, male, upper-class individuals dominate the canon of Western History. While such a dominance does not negate their scholarship, the voices of the marginalized—women, the poor and ethnic minorities—are not represented in this limited historical viewpoint. Many mid-20th century historians felt that there was a need to counter this inequality of representation. For example, E.P. Thompson, Clifford Geertz and Natalie Zemon Davis each generated works that revealed the history of a previously marginalized group. Despite their different areas of expertise, the academics ' approaches are essentially compatible, insofar as they exhibit the same ultimate goal—giving a voice to the marginalized—and compensate for each other’s shortcomings.
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In her piece, the Return of Martin Guerre, Zemon Davis adopts a micro-history approach to address her concern that very little is known “about [medieval] peasants’ hopes and feelings … [and] the ways in which they experienced the constraints and possibilities in their lives.” Zemon Davis asks, "[one] often [thinks] of peasants as not having had much in the way of choices, but is this in fact true? Did individual villagers ever try to fashion their lives in unusual and unexpected ways?" It seems she asks these questions rhetorically; her narrative, which depicts the lives of Martin Guerre, a man who abandons his wife and family to live abroad, Arnold Du Tilh, an imposter who adopts the identity of another man, and Bertrande de Rols, a women who shapes her identity in opposition to societal standards and ultimately influences the result of the court case in which she has become embroiled, challenges the academic assumption that the medieval peasantry was an oppressed and inactive societal group, tyrannized by the upper classes. Instead, Zemon Davis offers a conceptualization of the peasantry as a group of unique and active individuals with the agency to shape the outcome of their lives. In so doing, Zemon Davis accords the peasant man and woman a greater level of agency than historians typically attribute to them, thereby attempting to overcome the discipline 's tendency to marginalize this important social group in historical
In her piece, the Return of Martin Guerre, Zemon Davis adopts a micro-history approach to address her concern that very little is known “about [medieval] peasants’ hopes and feelings … [and] the ways in which they experienced the constraints and possibilities in their lives.” Zemon Davis asks, "[one] often [thinks] of peasants as not having had much in the way of choices, but is this in fact true? Did individual villagers ever try to fashion their lives in unusual and unexpected ways?" It seems she asks these questions rhetorically; her narrative, which depicts the lives of Martin Guerre, a man who abandons his wife and family to live abroad, Arnold Du Tilh, an imposter who adopts the identity of another man, and Bertrande de Rols, a women who shapes her identity in opposition to societal standards and ultimately influences the result of the court case in which she has become embroiled, challenges the academic assumption that the medieval peasantry was an oppressed and inactive societal group, tyrannized by the upper classes. Instead, Zemon Davis offers a conceptualization of the peasantry as a group of unique and active individuals with the agency to shape the outcome of their lives. In so doing, Zemon Davis accords the peasant man and woman a greater level of agency than historians typically attribute to them, thereby attempting to overcome the discipline 's tendency to marginalize this important social group in historical