Natalie Zemon Davis
A Distinguished Eugene J. Sheffer Lecture
Introduction by Madeleine Dobie
Lazӑr Șӑineanu (1859-1934) was a pioneering philologist and folklorist in his native Romania, bringing to bear on Yiddish and Romanian the historical and pluralistic approach to language developed in France by Michel Bréal. As an émigré to France in 1901, Lazare Sainéan applied his method successfully to the history of French argot and to the language of Rabelais, but got little response to his work on Yiddish. “Languages of the People” traces the relation of this philological trajectory to the conflicts of the time –-in Romania and in France and among Jewish groups in Europe –- about what constitutes a nation and who can belong to it.
Natalie Zemon Davis is Professor Emerita, Princeton University and senior fellow in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. A prolific scholar of global social and cultural history and historiography, her wide ranging and influential books include: The Return of Martin Guerre; Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France and Trickster Travels: A Muslim between Worlds in Early Modern Times.
Co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française and the Department of History
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