Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), xviii + 362 pp.

Those who know of Natalie Davis' interest in the women, artisans, peasants and other unprivileged groups of early modern France will immediately recognize the relevance to European workingclass history of this sparkling book of essays. That relevance is partly one of pointing out the contrasts between the horizontally arranged "class" structure confronting nineteenthand twentiethcentury laborers on the one hand and, on the other, the early modern hierarchical society of "orders" that linked the lower, working orders vertically to their social superiors rather than horizontally in working solidarity. It is useful for all of us to look beyond our specialized fields time periods in this case in order to understand more deeply how the groups we study can act and cannot act, that is, what is unique about them. Yet, surprisingly, Natalie Davis' essays such as "Women On Top" and "Strikes and Salvation at Lyon" are almost equally relevant in showing the continuity of laboring and "lower, class" conditions, attitudes, and even potentiality for improvement over the centuries. This disturbing fact (disturbing academicians' scholarly assumptions as well as outraging their feelings that things should get better as time progresses) raises fundamental questions about what labor historians should study, how, and even why. As an "outsider" it seems to me that the issue is not only important but perhaps central to "modern" labor historians, and I note from the May 1975 Newsletter that in late nineteenth-century France skilled artisans held attitudes toward women, social reordering, and even economics strikingly similar to the situation of the French Revolutionary sansculottes (probably the later workers were more conservative) and to the menu peuple of Natalie Davis' sixteenth-century guilds (and without the flair for trenchant criticism of social norms found in Davis' "working class" carnivals, charivaris. and Misrule Abbeys). With questions about modern working-class studies in mind, let me turn to the eight essays. For the purposes of the Newsletter, and with apologies to the author for omitting much that is central to early modern historians, the studies can be grouped into three categories. First, there are three studies emphasizing treatment of and attitudes towards the lower orders by social superiors, among them humanists, Protestant and Catholic authorities, literary and medical specialists, urban business interests, and even Charles Perrault of Mother Goose folk tradition fame. Davis' "Poor relief, Humanism, and Heresy" shows that a preindustrial society even though torn religiously and losing the medieval religious and societal obligation to help the poor, could still come as close as