<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > | study literature and history</h1>
"The Return of Martin Gale"
In 1982, a film set against the backdrop of rural life in the mountains of southern France in the 16th century produced a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film's vivid and true reproduction of history was widely concerned by ordinary audiences to film critics and professional historians, especially in the European and American historical circles, which triggered an academic discussion about history and film or film and television history. The film, titled The Return of Martin Gale, is based on a real-life case in French history and stars French actors Gérard Depardieu and Natalie Bayeux, written by Jean Claude Carrière and directed by Daniel Vigne. In addition, there is another important member of the crew, she is the American historian Natalie Zemon Davis who serves as the consultant for the history of the film.
Davis's participation provides great support for the film to maximize the sense of history and reproduce the historical authenticity in its creation. The film not only faithfully restores the living conditions of the 16th century southern French countryside in terms of scenes, costumes, props, etc., but more importantly, it also reproduces as much as possible through multi-party excavation of historical materials in terms of character, character relationship, historical facts, and language dialogue.
However, as a historian, Natalie Davis is not satisfied with this, she still deeply feels that fictional, visual films can not completely replace the interpretation of history, such as culture, religion, society, economy, mentality and other historical factors, often actors' performances and lines and cameras can not convey. For example, "the Basque background of the Gaelic family was abandoned to the rural Protestant factor ignored, especially the double game of wives and the inner contradictions of judges were downplayed." These changes may have helped give the film a powerful sense of brevity and simplicity to make Martin Gayle's story a legend in the first place, but they also made it difficult to explain what really happened. "
So Davis wrote The Returning of Matin Guerre in 1982, reanalyzing this bizarre and profound historical event in the language of historians she was more familiar with, and published it in France along with film scripts and the like, showing two different ways of historical narrative—historical and cinematic. The following year, the English edition was published separately, and after the great influence of the film, a so-called "Martin Gehr fever" was set off in the Western historical circles at that time.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >, Martin Gayle's story</h1>
Martin Gail, also known as Martin Geher, born 1525, takes place in a small mountain village in southern France called Artiga in the century, where Martin Gale comes from a well-to-do Spanish Basque immigrant family, and at the age of fourteen or so, arranged by his parents, married Bertrand de Rohr, a woman from a wealthy family in the same village, whose age is estimated to be even younger. Martin looks mediocre tall, thin, dark, good at sword fighting and country juggling, because the early marriage has not yet fully matured sexually, there may be a little sexual impotence, so the two have not had sex for eight years after marriage, let alone fertility. But according to Bertrand's later explanation, it was because they were under some kind of vicious curse, the "witch's magic bondage", until eight years later, when an old woman with a little magic told them how to lift the spell (four Masses, eating bread and pastries from the Communion ceremony), and had their first son, Sansai.
One day in 1548, the 24-year-old Martin, fearful of punishment for "stealing" a little grain from his father (stealing in any form according to Basque customs is unforgivable), took the opportunity to leave home for Spain. After some travels, he became an attendant of the Spanish Cardinal and broke a leg while wounded in battle for King Philip II of Spain.
Martin has been heard from since his disappearance, and during these days, Bertrand has always held on to his virginity and has not remarried. It wasn't until eight years later that a man who claimed to be Martin Gale mysteriously returned to Artiga, whose real name was Arno Guylle, and although martin, who was impersonated in appearance, did not match the real Martin, he was "slightly stocky, strong, and not good at sports", but he was "eloquent", had a "memory that made the actor jealous", and was a "debauched", "rotten life", "addicted to every vice", a young man, But eight years have gradually worn away people's memories, and Tyler has "painstakingly prepared, deliberated, memorized, rehearsed", "fabricated a new identity and life", almost all people have deceived everyone, believing his identity to be true, and more importantly, Bertrand has accepted the husband without any objection. The reason why Tiller pretended to be the missing Martin was because after he was discharged from the army, he left his hometown to join the army, fought for King Henry II of France, met two friends of Martin on the way home, and mistook him for Martin, so he had the idea of impersonation, and also managed to find out and remember various situations about Martin.
In the next three years, the fake Martin and Bertrand fell in love with each other, and two daughters were born, and they got along well with other villagers. However, when Tyler began to sell his inherited family property as Martin, and even demanded that his uncle Pierre, also translated as Pierre, hand over the property he temporarily held during his absence from home, and wanted to file a lawsuit for this, this caused Pierre's great dissatisfaction, and also caused his uncle, who had long suspected his true identity, to force Beltrand to come forward to accuse Tiller of impersonation.
The incident first went to the Shee District Court, which finally found Tiller guilty of 60 of the 150 witnesses who were uncertain, and about half of the other affirmers and those who denied it. The infuriating Tyler appealed to the High Court of Toulouse, which lasted for a long time, and finally the High Court was ready to make a decision in favour of Tyre based on the principles of "quality rather than the number of witnesses", "it is better to misplace the guilty than to punish the innocent", and because Judge Jean de Gejas sympathized with the Protestants. Just then, a man with a wooden leg suddenly appeared in the courtroom, claiming that he was the real Martin Gale. The sudden appearance of the real Martin not only shocked everyone, but also completely changed the court's verdict. In the end, Tiller was hanged for impersonation, stealing inheritance rights, adultery, etc., while Bertrand was blinded by the court's belief that she was gullible and was eventually placed in a convent. As for Martin, the court blamed his youth and impulsiveness for running away from home, considering that the disability, property damage and defiling of his wife that had occurred to him were enough as punishment and did not pursue further.
The story of an imposter in the small French countryside of the 16th century became the core of a book written by Davis, which is different from previous traditional works of cultural history, because Davis was the first to pay attention to such a low-class people. And her material is all based on the fact that Jean de Gejas, the judge of the Toulouse High Court who personally participated in the martin gale trial, left a first-hand record for later historians, who recorded the entire process of the case in detail, including all the evidence, testimony, court arguments and judgments, as well as some of his own comments. His book was a very popular book in the century, and it was published in French, Latin, and reprinted many times.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > ii. The microscopic, narrative historiography embodied in Martin Gale's return</h1>
The book "Martin Gaele" is not only a rigorous and microscopic study of specific historical events, but more importantly, in this book, it comprehensively reflects some of the latest trends and characteristics of Western historical research before and after the century, and the author adopts many new perspectives, new viewpoints, new methods, and even new narrative methods to conduct historical research, which is very useful for us to inspire and learn from.
Davis's depiction of Martin Gale's story in his book is entirely in the style of traditional narrative historiography. The author uses very fresh and concise words to tell the whole process of the event, the historical background, cultural traditions, event evolution, and the relationship between the characters are explained in an orderly, detailed and not chaotic manner, and the characters' personality, psychology and other portrayals are even more vivid and reasonable, which fully demonstrate the author's narrative skills.
Combined with the era when the book was written, the West was in the midst of the rise of new historiography and the popularity of quantitative historiography, and many historical works were keen on "static history" and long-term narrative techniques. Lawrence Stone, in his essay "The Revival of Narrative History," loudly called for a new approach to the idea that history writing should be centered on people. Davis's book is arguably an attempt to revive narrative history. In addition, Davis himself has a deep background in cultural anthropology. The ethnographic approach of cultural anthropology taught Davis how to better understand and restore rural life in 16th-century France through concepts such as folk customs and habits, "big traditions and small traditions". Obviously, the "enchantment", "witchcraft", "family traditions of stealing" and even marriage customs mentioned in the book cannot be expressed by relying solely on trial materials. But it is the combination of these folk traditions that gives us a better understanding of the many options of Martin Gale and his wife.
The so-called microhistory refers to the historical research method based on the reduction of the scale of observation, micro-analysis and meticulous research of literature.
This has been specifically addressed in the previous article. Historians use anthropological research methods to narrow the scope of historical research to a village, family, and even individual, and then use the "microscope" to enlarge these tiny objects, and restore their living conditions, social relations, character fate, and so on through a large number of trivial materials.
In his commentary on The Return of Martin Gale, Donald Kelly noted that it reflected the growing combination of history and anthropology, especially in what Geertz called "deep drawing" and "local knowledge," in which "for Davis, peasants, especially peasant women, were both economically motivated and sexually motivated, and had cultural traditions and abilities that most orthodox historians overlooked." This shift in emphasis from causal analysis to reconstructing social models, from quantification to qualitative evaluation, comes at the cost of narrowing horizons and lowering horizons, but it also restores the depth, humanity, and color of historical understanding. "
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > three, historical truth and fiction</h1>
Martin Gayle's story is about a subject of truth and falsehood, and historians' research is largely entangled in the contradiction between truth and falsehood, between fiction and reality. The creation of the film made Davis think very deeply about the narrative of history, authenticity and other issues, she wrote: "Paradoxically, the more immersed in the creation of film, the more I want to discover something beyond the film." I was prompted to dig deeper into this case and give it a sense of history. Writing for actors rather than readers raises new questions about the motives of 16th-century people—for example, whether they valued truth as much as property. Watching Gerald Depardieu feel the fake Martin Gale character in his own way gave me new ways to think about the real imposter Arno Guillo. What Tiller did. I felt that I had my own historical laboratory, and that I was producing not evidence, but historical possibilities. "Both film and history are reproducing such a real event with some kind of narrative, but no effort can really restore the truth of history, which is still hypothetical and fictional."
At the end of His Return of Martin Gaele, Davis playfully exudes reflections on this paradoxical contradiction: "Martin Gale's story is told again and again because it reminds us that anything amazing is possible." Even for historians who have cracked it, it still has a tenacious vitality. I think I've revealed the true face of the past—or maybe Li Ghost is doing it again. In fact, as a historian who seriously writes historical works, Davis wrote this book on the basis of considerable historical materials. However, even if the historical materials are sufficient, her restoration is limited and fragmentary, because the real history will not be completely preserved, whether it is a movie or a book, it is in the understanding of later people to try their restoration.
Natalie Zemun Davis
The question of whether historiography is fictional or real has always been a topic of debate in the field of historiography. Although many scholars who insist on historiography as an empirical science firmly believe that history must be a discipline that seeks truth and even strives to become as scientific as the natural sciences, few people to this day can face this question: Is the historian's writing of the past the first performance of a new play or a re-enactment of an old play? Davis also said of this issue: "When I was a student, we were generally taught to remove fiction from the materials, as historians of science do, in order to get the truth out of the facts. But she gradually discovered that even those archives that were used by many as letter history still had many fictitious phenomena, or that the archival writer himself was telling a good story with his logic, and this archive was left to posterity as historical materials, but often with the ideology and thought of the writer himself, and this kind of thinking could not be separated from the social environment in which he lived. In another davis book, Fiction in the Archives, she discerns how these fictions worked and why the authors narrated them in the same way that she did so in Her Return of Martin Gale.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >4</h1>
Overall, Davis's The Return of Martin Gale has been called "a model of both new and microhistory," Lin Hunt's 1989 book New Cultural History as "a source of inspiration for all of us," and Susan Deshan regards her and Thompson as pioneers in breaking through traditional social history and exploring new cultural histories in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, such a work with popular language and historical value is very worth reading.