About the book: 2021 / Natalie Zemon Davis is a famous historian, professor emeritus at Princeton University, author of numerous works on modern culture. Her famous book Ladies on the Sidelines (1995) brings to the fore three 17th-century European women, very different in life and intellectual experience, but similar in their originality, determination and independence. Neither the Jew Glikl bas Judah Leib, nor the Catholic Marie Guyard del Encarnacion, nor the Protestant Maria Sibylla Merian were royal or noble persons. Rather, they lived “on the margins” of the European 17th century, but their diaries, letters and travel notes, argues N. Davis, give us a much more accurate idea of ​​early modern times than official court history. The author carefully reconstructs the life and creative strategies of these women: how, due to different cultural traditions, each had to look for their own answer to the challenges of the era (marriage, motherhood, religion, the status of women in society). This triptych monograph describes the full range of possibilities for female self-realization in the 17th century, which could only be achieved far from the centers of power, on the periphery of the European ecumene.