El regreso de Martin Guerre

The Inventive Peasant Arnaud du Tilh had almost persuaded the learned judges at the Parlement of Toulouse, when on a summer's day in 1560 a man swaggered into the court on a wooden leg, denounced Arnaud & reestablished his claim to the identity, property & wife of Martin Guerre. The astonishing case captured the imagination of the Continent. Told & retold over the centuries, the story of Martin Guerre became a legend, still remembered in the Pyrenean village where the impostor was executed over 400 years ago. Now a noted historian, who served as consultant for a French film on Martin Guerre, has searched archives & lawbooks to add new dimensions to a tale already abundant in mysteries. We're led to ponder how a common man could become an impostor in the 16th century, why Bertrande de Rols, an honorable peasant woman, would accept such a man as her husband, & why lawyers, poets & men of letters like Montaigne became so fascinated with the episode. Natalie Zemon Davis reconstructs the lives of ordinary people, in a way that reveals the hidden attachments & sensibilities of nonliterate 16th-century villagers. Here we see people trying to fashion their identities within a world of traditional ideas about property & family & of changing ideas about religion. We learn what happens when common people get involved in the workings of the criminal courts in the ancien régime, & how judges struggle to decide who a man was in the days before fingerprints & photos. We sense the secret affinity between the eloquent men of law & the honey-tongued village impostor, a rare identification across class lines. Deftly written for both the public & specialists, The Return of Martin Guerre will interest those who want to know more about ordinary families & especially women of the past & about the creation of literary legends. It's also a remarkable psychological narrative about where self-fashioning stops & lying begins.