ABOUT AN INVENTORY

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS AND

PETER N.MILLER

Natalie Zemon Davis is Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus in the Department ofHistory,Princeton University, andAdjunct Professor ofHistory, University ofToronto, former Presidentofthe American Historical Association, and author ofmany books and articles on early modernEuropean history. She has made asignificant contribution to our understanding ofthe actuallived lives ofearly modern European men and, especially, women, as well as to the specific toolsand questions that the historian must bring to this task. She is, in short, the idealperson withwhom to talk about the process andproject ofstudying aseventeenth-century Dutch womanthrough her probate inventory

Peter N. Miller: Our talk will revolve around three bigtopics: the lives ofwomen in the seventeenth century, theways of doing this kind of history—microhistory—andthen, somewhere between the two, the inventory ashistorical evidence and how to read it.

Natalie Zemon Davis: I have beenworkingwith inventories for much of my life and, actually, I am working withthem again. And a few facts—that middle part—theinventory between the large scale and the small—give awondrous challenge, that ofworking with a few, interesting, rich things.

pnm: This is a project that began with an inventory, adocument.There has been a search for other traces of Margri-eta van Varick, but thus far it has not turned up very much.Acouple ofstray references in VOC [Dutch East IndiaCompany] documents, usually linked to the man towhomshe was then attached—first her uncle, a prosperous merchant, and then her two husbands, the first also a merchantand the second a minister. So, on her own, in her own

voice so to speak, there is a trail of her acquisitions. I amnot even sure it counts as consumption. What do you asa historian consider the challenges of working with aninventory?

nzd: I will start out by saying thatyou are a little bitricherthan you describe, because you know where Margrieta wasborn, where she lived when she made that inventory, andthe occupations ofher husbands. Her first husband was amerchant who worked in India and the second was a minister who was sent to Batavia and then Malacca. As a historian, whenI have several facts like this, I begin to think:"Where can we go with these things?" I often face thismyself in my current work. It's in another Dutch colony,Suriname, and I may have little more than that. That is,a name, perhaps a birth date, the name ofa husband andhis occupation, the size ofa plantation, and an inventory,ifI am working onsettlers. I might have only a plantationinventory with a few names ifI am working on slaves. Youmight wish for much more. I think of Linda Colley's very

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About an Inventory

interesting book aboutan eighteenth-century woman traveler, Elizabeth Marsh, who crossed the world somewhatthe wayMargrieta vanVarick did, in Elizabeth's case fromthe Caribbean to Morocco to India.l Colley was blessedbecause she also had Marsh's letters and a book. There wassomething in the woman's own voice.

Butthere is still a great deal thatyou can dowith limited things. You can start building aworld around Margrieta, as you have done inyour exhibition, by thinking aboutandexamining whatkinds ofexperiences someone wouldhave had being married to a Dutch Reformed minister.What were the duties of a Reformed wife? What kinds ofstores did people have in NewYork? Don'twe know something about the people to whom she was selling? And soyou can build upa world ofher buyers, ofher neighbors.This is the way the historian works. You start with whatyou have, and then you try to fill in as closely as you canwith parallel evidence, analogous evidence, always beingvery clear that it is not your own person. There is alwaysa possibility ofsomeone's being exceptional orvery different, but you are going to build up a world, and you canbegin to ask, when you see something particularly noteworthy aboutyourfigure: Issherepresentative or not? Allthe women that I meet in Suriname, except for the Caribsand Arawaks, arrived there in the first generation fromelsewhere, whether they were kidnapped from Africa orsold from Africa or came as parts of a family from theNetherlands or from other parts ofEurope. None ofthem,that I know of, made the kind oftrajectory that Margrietavan Varick made, that is, going toa former Dutch colony,in this case New York, from the Indian Ocean. That's avery interesting trajectory, andsomething thatwould makea huge difference when one is interpreting her life. Shehad an unusual experience.

Thewomen thatcome toSuriname bring all kinds oftastes and interests from the Netherlands, from France,from Germany, from England, really quite a wide range.But not with Margrieta's experience, and that is the kindof thing thathistorians jumpon, this unusual feature in alife. From the little I know about trade patterns, the loveof luxury, and their development in the North Americancolonies, the taste for luxury goods begins just at the veryend of the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century.There she is selling goods in New York, already knowing

about Asian goods. So one ofthe things I ask right awayis: Isshe insome sense partof thevanguard, with thekindofknowledge that she brought? Those are the strategiesthatwe use to try to create a world around the person, totry to create a sense of what that person felt, or, ifnot felt,then thought, or the taste that person had. That life, thethings around her, that is how we move. It just shows onceagain thatan inventory isn't just an inventory; the inventory is anopening ontoasetofrelationships andastyle ofliving.

pnm: We thought of the inventory in the first instance,and most narrowly, as a kind of checklist. As we startedwork, we thought about it as a map, and finally we cameto think about it as a genealogy. What about the emotionalside ofthings? How do you think ofaccessing this througha list of goods?

nzd: Iwould find it hard to look for affect in an inventory.I think you can look for sensibility inan inventory. WhenI am looking to re-create the life of a figure for whom Ihave a lot ofgaps, and where I have very little ifanythingwritten by the person, or by someone who knew him orher, I have to work quite hard to find situations where Igetfeeling. Thefirst question I'd ask is: Why would you needit? Ifyou are trying to create a whole portrait ofsomeone,Margrieta van Varick, you might want to get feeling,because you are thinking about her relationships with herhusbands. Wriat was the quality or feeling in those marriages? Or what about Margrieta van Varick's relationshipto her children? You might not get a great deal ofaffectthere, butyou could at least see what kind ofgifts she provided them, what kind of concern is shown by her forthem in her will, sinceshe died after her husband. So, thereare ways, with certain kinds ofdocuments, that you can getat afreet.

Now, with someone like Margrieta van Varick, I donot think you can get this from the inventory unless youhave, perhaps, books in theinventory. Ifonly I knew whatwas in the packet ofbooks that the estimators did notopenbecause they were all in Dutch and other foreign tongues;ifonly I had those books and saw some interesting seventeenth-century novels, or some Dutch poetry. What if Isaw that she owned some ofAnna Maria van Schurmanswritings? I don't know ifAnna MariavanSchurman wrote

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very much that wasnot in Latin, but maybe there issomething in Dutch. This extraordinarily learned woman wasonly a generation older than Margrieta vanVarick. Whatif I opened the boxof books and found this? Or what if Ifound some of the Dutch spiritualist writing of the time?That would be a way to really look at sensibility, and if Ifound those there, I could imagine—but I would be imag-ining from a text—what those discussions might be withher Dutch Reformed husband, whose position might beeither more or less pietist.

So there areways, I think, in which you could get intoa universe, not only of thought but also of possible affect,which would allow you to enrich the relationship. If youopened that box and found some medical texts or somepedagogical texts, they might give you some insights intothe kind of relationships she might havehad with her children. That would be a path. Finally, however, you justwork with what you have. Fromseeing this inventory, youmight be able to think about the kind of feelings peoplehave about their possessions, especially—and thishas beendone with some very interesting Italian inventories2—ifyou see what room objects are in, or the care with whichsomeone hasarranged their possessions. So, if not a movement toward passionate love, or great anger, or dislike,there can be a movement toward a feeling for order or afeeling of beauty. These would be some of the views ofMargrieta that you could piece together with a lotofcareful work.

pnm: It so happens in the inventory that therearea lot ofsilver children's toys.

nzd: Well, there we are Are they her own possessions,or are these things for sale?

pnm: They are her own possessions.

nzd: I think that's wonderful. In the inventories I have in

Suriname, I don't recall much in the wayof silver children'stovs. This seems like a verv interesting mother. When Ithink about how to fill that in, this is a real boon. There

is a greatdeal of scholarship nowon child rearing and theeducation of children, and many sources for it in the medical literature, as well as pictorial literature and religiousinstructional literature. Rudolf Dekker has compiled awhole collection of autobiographical memoirs, either by

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About an Inventory

people in the Netherlands when they were quiteyoung ormemoirs in which interesting things are said about children.3 He hassomething for the seventeenth century, onefrom an artisan family, one from a farm family, one froma middle-class family. So that one could, if one wanted to,thicken the meanings around Margrieta van Varick's silvertoys; one could really do quite a lot. There she is in thecolonv with the English, with some English children, andwith Indian childrenwho aregrowingup not too far away,and fighting, alas, and beingbadly treatedby the Europeancolonists in several instances. But still one could imaginea very interesting comparison. We do know quite a lotabout English child-rearing in the seventeenth century,including even collections of folk tales and stories told tochildren. Folklorists have collected stories from that veryperiod, and someof the newwork on indigenous peoplesfrom that part of Americahas been attentive to what theydid with their children. So already I can seesome kind ofa world that you could construct just starting with thechildren's toys, always knowing, however, that youarenotliterally getting Margrieta's example, but that you are placing her in a context.

pnm: Do you think inferiority isaccessible through material goods? Or do we need things like books or other kindsof "'ego documents" to get some senseof the past person'sinner life?

nzd: It's a challenge to focus on a particular figure if youdon't have a diaryor even an account book with littlenoteson the side, or a hvmnbook in which she might haveunderlined something, or letters between her and her chil-dren—theywere too young. If we think of Margrieta vanVarick, we know that she is literate; she has books. We

knowthat she has a circle of people with whomshe iskeeping accounts. So we could begin to imagine something

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about her, at least her range of knowledge, justbyknowingwhere she was and having a sense of the bodies of information that she had to have about business, about religion,about travel, about the customs of people. I think, in termsof inferiority, we could imagine also how she felt about

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the Native Americans, the indigenous peoples whom shesaw. I do not know what her sensibilitywas, but in thinkingabout her, I would be attentive to the fact that she hadalready been in connection with a non-Christian world in

About an Inventory

Malaysia, a world ofpeople who grew up very differentlyfrom what she knew in the Dutch Republic. This helps usthink about the possibilities of her perceptions.

pnm: The bookshelf ofa certain sort ofwoman in the seventeenth century is oneofthethings that we have thoughtabout. Without knowing her books, could we speculateon some of the most commonly found titles?

nzd: Yes, I think you could do that. The texts that I havefor seventeenth-century Dutch women tend to be thoseof verv learned women, like Antoinette Bourignon, who

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was a great religious virtuoso of learning, or Anna Mariavan Schurman, or MariaSibylla Merian, who was Germanand Dutch and very learned in natural philosophy.-* It isnot thesame thing with Margrieta van Varick, butyou doknow thatshe traveled, and youknow that she was in business. Therefore, we have toexpect that she might have hadsomecommercial handbooks. Aid you knowthat her husband was a Reformed pastor, and therefore there wouldhave been hymn books, prayer books, religious texts, andthe Bible on that shelf. So I think that one could imaginea bookshelf.

One of the things I would do, and I would like to doit right now, is togo back to a book that I was looking atjust the other day inconnection with books purchased inSuriname, a big study of the Amsterdam book trade from1680 to 1725.5 The book contained the names of publishers and thekind of books they published, as well as allsorts of information about the people who bought fromthem. You could start to imagine a bookshelf partly bylooking atsome ofthe women who are on their publishers'records and the books they bought. This is a big project.I think that one could put together a possible bookshelfbyusing existing Dutch inventories and by thinking aboutthe life she led. It is very important that her life was bothreligious and commercial and that she was a mother. Myguess would be that hers was not a very big bookshelf, withperhaps twenty books on it. I think that this would belovely to think about. It is a possibility for Margrieta vanVarick.

Somethingelse that one could do to tease out this life,to speculate on it, would be to look at patterns ofgifting.She herself may not have done any trading orexchangingwith theAmerindians. As I say about Quebec at thistime,

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any major exchange with indigenous peoples was alwaysdone in the form ofagift, together with some accompanying ceremony and dining. Margrieta herself may nothave been involved in that, but the people she dealr withcertainly were. And gifts would bean important elementin her relationship with her neighbors and within thechurch. So this is something that one could ask about:What items in her inventory would be likely to serve asgifts? Is that achoice you can make? Inworking on this foran earlier period, sixteenth-century France, I found thatmany different kinds ofthings could be gifts, dependingon the situation.6 But for neighborly relations on an everyday basis, the girt was food. People were always giving eachother food. It was constantly being shared, and not onlywith the poor. Certain things—intimate apparel, jewelry—were passed on to the next generations through wills andsometimes as gifts duringa lifetime, as an intervivos trust.Books were a frequent gift among people who could read,and I wonder whether there were similar patterns in NewYork. Were there prized objects suitable for gift exchangethatcould bespeculated about in herinventory? Does herwill mention anything special about gifts to the childrenor gifts to people other than her heirs?

pnm: The will is focused on the children. And there aregifts, but mostly they are money, silver coins; there is evena gold Arabian ducat...

nzd: For the children?

pnm: Yes, and they are all wrapped up in napkins.

nzd: Well, ifyou know that they are wrapped up in napkins, you're a lucky man! I always wonder, when I look atgifts, what they were wrapped up in. This is wonderful.When I was doing my gift book on the sixteenth century,I kept wondering: How were these presented to people?What were they wrapped up in? Were they put into boxesand then were the boxes opened? I think it is lovely thatthere were all those special packages, that you know howshe kept them. Did you know that that was such a nicelittle fact?

pnm: No.

nzd: Well, I think it is lovely that you can know that. Ihave done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of wills

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in my time. I have done them for the early period, and Iam doing them now from eighteenth-century Suriname,and I very rarely find anything about how things are presented. You sometimes get a sense when you see picturesof small chests orboxes thatmay have been used to presentgifts. Often in women's wills in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you find them giving garments or bed-

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clothes to relatives. Jewelry is given not onlyto children ortheir heirs but sometimes also to friends; sometimes youfind "my best skirt" beinggiven to a sisteror a friend.

I've always wanted to have information like that, butI've never found it. I've never, ever found informationabout how something is wrapped. It's a total surprise. Morethan once I have been asked "What did they wrap themin?" We are soattentive to wrapping nowadays.

I would wonder whether Margrieta van Varick had servants towhom she might also have given a garment, orsomelinens, or somethingof that kind. Did she have servants?

pnm: She had a slave.

nzd: Oh, she had a slave! I knew that there were slaves.An African slave or ...

pnm: We do not know. I think it was a woman slave.

nzd: I see. Did she provide for her manumission in the ...

pnm: No.

nzd: Did she try to Christianize her, do you know? Iwould immediately ask those questions. Although Margrieta had a Reformed husband, it does not mean that hewould necessarily try to Christianize the slave woman. Ihave been working very hard on this in Suriname, wherethe Reformed pastors all have plantations, some of thempretty huge sugar plantations with lots of slaves. Duringtheeighteenth century, and even later, the pattern ofconversion is to select onlythose of the slaves whomtheythinkare quite unusual and convert them. They might baptizethe babies, but they do not involve them in education orbecoming church members if theyare free lateron. It wasnot automatic even with a minister. But Margrieta is in ahousehold where Christian teaching and preaching aregoing on. And that slave would know something aboutChristianity by being there, although she might be just ashappy to be left with herown gods, theAfrican gods that

About an Inventory

she knew. Do you know whether the slave was born inAfrica? At that date, she probably would have been bornin Africa and would have been part of the very rich andcomplex and interesting spirit religion ofWest Africa. Butifshewasn't, did Margrieta sell her?

What was her name? That would be an interestingthing tolook at—to see whether they gave her aChristianname, or whether they gave her a name like Amiba orMina or Amina.

pnm: Her name was Bette. Is this short for Elizabeth, andtherefore on the Christianizing path?

nzd: Not necessarily. Bette is an indeterminate name. Ihave plantation inventories, and Iassure you that I look atthe names of all of those slaves, because if I see in an inventory ofa Christian plantation thenames John orJames orChristopher among names like Neptune, Jupiter, August,or Prince, I prick up my ears, especially if after the nameJohn or James or Christopher is the word "mulatto."Because it means that there is some interest in conversion,eventually. It is similar on theJewish plantations, where Imight suddenly see Sarah, Abraham, and Isaac (althoughI am more likely to see Ishmael than Isaac) followed by"amulatto" and then the names Prince, Jupiter, Amina,Amiba. I know that there is something happening here.So the names of theslaves on an inventory can teach you;they can be precious clues. In this little interchange, weare seeing the kinds of things that you can learn from aninventory. Just like the clue that I was also excited aboutbefore, about the wrapping of the coins. Could that betied up with her experience in Malacca?

pnm: So, may we turn to these goods acquired in theEast?

nzd: I would imagine that Margrieta had some specialmemories about the gifts that she bought from India, theEast Indian trade, and the Japanese trade. Those wereimportant years in herlife. She was young when she wentout; her first husband was involved with India, her uncle—in the role of her father—with Japan. The objects werespecial and exotic for her, although familiar at the sametime, and I would imagine that they played an importantrole in her house and in her life and memory. She mightsell some of them, but she would keep some and expectthrough her will to pass these things to herchildren. Did

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she simply give all her household goods to her children?Are they the heirs For all her mobilier, aswe say?

pnm: There are special bequests, and then there is just along list or things.

nzd: Yes. But are the special bequests to them? I shouldthink that there would be some objects that came in, perhaps as gifts orperhaps through purchase, from that periodof her life. They would have a special statusand would bepassed on to herchildren with memories, since they mayhave been young at the time. I am reminded or a very-interesting project bya wonderful anthropologist, WilliamA. ChristianJr., who is nowdoing a study or things." Theproject involves an ethnography or things, not from aninventory in this case, but from actually living with afamily in their lastyears. They were big collectors, but notfancy collectors, college professors who collected thingsthey were interested in. And it is very interesting to lookat all the stories that surrounded each object in their house,and what then happened to them as they had to give uptheir house and move. To be sure, people's relationshipsto "things" in late rwentieth-centurv Madison, Wisconsin,

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are not going to be thesame as in late seventeenth-centuryFlatbush. but it is suggestive. I have seen his film showingthis family talking about their things, touching their

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things, telling stories about them, and onecan imagine—partlv because we know it from writings or the seventeenthcentury—conversations that Margrieta van Varick hadwith her children as she first showed them these objects.Or conversations with the women members in her con

gregation: "Oh ves, I got this because it was given to mvuncle" or "it was given to my first husband" or "it came infrom theJapanese trade."This is the way in which objectsare enriched.

pnm: If I could interrupt just to amplify the situation.Margrieta was an orphan, and her uncle really took theplace of her father, so that it is even more possible thatthese items could be emotionally...

nzd: Yes. bothfrom family, and from family living in apart of the world very different from the Netherlands inwhich she was born, or the Flatbush where her childrenwere growing up and continuing their lives. Since herdaughter ended up marrying a very gifted silversmith, I

would think about that asperhaps a legacy that might havecome from those silver toys and other objects that surrounded her when she was a child. Of course, daughtersgooffand do all kinds of things. We know they don't necessarily follow in their family's footsteps. But still, there isa kind of relationship here to crafting things and to silverthat you see here; it's a continuity that one might thinkabout. You were telling me that the husband of Margrietavan Varick was part of a revolt?

PNM: Her second husband, Rudolphus, was caught up inLeisler's Rebellion. It is complicated, but this was a verylocal response to the overthrow in England of James IIafter the invasion by William and Mary, who were sovereigns of the Netherlands, in 1688. Some ofthe local Dutchwho had chared under the centralized authority createdby James's governor, William Andros, sought to reassertDutch authority. Van Varick at first supported the rebels,and then he broke with them because of their excesses. He

was jailed at the instigation of somecongregants and wasonly released after five months in prison. Hiscongregantsresented his position, and there was a noticeable drop-offin church attendance, even after his restoration. Back

wages were still outstanding at the time or his death.s

nzd: If hercongregation was at allsplit, it would have hadimplications for her social relationships. I am sure thatsome of the women in the congregation continued to befriendly to her, and it doesn't seem from her inventory,and the list of debtors, that she lost customers. On the

other hand, depending on how long-standing some ofthose debts were, they might testify toa real drop-off inherstanding, perhaps reflecting her husband's ostracism forrejecting Leisler. But it is a long list.This is a woman withextensivecommercial connections; this is not a tiny traderwith a stall. Shewas really dealing with people. So at leastin the commercialcontext, it does not lookas though shewas in any way cut off. Yet there might have been a contraction in her social life.

What I would expect, not having seen diaries there,but knowing them from both the Netherlands and fromSuriname and France as well, is that her social life wouldhave consisted of a lotof people going back and forth fordinner. There would certainly have been a Sundaydinnerat Pastor van Varick's house, where all the best silverwould

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be put out, and the pewter, if that's what they had; butcertainly theywouldhave used the best silver and the nicestofdishes, and it would have been an occasion for displayofthe objects from India andJapan that she had broughtfrom the East Indies. And there would have been reciprocated dinner invitations, at least from the wealthier members of their congregation, those of the same status.

pnm: How do you think the congregants would have feltabout seeing all of those high-end Indian, East Indian,Japanese things? Would theVan Varicks have been seen asshowing off? Could that have been resulted in some discomfort that the community might have had with them?

nzd: I could imagine two reactions. One is not merelythat it was ostentatious, but that it was sensuous and ori

ental. Thiswould carrywith it someof the stereotypes thatyou find in the earlier puritanical literature: that this iseastern, luxurious, and tempting. Butsome were probablyquite impressed and tempted. By the eighteenth century,in a different Dutch setting at Suriname, the discourse ofluxury is that luxury is good. Those whoarecritical of howfar it goes are critical of the indolence of the plantationowners. I don't know how any of this would have playedin late seventeenth-century Flatbush, but I wonder, at leastwith the wealthier families who have lots of servants and

slaves, whether the slippage away from a more strictReformed ethic in regard to luxury is not perhaps presentalready at the beginning. Certainly, by theearly eighteenthcentury thereareastute traders in the Hudson Valley whoknow that people want luxury goods. I would expect amixed reaction from the people in her husband's congregation and among their neighbors.

pnm: One ofthe inventory items that has been achallengefor us to figure out is listed as "Indian babies."

nzd: Indian babies?

pnm: So weare thinking...

nzd: Dolls? Baby dolls?

pnm: ...small ceramic figures, probably from China butthat are called "Indian," probably for "East Indian."

nzd: Ofgods. Of divine figures. Well, yes, that's an interesting thing in the household of a Reformed minister's

About an Inventory

wife. Unless we are going tosee this as anearly example ofecumenism. That is interesting. Theymightbesmall statuettes of Indian gods, divinities, Hindu divinities.

pnm: Entering hercollection, they might simply have beenaestheticized or perhaps viewed as toys for the children.

nzd: Yes, yes, yes.

pnm: As they shift contexts, they also shed meaning

nzd: Yes, but if they were divinities, it would be quite astep for them to become toys for the children. I couldimagine their becoming exoticized and then becoming acuriosity, but—This is really a fascinating puzzle. Firstofall, if it really were a statuette of an Indian divinity ora Hindu god, how would she haveobtained it? Is this thekind of thing that would have been sold by some Indianmerchant to an Indian? Maybe it would be collected, orcollected and then given as a gift. Butyou wouldn't thinkthat an Indian believer would make a gift of an Indianstatuette divinity to a nonbeliever.

pnm: Perhaps in a marketstallwhere the husband or uncleis going to buysomething else and picks it up on theside?

nzd: Then it could be picked up. And profaned. I wouldwonder about its being made a plaything for one's children,however, even ifyoucompletely de-exoticize and de-sacral-ize it and so forth. You know, there were still witchcraftbeliefs in the late seventeenth-century world, and in NorthAmerica. And I would wonder more about its setting in acabinet ofcuriosities than its becoming a toy, but perhapsI am wrong.

pnm: This is a question thatwe have thought a lotabout.At whatpoint do a person's possessions constitute a collection, or not a collection?

nzd: I can tell from my plantation inventories what possessions are likely to be for practical use. Many itemsarepieces of equipment used in sugar boiling or in coffeemaking—that is part of the story—and then there arethings that are used for meals, for cooking, andsoon. Itis when I get to the books that I start looking for thingsthat are used in a religious life. And with books andpaintings I begin to look for collecting. Does she havepaintings?

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pnm: She has pictures. Some of them are family portraits—of Rudolphus, of Margrieta, of thechildren. Someare just generically defined, such as a "picture with agildedframe." There is one obscurely described as "sheep andships."

nzd: And are they mostly from the Netherlands ordoyouthink that some paintings may have been painted elsewhere?

pnm: There is a listing for an "East India picture." Is it apicture of the East Indies painted in the Netherlands? Oris it somekind of pictureproduced in the East that couldbe a panel or a kind of textile representation?

nzd: You said, "East India" picture? Well, that is wonderful. I think these puzzles are a delight. They should belooked at not as a hindrance, but as something that leadstoa kind ofspeculation. I hope thatyou are going toleavespace for viewers at your exhibition to think about someof these problems. You know, give the option ofdeciding"What could this mean?"

pnm: That is exactly what we want to do. Every exhibition poses interpretative challenges. In this one, and verymuch in keeping with our roleasan educational institution interested in the mechanics of studying the materialworld, we want to incorporate these questions into theexhibition itself, as much as is possible. So, for instance,where there is an ambiguity in the inventory, we mightlike tosuggest the different possible ways ofinterpreting it.

nzd: I would wonder what the term "Indian babies" wasin the original Dutch. If I were making a film about it, itwould be fun to imagine this colonial Dutchman turningtoanAfrican slave woman andsaying "What is this?" Andshe says: "Well, that is an Indian baby." Orsomething thatshe knew from aconnection with the Indians, orsomethingof this kind. In A Mercy, a book byToni Morrison set inexactly the same period, youhave thisconnection betweenan African slave woman and an Indian slave woman.9

pnm: How did the world seem to people living in placeslike New York in the seventeenth century?

nzd: It depends on your situation, whether you are apatroon, an Indian tribal chief, or the wife ofsuch aperson

who would have been very important as well. Or whetheryou are a slave. But, it would seem to me, that all thepeople we have talked about have some travel in their experience. Either their parents have traveled, or they have traveled. If they are Munsee or Mohawk or Poughkeepsie,whatever the tribe, they have a lot of movement in theirexperience. Sospace and encounters would really seem tome part of ordinary experience for most people in NewYork. And the model of villagers who stayed put, asopposed to those who moved, the European model—which might not even be right for Europe—the villagerswho for centuries had their family in the same village, isprobably oversimplified, because we know people movefor business affairs. But I do not think that this stereotypical model could apply tothe late seventeenth-centuryNorth America or the Caribbean that I am familiar with.

pnm: So could we think about a Dutch imperial worldproducing different kinds ofpeople? Those who would goand move around would, and those who stayed at home?

nzd: I think that is a legitimate contrast. But let's leaveAmsterdam and look at Hem, where the Van Varicks livedbetween their stints in Malacca and Flatbush, or some ofthe smaller areas, where some of my Surinamese peoplecome from. It may not make as much ofa splash, but itwould not be strange to them to have a relative who isliving very, very far away and might come back to visit. Idon't know about Flatbush and New York, but I do knowthat in the Dutch Antilles and Curasao and Surinamepeople are sending things back.The Dutch settlers aresending plants back to the Amsterdam botanical garden,for instance. So there is aknowledge exchange that is goingon that makes a difference. I do not want to make everything alike. I just mean that there are patterns of communication that are opened upand a knowledge exchangein objects, scientific objects, objects for health, things toeat, which come back to Europe.

pnm: Inyour prologue to Women on the Margins, you gaveyourself a rebuke from Glikl of Hameln, who called you"thewicked daughter."10

nzd: [Laughs]

pnm: Do you think all historians are "wicked daughters">

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nzd: [Laughs] I think so. Exposing things that maybe families don't want to have said or...

pnm: When you said "wicked daughter," I was thinking,obviously, about the Passover seder and the wicked sonwho is rebuked because hisquestion is: "What areall theserituals for you?"

nzd: Right.

pnm: "For you and not for him," right?

nzd: Yes.

pnm: So the question is whether the historians are alwaysnecessarily stepping back from things, so that everyoneand everything is a "you"?

nzd: Yes. In terms of the seder, whenever we have our seder,I always try to do a riffon the wicked son's saying "I don'tthinkhe was fairly treated." Just asking—he was just interested in asking what they meant "to you" in order to understand where the other person wascoming from. And thenhe could decide how, once he knew. So I havealways triedto defend that as a good question, and perhaps it is indeedbecause I am an historian. But it isextraordinarily important to step back from yourown understandings, your owncategories, and your own reaction to say what an objectmight be, and do all you can to understand how the worldisseen through the eyes of your subjects, whether you likethem or not, whether you disagree with them or not. Thatis your duty. I have sometimes worked on very violentpeople, andmy job is to understand where they are comingfrom. Tosee themaspart of the range of humanexperienceand make sense of it. It does involve stepping back and nothaving loyalty toany one side while you are doing the workof excavation, of exploration, and of interpretation. Youcan still, finally, in the end, make a judgment, but onlyafter you have been very fair toyour characters. What I tryto do myself—if I can, if I have a judgment I want tomake—is to say it through somebody of the time. In otherwords, I don't say, "This is the final word." I justmake surethat that particular point ofview gets expressed by some,sav, seventeenth-centurv figure. When I was working onMarie de l'lncarnation, oneof my Women on the Marginswho was a very engaged Catholic andbelieved deeply thatbringing Christianity to the Algonquian and Iroquois

About an Inventory

women would be important for them—and in some waysfor some of them it was—I was still able to bring in anotherperspective, notonethat I necessarily thought was therightone in this case, but I wanted it to be dialogic. I simplyquotedwhat Marie herself reported—and I think reportedaccurately, because it was critical of her: the voice of anIndian woman, an Algonquian woman, who didn't wantto see these Jesuits coming into hervillage. I was able to bemultivocal without interjecting what /think about the seventeenth century but keeping it to what they thought. Letit be that way. That is my preference, finally, to let themspeak—but the strategy is to try to get as many differentviews aspossible. And then youget the sense ofwhat's possible in a period, rather than imposing our own sense ofpossibility.

pnm: How does one balance the "you" and the "us"? Thebeing apart and the belonging? Because while historiansdistance themselves in order to understand, they sometimes also have to comeclose and use an empathetic imagination to unlock hidden doors to the past.

nzd: It is funny, but though I do try very hard to becloseto my people, by working on every bit of every scrap ofevidence I can get about them, or to people who arecloseto them if I cannot get acquainted with them—I usuallydon't use theword empathy. I prefer the word imagination.I try to imagine myself how they might have looked at acertain situation. That is the way that you try togetall thecontext and look at how they would see theirpredicamentand the categories they would use, and you do the bestyou can with that.

I find myselfhampered sometimes, not in that areabut in being able to visualize what they looked like. Withal-Wazzan, my"Leo Africanus," I was never able to imaginewhat he looked like.11 I had pictures of others, one ofwhom, aTunisian sultan, I put in the book, as somebodywho was from his part of the world at the same period.Currently I've been trying to imagine the appearance ofa slave woman. In my Suriname book, there is a veryremarkable slave woman who shared the bed of the estatemanager and had five children with him. Then, when hewent away and she thought he wasn't coming back, shebecame the lover of the most remarkable slave on theplantation, who later ran away from the plantation and

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became a leader ofthe Maroons. Anyway, I begin to thinkthat this must have been an extraordinary-lookingwoman. She must have been a tall, handsome, blackwoman with an amazing presence, to have been able toaccomplish all that. I began to think it was really important to know what she looked like. I do not even know literally which of the West African communities she wasfrom, I just know that her father was from the Guineacoast. I wonder what Margrieta van Varick looked like. Doyou have any sense of that? And do we have paintings ofany of the women in that community?

pnm: Yes. In the exhibition, for example, we have a portrait of Hester Leisler.

nzd: Yes, I see. So we don't have a portrait ofMargrieta herselfBut perhaps from die garments chat you had from her, you couldimagine awoman with aplain face whom you could dress in thosegarments? Could one do diat? Iam actually quite interested nowingarments because Iam working on slave women, and makinggarments was oneofdiediings diat diev did. Thewoman Ihavebeen discussing, dieremarkable slave woman from Suriname, wasalso aseamstress, and her daughter, who was die partner and loverof a Scottish-Dutch soldier, was a seamstress as well. Thev weregiven textiles, even some ofthe textiles ofEmpire diat came in onthese boats. This is the middle ofdie eighteendi century, and the}'were making garments diat were described by Europeans as luxurygarments because even die slaves were very dressed up. And so theability to visualize figures has become more important in myworkdian ever before, partly because slave women and freed womenmade dieir way in the world by how they looked.

pnm: So how to think about the Dutch minister's wifewith all her polished silver and the Japanese gowns andthe Indian textiles—really an abundance ofgarments, byfar the single largest category in the inventory—sitting inher house in Flatbush?

nzd: I think she felt regretful. Do you think she felt thather world was a little bit less elegant, a come-down fromthe way she had lived before? It would be nice to knowwhether she or her husband were invited to the homesofthe prominent Dutch families. Were there any ofthem inthe congregation? Did her husband have any wealthypeople coming to his church? Really wealthy people?

pnm: There are some nor very wealth}'. It was a farmingcommunity. Much more humble than the patroons oftheHudson Vallev.

nzd: It was a farming community. If there were othersfrom the Dutch Republic and the same background, Iwonder if she felt that by showing off these possessions,she was snootier than these people were.

pnm: Now we are back to our question about the affectof things

nzd: Yes.

pnm: All right. I mean it is not only the emotional connection to her family, but she also has these luxurious varments, textiles, wall hangings.

NZD: Yes, and they are going about in their beeaver hats.

Laughs]

pnm:And she may haveused them or seen them in use inMalacca, and now she has them in the great kast in herhouse but there are no...

nzd: ...other occasions on which she can wear them.Would she have worn a coverall, a shawl? Could she haveworn it to the Sabbath service?

pnm: She might have, but then what are the degrees ofpropriety? It is what we talked about before, the semanticsof these objects in acommunity. Do they change over time?Do they become nostalgic? Do they become accusatorv?

nzd: Well, I am sure that if I were Margrieta and I werein that situation, I would give some away as gifts to someofthe other ladies in the congregation, to win them over.[Laughs] That would be mv strategy! And it might noteven be projecting from the twenty-first century back intothe past. Gift exchange, you know, was very important asa form of alliance and was used for making friends. Itwould be a way todisarm jealousy. Do you have the inventories of some of the other people in her neighborhood?

pnm: Nobody has done asurvey to try to map out and seewhether the names in her community or on her debt listhave inventories that survive.

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nzd: I think that your exhibition already has severalmaster's theses if not doctoral dissertations' worth of ideas

that people could run with. I mean you could really try toset up a program—not just taking individual inventoriesbut actually studying how they hook up to a network. Anda network where youmightbeable to follow objects a littlebit. One of the things that I most enjoyed in myworkonbooks as gifts was the fact that since they were books youcould follow the path of gifting and its relationship tobuying. Sometimes a book bounced down several decadesas a gift, signed each time, and then it might be sold andgo back to being a gift again. I think it would be possibleto follow someobjects through ifyou have all these inventories.

pnm: There are actually not so many surviving from theseventeenth century. One of the contributors to thevolume, Ruth Piwonka, has worked on this, and in heressay [chap. 7], sheactually compares Margrieta's inventorywith thoseof somecontemporarywomen.

nzd: Oh, wonderful. Have you seen any sign of Indianobjects or China bowls?

pnm: Not yet.

nzd: One of the things I wonder about is whether hertrading in Flatbush was not building on skills or privatetrade that she maywell have acquired in Malacca. I do notknow how much she did when she was in Hem or whether

she had gone into trading during that interval, but I wouldexpect that it was probably a very interesting experience forher, having seen trade in Malacca. Shecomes to Flatbushand becomes very successful, thanks to the number ofclients that she has in the local trade, whether or not thatwas a new experience for her. She might not have beennewat trading, but each place hassome of itsown customsand its ownways of accounting. I mean, here she is counting in wampum. She certainly was not counting inwampumwhen she was in Hem. So I think that must havebeen quite a learning experience for her—an expansion ofher universe in a fascinating way.

pnm: Do you think she would have been afraid when herhusband died and she had to set out on her own? Howmightshe have experienced that?

About an Inventory

nzd: Well, there are widows in her list ofaccounts, so thereare widows around. This happened to women a lot, andpeople died at quite a rate in that early period. He presumably left her something to live with. I would expectthat ifshehad survived shewould certainly have remarried.Certainly with two little children and with a prosperousbusiness, that would have been a very good marriage forsomeone even younger than she was. A pattern that Ifound in Suriname—I don't know whether it was the case

in Manhattan or in Flatbush—is that voung men whocome from the Netherlands as estate managers marriedand try to marry heiresses. There are a number of the marriages there that in sixteenth-century Europe we call a"charivari" because the women are much older than the

men. Not every marriage in Suriname was like that, ofcourse, but there were some couples who are really quitedisparate in age, and it is because people want a marriageto have a plantation continued, and to have a family lifecontinued in some way or another. With Margrieta, I thinkshe would not be afraid. She was a woman of property. Awoman of extensive trade would expect, if she survived,to remarry. She would have managed.

pnm: To shift gears slightly... our Van Varick project is apiece of microhistory [narrative reconstructions fromarchival sources, often intended to record other matters,such as the lives of individual people of no great account,and therefore able to shed light on "ordinary" conditionsfor "ordinary people"]. Why do you think there has beensuch a great interest in, and practice of, microhistory inthe past decades?

nzd: It followed in thewake of broad social history. Youhave to see that as a context, that is, people doing veryexciting things, the peasants of theLanguedoc, the Englishworking class, or even, in my case, a large populationwithin a city. That kind of social history involves lots ofpeople, lots of cases, lots of examples, even if you are notdoingquantitative history. The turn toward microhistory,I think, was often connected with wanting toget very closeto the nature of experience. To press into the nature ofexperience. It had to do with interest in certain anthropological questions that were answered by the direct observation of small groups. The microhistory possibility, thiskind ofvery small focus, seemed to open up the path to

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getting closer to the nature of lived experience, from whichyou could then try to generalize.

For me, anvwav, there was also an interest in lookingat kinds of behavior that could not be so readily explicatedin terms of rational interest—activities connected with

performance, with festivity. Now, you could lookat thesein terms of large social history too, but often their meaningcan bedeepened by a very tight look at a case. I thinkthat is part of the picture. Again I am speaking for myself,but it is also true for some of the other historians I know,including John Demos, Jonathan Spence, and others whohave written microhistory and to some extent CarloGinzburg, whose microhistory has been pioneering,although what I am saying now may be less relevant tohim since he was interested in the movement of ideas. Also

turning to microhistory hadsomething to do with thewayyou wanted to tell a story, not only what you wanted tolearn, but how you wanted to write, and whom youwanted to reach. And it was critically important in goodmicrohistory to choose cases that were telling, thatspokebeyond the individual case to larger issues, whether thesewere larger issues in the relationships between the indigenous American peoples andearly settlers, or between peasantsand judges, aswas the case with myMartinGuerre.12

You wanted to speak beyond that, but you also wantedto have a story that youcould tell people. Therewas somevery good social history written of the large kind. I mean,it is great fun to read Lawrence Stones remarkable quantitative studies with all their examples, and the broadvisions of Fernand Braudel on The Mediterranean makewonderful reading. But this is not always accessible reading to large numbers of people. And through these micro-histories you can often tell a story in a way that wouldsometimes lead people to say to me "Oh, I read yourMartin Guerre like a novel," or "I sat down and I read it

at a single sitting." So that was another appealing thing.Certainly my decision to work on a film before I wrotethe book on Martin Guerre was precisely because I thoughtI had a marvelous story with really interesting, thick, historical implications to it, not at all obvious. I could tell alot of important things about peasants, but I wanted towork with filmmakers because I thought: here is a greatsixteenth-century story that will appeal easily to millionsofpeople, and it is good for them to know a little bitabout

the past, that it is different from the present. I think thatsome of these things about forms of narrative—vvavs oftelling a story—are part of the interest in microhistory.Now you have this with your exhibition, and itcan be veryappealing to people who might not want to pick up andread a book about inventories. But here is the world ofawoman, the worlds around a woman. People will want tocome and see this, in a setting where there are texts, wherethere are objects, where there are cabinets. Thewav youwant to tell a story is very much part of the decision.

pnm: I was going to ask you about the affinity betweenmicrohistory and exhibitions. Do you do a lot of exhibitions? Because I was thinking of your work on film.

nzd: No, I occasionally talk to people who have donethem, but I have never... Actually, I did one, with Tony[Anthony Grafton] and a few students, on Gender in theAcademy: Women andLearningfrom Plato to Princeton., inconnection with the twentieth anniversary of womencoming to Princeton.13

pnm: My last question has to do with using material evidence, as opposed to textual evidence, and how you feelabout thechallenges and opportunities ofusing things totalk.

nzd: Well, I think it'sgreat to usewhatever evidence voucan. Material evidence I've used just a little,and wheneverIdo, I like tosee it inconnection with texts—to help makeit talk. My main material evidence is actually books, booksnot just for their content, but as physical objects. I do thisall the time, checking out the way the book looks, theinscriptions in it, and so on. It isa moment of affect. WhenI want to introduce mv students to seeing the book as amaterial object, I hold the class in a rare-book room, andI always say to them: "You actually have in your handssomething that was held in the hands of someone in1542...or 1702...or 1831." And I feel this when I am

usingmanuscripts too. "You once held this," I think, abouta scribe or a reader or perhaps even the author himself orherself. Part of mysense ofwhatI thinkofas my contractwith the past comes from these experiences with an objectand a text: I got this because you wrote it, or you madeit... and that's a source of mv sense ofobligation to them.Actually, I prefer to use the language ofgifts rather than the

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language of contract. Mysense of obligation comes fromthe fact that they gave it to me, and my obligation is totry to understand it as best I can, and to see what was theirwork. Either what they intended, or how it functioned inthe world around them, or how other people may haveseen it. But also there is a veryspecial moment, when yousee objects like a textile or a shoe or something that hasbeen preserved, likea Viking ship, from a very, very longtime ago. Or when you see a beautiful necklace or anykind of jewelry from millennia ago, quite apart from thescholar who wants to understand "Where did they getthis?" or "Where did this stone come from?"

In all of that, there is always a moment when I feel—and I would use the word now—empathy, although notnecessarily in the scholarly sense. I am thinking: "What

1. LindaColley, The Ordeal ofElizabeth Marsh: A Wo/nan in World History(New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).

2. RcnataAgo, // Gusto delleCose. UnaStoria degli OJfeti nella Roma deiSeocento (Rome: Donzelli, 2006).

3. Rudolf .VI. Dekker, Childhood. Memory andAutobiography in Holland:From theGolden Age to Romanticism (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000).

4. For Maria SybillaMerian see chap. 3 of Natalie Zemon Davis, Women onthe Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge. MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1995). Ella Reitsma,MariaSibylla Merian and Daughters:Women ofArtandScience (Los Angeles: Getty Publications. 2008). ForAnnaMariavan Schurman, see Choosing theBetter Part: AnnaMaria van Schurman(160^-1678), ed. M. R de Baar, Machteld Lowensreyn. et al. (Dordrecht,Boston: Kluwer, 1996). ForAntoinette Bourignon seeMarthe van der Does,Antoinette Bourignon, 1616-1680: la vieet I'oeuvre... (Amsterdam: HollandUniversityPress, 1974): Joyce Irwin, "Anna Maria van Schurman andAntoinette Bourignon: Contrasting Examples ot Seventeenth-CenturyPietism," Church History 60, no. 3 (September 1991), 301-15.

5. Isabelle Henriette van Eeghen, DeAmsterdamse boekhandel 1680-1 ~25,5 vols. (Amsterdam: Scheltema and Holkema, 1960-1978).

About an Inventory

was it like to wear that necklace around your neck?" Thesense of the woman who put on those earrings, and howshe must have enjoyed putting them on. You do have thismoment, which does not then surface in your writing; itis just part of the pleasure of seeingobjects from the past.Also, it is not only the longer project of understanding,but that moment of a shared life: what it was like to puton the necklace. Of course, you may think: "Yes, but itmight have been different for her. Maybe this was a religious object, who knows." But there is just that onemoment, and then you think, "Oh, what a pretty thing,how lovely to have put that on "

Interview conducted in Toronto on March, 3, 2009, andeditedforpublication by Peter N. Miller.

6. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gifi in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison:Universityor Wisconsin Press, 2000).

7. William A.ChristianJr. is in the midstof an ongoingvideo projecton anoldercouple in Madison. Wisconsin, and the storiesthat go with their possessions,entitled "Lives Through Things: A Wisconsin Familyand What TheySaved."

8. For a killer account, see chap. 6 in this volume.

9. Toni Morrison, A Mercy (New York: Knopf, 2008).

10. Davis, Women on the Margins.11. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslimbetween Worlds (New York: Hill and Wing,2006).12. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return ofMartin Guerre (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1983).

13. Natalie Zemon Davis,Stephen Ferguson,Anthony A. Gratton, et al.,eds.. Gender in theAcademy: Women and Learningfrom Plato to Princeton: AnExhibition Celebrating the 20thAnniversary of Undergraduate Coeducation atPrinceton University (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1990).

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