journal article
LitStream Collection
On Cultivation (2002, 2023)
Davis, Natalie Zemon; Perl, Jeffrey M.
2024 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-11236621
Half of this piece appeared under the title “Postscript on Cultivation: Editorial Note” in Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (spring 2002), and half was written in 2023 by one of the coauthors as a posthumous tribute to the other. The historian Natalie Zemon Davis died on the fourteenth day of the latest war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. The relevance of “Postscript,” which was written following the attacks by al‐Qaeda in the United States on September 11, 2001, is that it redirects the attention of scholars from the battlefield and mass media to the ivory towers in which intellectuals are sometimes said to hide. Cultivated civilians ought to know that cultures strive to erase one another in ways vile but unsurprising. Those who learn history expect atrocity and should busy themselves less with assignment of blame than with archaeology, the preservation of objects, the collection of reports and stories, and the reinforcement — by retiring from the streets into libraries and other spaces of patient cooperation — of the partition between barbarism and civilization. With reference to the religious wars of the sixteenth century, during which — Davis showed in a famous essay — Catholics and Protestants fought each other by day but met by night to collect and distribute alms, Perl commends the urge to withdraw from both combat and protest into institutions doing good works quietly.