The Refashioning Of Martin Guerre Analysis

Strength and Weakness I believe that there is no perfect work. That is to say, every work has its own flaws; Davis’s book is not an exception. It is not an obscure that Davis’s work has few flaws. First, there is an exaggeration of using conjecture; while reading the book, I have noticed that Davis says words, such as “almost certainly,” "clearly," or "must have.” All of these expressions mean the author herself is not certainly sure of what is occurring, which is usually an indication that she is not quite sure. In fact, it is very seldom to find historians recourse to such thing only whenever is necessary. That is, only when historians intended to make a room for uncertainty if they are unsure of their works. On the other hand, honestly,

Obviously enough, in the most cases, historians are not the direct reporters of past events, because there is no way to revisit the specific period of time; but, rather, historians use primary and secondary sources in order to report the historical event. As a result, Davis is exposed to stinging attack from Robert Finlay. He reviews Davis 's book in his article on The Refashioning of Martin Guerre by criticizing her method in writing the story as a historical work. For him, Davis’s treatment of Martin’s story is not a historical work, but rather fiction. Primarily, Finlay focuses on his criticism on Davis’s imagination of reconstructing of the Martin Guerre’s story in order to make a dramatized story. He thinks that Davis should use only full documentary evidence instead of using her imagination. For example, she relies on the Coras’s book, and at the same time; on her intuition and assumption due to the silence in Coras’s text. She responds back to Finlay in her article “On the Lame” in which she notes the “difficulty in the historian’s quest for truth…” The key point here is there is no one single narrative in history, but rather many stories to be told, representing various experiences in the past, is surely foundational to the historiographical school of new history. Also, she defenses her style of writing the book because she wants to make it accessible to the reader not only in the schools, but also to the average person. As a matter of course, the best defense of her book can be found in the article’s conclusion, when she states that Finlay claims cannot be true in any case, when he argues that Bertrande would not be able to tell the difference between the impostor and her real husband. She sites psychology sources to support her argument . Even more, she