The Return Of Martin Guerre Sparknotes

The sixteenth century was a time of change. It was the beginning of the modern era, with the renaissance bringing change to every aspect of life. The novel The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis shares the story of Martin Guerre while revealing important aspects of French society, including work, family, religion, law, and social structure.

Europe depended heavily on trade to survive. Toulouse and Burgos were both trading centers and capitals of commerce in France. At the time, due to the popularity of work as merchants or farmers, people in early modern Europe tended to be uneducated, neither knowing how to read nor write. Uneducation was one of the many walls that furthered the divide between class. Inside a class there were separations too, for instance, the fact that only men were considered when determining class, since, “organizational structure and public identity were associated exclusively with males” (Davis 29).

Typically, women grew up helping around the house until they were married off to a suitable husband. Fathers paid a suitable dowry, large, at once, and with land for the more wealthy families, and broken apart over time for poorer families. Martin Guerre’s wife Bertrande De Rols dowry was generous and came with land, since her family was of a higher

status. Then, once women married, the wife’s jobs were to bear children and help by “hoeing, trimming the vines, cutting grapes”(Davis 30).
Marriage was arranged, typically to suit both families and gain as much wealth or status as possible, just as Martin Guerre married Bertrande De Rols, at the young ages of 14 and 9, for Betrandes family wealth.

Although, canon laws made Martin’s marriage illegal, due to Bertrandes young age, the Guerre family was too desperate to wait. As is tradition, families eagerly awaited the news of a pregnancy early in a marriage; however, in the case of Martin Guerre, the vacancy of such news brought embarrassment upon the families. Not being pregnant bore news of a cursed father, causing Bertrande's’ family to try to get her to leave him, as the marriage had not been

consummated.
The government, still a monarchy, also included a Parlament. Parlament consisted of five chambers with rotating groups of ten to eleven judges and two or three presidents. Below Parlament were Resident Seignors, much like nobles, who had as much power as a judge in court. Judges had the ability to lie to suspects to get to the truth, and often felt it was better to leave alone a guilty person than accuse an innocent one. A person being tried in court had the possibility to deny the right of counsel in a criminal trial, due to the ordinance of Villers-Cotterets of 1539. The court was very civil, allowing people to repeal a sentence and go to a higher court; however, they still sentenced people to death, just as they did to Arnaud Di Tull when he was accused of impersonating Martin Guerre. He was sentenced to death by beheading, a death often saved for nobles.
The mannerisms of life in early modern Europe altered depending on the region. Certainly some places were more modern than others, as happens during a revolution. People were dealing with new things such as the rise of a new religion, Protestantism, that competed with the traditional Catholicism.