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The Return Of Martin Guerre Essay

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Introduction The Tale of Martin Guerre has been retold throughout history in the forms of; a play, movie and a book. What makes this story so interesting is due to the fact that it stems from a real-life peasant court case which occurred in the 16th century. In the case, a man by the name of Arnaud du Tilh takes the identity of a middle-class family man by the name of Martin Guerre. He manages to take on the persona of Martin Guerre for a period of three years where he manages to both; increase the Guerre family estate, and father a child with Martin’s wife, Bertrande de Rols. What helped Arnaud steal Martin’s identity was due to the fact that the real Martin Guerre had left his wife and family eight years prior to Arnaud arriving in the French village of Aritigat. Twentieth Century historians Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Finlay have attempted to provide historical reasoning for why the case of Martin Guerre became so popular. As this essay will show; both historians were constrained to the same archival evidence; however they used different methods of interpretation to come up …show more content…

Her writing of the book postdates the movie of Martin Guerre, Le Retour de Martin Guerre, which Davis herself was involved in with the screenplay . Davis was not thrilled about the interpretation of the movie because it strayed from the actual events of the court case . As a result, Davis wrote The Return of Martin Guerre using her own interpretations based on the archival evidence she collected. Davis’ ultimate goal was to ensure that her book was easily accessible to all audiences and therefore, she catered to different groups of people through her choice of detail, literary voice, and metaphor as by topical analysis . By writing about how people lived during the 16th century, French society, readers are more understanding of why people did what they did; specifically in regards to the Martin Guerre court

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