Natalie Zemon Davis is a renowned historian, professor emeritus at Princeton University, and author of numerous works on modern culture. Her famous book, Ladies on the Margins (1995), brings to the forefront three 17th-century European women who were very different in their life and intellectual experiences, but similar in their originality, determination, and independence. Neither the Jewess Glückl bas Judah Leib, nor the Catholic Marie Guyart del Encarnación, nor the Protestant Maria Sibylla Merian were royal or noble persons. Rather, they lived “on the margins” of 17th-century Europe, but their diaries, letters, and travel notes, Davis argues, give us a much more accurate picture of early modernity than official court history. The author carefully reconstructs the life and creative strategies of these women: how, due to different cultural traditions, each had to seek her own answer to the challenges of the era (marriage, motherhood, religion, the status of women in society). This triptych monograph describes the full range of opportunities for women's self-realization in the 17th century, which could only be achieved far from the centers of power, on the periphery of the European ecumene.