Untitled - Istituto di Storia dell'Europa Mediterranea - Cnr

24
Little Do We Know. History and Historians
their societies, reacted differently to Europeans. 11 According to
Codignola, in spite of Devens's limited knowledge of the Jesuit
literature and lack of firm evidence, she manages to write a honest and
well-balanced case explaining how Jesuits reshaped gendered
relations and the status of women in Great Lakes aboriginal societies.
Part III closes with an examination of two large-scale treatments of
major historiographical issues in the history of French Canada that are
directly related to the ebb and flow of the historiography of European
expansion in North America. In the first case, the study of the
seigneurial regime of New France has been revived in 2008 through
the work of Sanfilippo, an Italian historian who was one of
Codignola's doctoral students (Ch. 26). Sanfilippo's Dalla Francia al
Nuovo Mondo (2008), a full revision of his 1989 doctoral dissertation,
must be read together with his Il feudalesimo nella valle del San
Lorenzo (2008), an extensive overview of the historiographical debate.
In his lengthy and appreciative assessment of Sanfilippo's books,
Codignola intimates that one of their several merits is to demonstrate
the similarity between the seigneurial system of New France and the
feudal system in France. The second case is the long survey of the
New France's early days, from 1598 to 1613, La France de Henri IV,
written by French historian Éric Thierry (2008). In Codignola's
opinion (Ch. 27), Thierry follows the path devised almost half a
century earlier by Canadian historian Marcel Trudel, the
acknowledged authority in the field of early French expansion into
Canada, adding details, but no original interpretation.
Part IV, American, Canadian, and Other Useful Studies, provides a
long-term overview and assessment of Americanist historiography in
Italy and of international Canadianist studies in Europe. The opening
chapter (Ch. 28) illustrates the process through which American
history was introduced and grew in the Italian academe. By employing
the methods of prosopography, Codignola traces this development
from the end of World War II until 1978, a year coinciding with the
11 For a more recent study on this topic, see Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and
French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst,
Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).