Women on the Margins examines the lives of three seventeenth-century European women: Glikl bas Judah Leib, a Jewish wife and trader; Marie de l'Incarnation, a Catholic who left behind her community and her child in France in order to help found a convent in Canada; and Maria Sibylla Merian, a Protestant artist-naturalist who travelled to Suriname to study and paint insect life. Davis pursues the kind of microhistories here which will be familiar to those who have read her The Return of Martin Guerre. I found all three lives fascinating, but thought that the case for examining them in tandem could have been made more strongly. The final analytical chapter is very brief, I found Davis' definition of "living on the margins" to be overly broad, and the introduction—in which Davis conducts an imaginary conversation with all three women in a place called 'Thoughtland'—I found to be more embarrassingly twee than thought provoking. More sustained comparative analysis would have strengthened this book immensely; while I found each chapter interesting on its own, Women on the Margins is less than the sum of its parts. ( )