Al-Wazzan the Stepping Stone

     I found Natalie Zemon Davis's Trickster Travels to be absolutely fascinating.  However, while it seems to me that The Return of Martin Guerre could be considered to be in the "elite" tier when it comes to answering the question "What is a microhistory," Trickster Travels is probably a few spots lower.  To be fair, I don't remember Davis  ever using the term "microhistory" in her introduction, so it would be unfair to hold it against her that this is less of a microhistory than Martin Guerre.  She often uses Al-Wazzan as a stepping stone to talk about other aspects of African and European life, rather than using Al-Wazzan's experiences as a lens itself.  For example, in the chapter "Curiosity and Connections," Davis writes, "Once he was free to walk through the streets of Rome, Yuhanna al-Asas would have been quick to see and hear of them as part of the city's public face" (205).  Then, for the next five pages, she talks about what sexuality looked like in Italy at the time.  She doesn't mention anything that Al-Wazzan actually did, just things that he probably would have seen.  The next mention of something that Al-Wazzan actually did himself is on page 210, when she talks about something he mentioned in his Geography of Africa.  Not that there's anything wrong with this-Davis has written an excellent book.  However, it seems that the book uses Al-Wazzan's story as a starting point for going down a number of "rabbit holes," rather than using Al-Wazzan's story itself as a lens.  Nonetheless, the book is incredibly useful for a class on microhistories, since one can see the way Davis expertly fills in "silences," linking a single character to questions about a much larger world, which is a skill that is bound to come up inevitably when writing a microhistory.