They Lived for Their Work : A triptych tells about forging new directions in an era of change : WOMEN ON THE MARGINS: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives,<i> By Natalie Zemon Davis (Harvard University Press: $24.95; 360 pp.)</i>

‘Women on the Margins” is a book in disguise. It looks like an act of pious retrieval, the kind of tradition-making that women’s studies took off on a quarter of a century ago, as old-fashioned as the space program. But despite the title, this isn’t something we’ve read before. Perhaps Natalie Zemon Davis, author of “The Return of Martin Guerre,” is playing a subtle game with her readers, for “Women on the Margins” is actually devoted to hiding its three subjects, burying them and losing them in the intricacies of their stories. By insisting on 17th century particularity, Davis means to render these lives unavailable to the old (or is it new?) politics of identity.

So it’s a less innocent enterprise than it looks, this triptych of studies. The women she chooses have nothing much in common except for articulate careers in the century that started putting the world on one map: matriarchal Jewish autobiographer Glikl bas Judah Leib from Hamburg, Germany; a Catholic missionary to the Huron and Iroquois in Quebec, Marie de L’Incarnation, who came from Tours, France; and Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfurt, Germany, a radical Protestant naturalist-artist and student of caterpillars.

Not that Davis dissolves her characters in broad cultural history either, although it’s important that all three belonged to an age when spiritual adventures were the great springboard to expression. Urban culture, print and translations into the vernacular helped as well. Then there was global trade, which dizzyingly expanded the modest mercantile sphere these women grew up in. For Davis, they are all three citizens of a European diaspora, inhabitants of a migrant, moving era that made room for new kinds of women’s work.

She loves them because you can’t generalize from them, although their worlds do have fugitive connections and contrasts. For instance, Glikl’s society was shaken in her youth by the proclamation of the failed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi--itself arguably part of the heightened religious consciousness that in its Counter-Reformation guise inspired De L’Incarnation to convert Canada’s filles sauvages, the “wild girls” (after degreasing them and supplying them with decent French underwear, though you couldn’t, she said, expect too much in the way of manners). Or then again, Glikl’s grandson, prospering in London in the East India trade, converted to the Church of England--its quiet Christ Messiah enough for him--which may have been the same kind of rationalist move that Maria Sibylla Merian made in middle age when she detached herself from the Last Days enthusiasm of the Labadist community in Holland and made an expedition to study and draw the plants and insects of Suriname in 1699. There, in fact, along with the Dutch, some left-over British and the slaves who worked the sugar plantations, was a handful of Jewish colonists, Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazim sharing a jungle synagogue. These stories are hooked onto each other by particular, idiosyncratic association, not by big overarching narrative patterns.

The three were widows, and all had children. However, even here there’s a quirk of difference, for Merian declared herself a widow before she was (in fact, her Lutheran husband divorced her when she joined the Labadists). They didn’t exactly choose to be separate and strong, although Marie de L’Incarnation at least welcomed widowhood. “Seeing that I was free, my soul melted in thankfulness that I no longer had anyone but God in my heart,” she wrote years later to the son she had left behind when she joined the Ursuline order. He became a religious himself and the editor of her writings, but as a boy he had shouted for his mother over the convent wall. She, though, was caught up in Counter-Reformation ecstasies. She had read St. Teresa of Avila in French translation (she was only a baker’s daughter, but she was literate) and, like the heroine of some baroque fairy tale, she passed all the tests with flying colors:

“When the violence of her feelings for the sacred Incarnate Word could not be borne, she retired to her room for her pen. ‘Ah, you are a sweet love. You stop your eyes, you steal our sense.’. . . She struck herself till she bled, then put haircloth to the wounds to intensify the pain.”

Davis’ moderate tone makes these excesses somehow par for the course. What was unique was de L’Incarnation’s missionary vocation. She was not (like the Jesuits) a budding ethnographer; she recorded the Amerindians’ otherness with a kind of visionary innocence. Witness de L’Incarnation’s record of the Huron woman who harangued her people against the Christians who came bearing not only their outrageous faith but also such European diseases as smallpox:

“It’s the Black Robes who are making us die by their spells. . . . They set themselves up in a village [and] everyone dies. . . . They have big pieces of wood [guns] by which they make noise and send their magic everywhere.”

De L’Incarnation reports this in a letter, her faith undented. Davis wants us to wonder at the way de L’Incarnation went to the very end of the world of her own comprehension and peered over the edge.

Noticing what her subjects don’t is part of Davis’ aim. With her first subject, Glikl, she hardly needs to--we all know about anti-Semitism--though she conveys vividly what it was like to live in a world where complaining of a crime committed by a Christian was itself a crime. Christians are on the margin here, “encircling the Jews with their institutions and worldly control.” Davis adds emphases to stress the quality that made Glikl a pioneer autobiographer. Her life-narrative is interspersed with stories--folk tales “so troublesome, so full of surprises and reversals” that they are just as problematic as real life. Davis saves for last the true story, told by Glikl, of how she could not hold her dying husband because she had her period and ritual laws of purity kept them apart.

Each narrative has such telling moments, not always the most personally traumatic. Here is Merian on the peacock flower of Suriname:

“Indians . . . use it to abort their children so that they will not become slaves like them. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola must be treated benignly, otherwise they will produce no children at all. . . . Indeed they even kill themselves . . . for they feel they will be born again . . . in a free state in their own country, as they instructed me out of their own mouths.”

It is characteristic of Davis that, along with Merian’s beautiful drawings of plants and insects, she wants readers to “see” this. Merian doesn’t reveal herself, though, as Davis writes:

“Just as she did not arrest insects in their flight to depict their insides, so she did not stop to reveal her own. Describing God’s creatures on the outside allowed them to keep living and changing.”

Merian’s fascination with the metamorphoses of moths and butterflies makes Merian the book’s mascot--for though Davis disclaims a “favorite,” it’s clear she much relishes the absence of intimate material from Merian, who “preferred the freedom of concealment and discretion.”

So perhaps I was wrong in saying at the outset that “Women on the Margins” avoids piety. It does have its own reverence for history as narrative. If the story is compelling enough--Davis exiles scholarly references to copious end notes--then we will be able to glimpse something of the real nature of difference, of what pluralism might mean. There are several deities in this book, including the fashionable god or goddess of dying nature and the ecologists, and they are forced into improbable coexistence by Davis’ patient and imaginative narrative. A marvelous book, then, with no end of other stories waiting in the wings--for example the one about Vladimir Nabokov, who came upon Merian’s butterfly books in the attic as a small boy.