Becoming Holy in Early Canada 9780773596450

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B e c o m in g H o ly In Early Canada

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M cG i l l -Qu e e n ’s S t u di e s i n t h e H is to ry o f Religio n Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. s e ri e s o n e : g .a . r awly k , e di tor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

10  God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker

9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827– 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

s e ri e s t wo i n me mo ry of g e o r ge rawlyk d o n a l d ha r ma n a k e n so n , e di to r 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson 2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 3 Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill 4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna

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  6  The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan   7  Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka  8 Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston   9  The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

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10  Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt 11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan 12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley 17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie 19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay

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21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin 29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod

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32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson

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43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee 45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett

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54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty 61 In Defence of the Faith Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth

63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 68 Fighting over God A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada Janet Epp Buckingham 69 From India to Israel Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality Joseph Hodes 70 Becoming Holy in Early Canada Timothy G. Pearson

62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain Paul T. Phillips

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Becoming Holy in Early Canada

T i m o t h y g . Pea rson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-7735-4418-5 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4419-2 (paper) 978-0-7735-9645-0 (ep df ) 978-0-7735-9646-7 (ep ub)

Legal deposit third quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Pearson, Timothy G., 1976–, author Becoming holy in early Canada / Timothy G. Pearson. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two no. 70) Based on author’s thesis (doctoral) – McGill University, 2008, under title: Becoming holy in early Canada: performance and the making of holy persons in society and culture. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-4418-5 (bound). – IS BN 978-0-7735-4419-2 (pbk.). – ISB N 978-0-7735-9645-0 (ep df ). – IS BN 978-0-7735-9646-7 (ep u b ) 1. Christian saints – Canada – History.  2. Christian saints – Cult – Canada – History.  3. Holiness – Catholic Church – History of doctrines.  4. Catholic Church – Canada – History.  5. Canada – Church history.  6. Christian hagiography.  I. Title.  II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 70 bx 4659.c2p 42 2014     282.092'271      c 2014-902070-8 c 2014-902071-6

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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For Kirsty

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Contents

Figures and Tables  xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 3 1  The Cult of the Saints and Early Canada  16 2  Evangelism: Martyrdom  35 3  Evangelism: Indigenous Holiness  62 4  Charity: Domesticating Holiness  84 5  Asceticism: Making a New Culture  111 6  Miracles: Social Dramas and Community Bonds  140 7  Hagiography: Writing Memory  170 Conclusion 191 Appendix: Holy Persons of New France  199 Abbreviations 203 Notes 205 Bibliography 253 Index 279

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Figures and Tables

f ig u r e s 3.1 Grégoire Huret, Preciosa mors quorundam Patrum é Societé Jesu in nova Francia (1664) in François Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, vol. 2 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1952), 481.  79 4.1 Marie Guyart, de l’Incarnation, Anonymous, c. 1672, Musée des Ursulines de Québec, Collection du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec.  92 5.1 Catherine de Saint-Augustin, by Abbé Hughes Pommier, c. 1668, Collection des Augustines de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.  119 6.1 Le Vray portrait du trs religieux Fr. Didace Pelletier, by JeanBaptiste Scotin (1678–17xx), Reproduction 1887. Musée de la Civilisation, Québec, sme Archives. 149

ta b l e s 4.1 Women as a percentage of holy persons in New France  90 6.1 Official Diocesan inquiries into the miracles of Frère Didace  151

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Acknowledgments

This project could not have been completed without the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, McGill University Department of History and Faculties of Arts and Graduate Studies, and the Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University. My deepest appreciation goes to these organizations for supporting humanities research in Canada generally and this project in particular. Likewise, the support of numerous colleagues and friends was indispensable to the completion of this work. Catherine Desbarats and John Zucchi consistently offered unparalleled generosity and support, advice, and timely criticism throughout the process of completing my PhD dissertation and now also this book. Their enormous intellectual influence can be found throughout these pages. Dominique Deslandres’s scholarship and friendship, likewise, have been vitally important to my research and thinking, and to the completion of this project. She urged me to think carefully about issues of religion, gender, and emotion, and I hope her influence can be seen throughout the book. Allan Greer also provided keen insights at critical moments, and invaluable advice throughout the researching and writing of this book. At McMaster University I would like to thank Viv Nelles, Ken Cruickshank, and Red Wilson for their scholarly and financial support, and for creating the Wilson Institute and an environment supportive of the study of Canadian history within broad intellectual and geographical contexts. Viv Nelles and Megan Armstrong both

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xvi Acknowledgments

read the manuscript of Becoming Holy and offered keen critical insights and evaluations. Emma Anderson, Christine Hudon, Jarrett Rudy, Brian Young, and David Boruchoff also read and commented on early versions of the text, and their responses are very much appreciated. Long conversations over coffee with Alexandre Dubé, Helen Dewar, Jean-François Constant, Jean-François Lozier, Jeffers Lennox, and other friends and colleagues have also contributed greatly to the completion of the book. Tom Wien has been a constant support and source of knowledge, and Ollivier Hubert kindly guided me through the Sulpician archives in Montreal. Andrew Hughes and Michael Herren first encouraged me to pursue religious history and specifically nurtured an interest in the cult of the saints. I would like to thank the archivists at the Archives du Séminaire de Québec and the Archives Deschâtelets at the Université Saint-Paul for their help, and especially the librarians at the Grande Bibliothèque (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec à Montréal) for their assistance and patience in digging up obscure texts and canonization processes for me. At McGill I must also thank Colleen Parish, Celine Coutinho, Karen Connors, and Jody Anderson for their help and advice, offered freely and without reservation on numerous occasions. At McGill-Queen’s University Press I wish to thank Jeffrey Brison for first expressing interest in this project, and Kyla Madden for sticking with the project and expertly guiding me through the publication process. Any errors and faults remaining in the text are, of course, entirely my own. My thanks go also to friends who have provided invaluable help and support along the way. Duncan Cowie and Anna Lepine generously offered a place to stay in Montreal, often for long periods of time, despite having a newborn. Tom Brydon’s love of history and profound gratitude for the privilege of doing what we do everyday – teaching, writing, and learning – remains a constant inspiration. Nick Dew, François Furstenburg, and all the members of the French Atlantic History Group created an intellectually stimulating and nurturing environment in which to grow as an historian and as a scholar. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support over the long years it has taken to complete this book; my parents, Graham and Miriam Pearson, my sisters Kate and Sheila and their families, and, my grandmothers, Marjorie Pearson and Margaret Bartleman,

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Acknowledgments

xvii

who, in their own ways, inspired in me a love of history and all it can teach us about ourselves and our world. My thanks also go to Lucy, who unfailingly gave me the perfect excuse to take an hour’s break every afternoon for a good walk, during which I developed many of the major arguments presented here. And, of course, I could never have gotten this far without the unfailing love and support of my partner, Kirsty Robertson. I cannot thank her enough. Without her, this project and so much else would never have been possible.

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B e c o m in g H o ly in Early Canada

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Introduction

On 17 October 2010 Pope Benedict XVI officially declared Frère André Bassette (1845–1937) a saint. Perhaps best known for building Saint Joseph’s Oratory on the slopes of Mount Royal in Montreal during the worst years of the Great Depression, Frère André became the eleventh Catholic saint associated with what is today Canada. He died in 1937 with a reputation for holiness and healing that extended through much of Catholic North America. Tens of thousands attended his funeral. Multiple biographies soon appeared in both French and English.1 And behind the scenes, the creaky machinery of the Catholic Church geared up to begin the long bureaucratic process that led, seventy-two years later, to his canonization.2 Even today, Frère André is well known in Montreal in both the Catholic and the wider communities. A statue of him graces the corner of Boulevard René-Lévesque and Union Street in the heart of CentreVille. Every year fans of the Montreal Canadiens ask for a “Brother André miracle” to see their team win the Stanley Cup. When the day of his canonization came, flocks of the faithful travelled to Rome to witness the event, and city officials, politicians, and the media (local and national) celebrated the achievement. Sanctity, it seems, can still draw a crowd.3 The news reports from that day might rightly lead us to conclude that the reasons for Frère André’s popularity in 2010 differed significantly from those that endeared him to the faithful in 1937. The English language media in Canada, especially, described his canonization in the language of national pride, bypassing issues of religion and even ethnic and linguistic diversity, and transforming the cult of  a French-Canadian Catholic holy man into a civic cult every

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Canadian could celebrate. Eric Reguly in the Globe and Mail (Canada’s self-styled “national” newspaper) called Brother André the “Rocket Richard of miracles,” conflating Catholicism with what is perhaps Canada’s true national religion, hockey.4 Canada’s public broadcaster, the c b c , sent its chief correspondent and national news anchor, Peter Mansbridge, to Rome to host a live telecast of the canonization mass – an honour generally reserved for elections and significant political events. The French language media in Quebec, on the other hand, focused more on the complex history of Catholicism and its legacy in modern Quebec.5 Meanwhile Montreal’s mayor, Gérald Tremblay, trumpeted the tourism potential St Brother André held for his city. “Many more people will come. Religious tourism is becoming more and more important,” he told the press while attending the canonization mass. In the Vatican crowd, Canadian pilgrims waving Quebec and Canadian flags shouted: “We love Canada! We love Brother André!”6 Two years later, the canonization of the twelfth saint linked with what has become Canada, Kateri Tekakwitha, garnered a significantly different but also varied response. Tekakwitha was a Mohawk woman who died in 1680 after living what observers at the time described as an exceptionally pious and rigorous Christian life at Kahnawake, an Iroquois community just across the St Lawrence River from Montreal.7 She was canonized on 21 October 2012. Once again crowds gathered in Rome, and media in Canada and around the world reported the event, emphasizing Tekakwitha’s Aboriginal heritage – she was the first Indigenous saint recognized by the Catholic Church. This time, however, there was no live broadcast from Rome. The c b c instead reported her ascension into the ranks of the Christian holy under the “world news” heading on its website.8 The Globe and Mail was more ambiguous. Eric Reguly at once proclaimed Tekakwitha “the first Indigenous Canadian Saint” and “a truly international saint,” noting that the “colourful traditional costumes” worn by many Indigenous people who attended the canonization mass delighted and amused Italians in the crowd. This canonization was really about politics, he said, implicitly questioning the holy qualities of the candidate and suggesting the need for some sort of alternative justification – an atonement on the part the Church for old wounds and old divisions with Indigenous peoples everywhere.9 In the United States, some news outlets presented Tekakwitha as an American saint, and Indigenous news reports

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Introduction

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varied considerably, reflecting the deep ambivalence of many First Nations people toward Tekakwitha and the Church.10 These recent canonizations and the news coverage that surrounded them highlight how sanctity still resonates publicly even beyond the Catholic faithful, and how the holy continue to occupy a place in public life and discourse. Moreover, they show the great variety of religious, political, social, and cultural interpretations and understandings of the holy that are possible. The saint, even as he or she rises to the universal ranks of the Catholic holy, holds particular meaning among specific people and communities. The ability of the cult of the saints to adapt to changing times and needs is one of its central features, as are the multiple interpretations to which it is subjected. Holy persons are among the most mythologized figures in history, and consequently also among the least understood. They often have a tendency to appear as stereotypes, codified in the generic language of hagiography, canonization proceedings, news reports, blog entries, and the rhetoric of press conferences. Thus narrativized, they become emblems – miracle-working shells of their historical selves. The holy are continually made and remade in the image of those who invoke them.11 This is the genius of the cult of the saints and what keeps it relevant; but it is also what makes historians wary of it and of the archival records that sanctity and holiness have produced over time.12 This wariness is perhaps uncalled for, however. Holy persons can in fact tell us a lot about the times in which they lived as well as the times in which they were canonized. In this book I focus on the former, specifically on the process of becoming holy in the French colonial period in Canada from roughly 1600 to 1760. Repatriating holiness from its abstractness as an entity removed from daily life and experience, I reinsert it into the historical contexts in which it was originally recognized and valued. Just as many of those who gathered in Rome to celebrate the canonizations of Frère André and Kateri Tekakwitha believed in a deeply personal relationship with the new saints, so historical communities experienced holiness and the divine, and lived their religious faith, in relationships with the holy figures who lived among them. Rather than repeat well-known biographies, I look closely at these community relationships, to inquire into the place holy persons occupied in colonial society. How did aspiring saints construct their holiness, and for what reasons? What qualities did people see in them, and what roles and functions

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were expected of them? Holy persons developed their sanctity in specific and deeply contextualized performances of the traditions of Catholic sanctity – in manifestations of holiness that played out in a specific time and place, and resonated with local audiences. The social and cultural significance of historically situated sanctity is best revealed in the lived encounters and lived relationships between holy persons and those who witness their acts.13 The names of many of the holy persons of New France are familiar to historians, students, and the general public alike, but most often as stock characters – the first bishop of New France, François de Laval; the first secular nurse in Canada, Jeanne Mance; Marie de l’Incarnation, the first teacher and superior of a female religious order; and now Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Indigenous saint. It has become almost impossible to distinguish the historical person from the model or type he or she has come to represent. As a result, the holy are very difficult to get to know as individuals with real lives. This tendency toward abstraction is as true of the universal saints of the Catholic Church like Mary, Joseph, or even a Saint Francis of Assisi as it is of those like Tekakwitha and Frère André, whose posthumously imposed biographical model, symbolism, faith, and tradition often trump historical understandings, as a consequence of canonization procedures that occurred many years after their deaths. Historically, the holy persons of New France were a diverse group that included missionaries, nursing and teaching nuns, lay persons, and Indigenous Christians. Relative to the small size of the colonial population, a substantial number of holy persons lived, died, and were recognized in some way during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for embodying both local and translocal ideals of holiness. New France accounts for thirty-one holy persons prior to 1701 and a further seven in the eighteenth century until the British conquest of 1763.14 The proportion is notable in relation to a Euro-Christian population that numbered fewer than 4,000 in 1663, about 10,000 in 1680 and not more than 75,000 in all of French North America by 1763 (perhaps 60,000 in the St Lawrence valley).15 The overwhelming majority of colonial holy lives date from before 1700 when the colonial population was very small. After those years a rapid decline in the number of new candidates mirrors a general decline of apostolic Catholicism in Europe and elsewhere, following the heady days of the Reformation, Catholic Reform, and European overseas expansion.16

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Almost without exception, French colonial saints plied their trade in the St Lawrence valley, known to the French as “le Canada,” or in the missions that adjoined it, whether in the Great Lakes region (pays d’en haut) or in Acadia. Other concentrations of French settlers in the Americas, such as New Orleans and Louisbourg, were established only in the eighteenth century when the religious rigour that had accompanied earlier colonization had given way to a spirit of Enlightenment experimentation within the empire and the bureaucracy of the French state.17 The “early Canada” of my title, then, represents the St Lawrence valley and neighbouring missions in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This setting offers abundant examples of what might be called local sanctity – the faith communities that gathered around living holy persons, and which included almost everyone associated with the early modern colonial project, from Indigenous allies and enemies of the French, to habitants, religious authorities, missionaries, civil and military leaders, and entire villages.

L o c a l S a i nts In the Catholic Church the doctrine and theology of the communio sanctorum (the communion of the saints) states that each new saint is connected with every other saint who has come before or is yet to come – that all saints share essentially the same essence and therefore display similar characteristics and do similar things.18 It is this feature of Christian sanctity that lends a quality of familiarity and repetition to the Lives of the Saints. Martyrdom, mission work, miracle working, heroic charity, and asceticism are all standard models of Christian holiness that find representation in colonial lives. One of the most important jobs of hagiography – writing the Saint’s Life – is to show how each new performance of these traditions resembles all others. The result is that in texts that narrate the lives of the holy and survive as historical sources, local variation is often obscured in favour of generic sameness. In reading the Lives of the Saints, it is sometimes easy to forget that historical performances of the traditions of sanctity, in fact, took place in lived relationships and specific places, in convents and villages, in interactions between missionaries and converts, in families and communities, and in dialogue between the laity and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In other words, before becoming saints of

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the universal Church, the holy were local figures who developed their reputations in their interaction with immediate audiences and with Church tradition. While not ignoring the important influence of the universal aspect of sainthood, I hope to understand how saints became saints in this local context; to discover what it was that made practitioners of holiness important and relevant to, in this case, colonial people, to explain their prominence in early New France, and in turn to learn how people who believed they were called to holiness related to their audiences – French settlers and Indigenous peoples, lay persons and ecclesiastics.19 No one whose holy life unfolded in New France was officially canonized by Rome during the French regime. Thus, those who acquired reputations for  holiness did so informally and before colonial witnesses who included all elements of the population. A local saint may be characterized as anyone who died with a reputation for holiness among the faith community that bore witness to his or her original living performance of the traditions of sanctity; that is, the community that first attributed to that individual characteristics and accomplishments associated with traditions of holiness common in the Church and also specific to a particular time and place. Historians such as Allan Greer, Dominique Deslandres, and Jodi Bilinkoff have recently begun the work of repositioning holiness within colonial historiography and colonial communities by linking it with religious ferment and change in Europe and the colonial encounter in the Americas.20 Greer’s book Mohawk Saint, about Catherine /  Tekakwitha and her Jesuit biographer Claude Chauchetière, has done much to make historians and readers aware of the phenomenon of colonial sanctity. By focusing on a particular case and highlighting its importance for understanding how Christianity became an Indigenous religion, Greer illustrates the use of hagiographic sources to illuminate colonial intercultural life, relations between missionaries and converts and their communities, and the deep cultural and psychological impact of the colonial encounter on all people involved with it.21 At the same time, the settlements and society of New France were deeply rooted in the trans-Atlantic religious and political affairs of the Early Modern world. The Early Modern was one of the great periods of saint making in Christian history. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation created a climate of religious crisis and eschatological fear that spurred extraordinary religious careers.22

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Introduction

9

Dominique Deslandres’s work situates the early French mission project in Canada within the changing religious dynamics of France at this time, and Bilinkoff’s work on Early Modern hagiography shows how colonial French and Spanish Lives were part of a general pattern of change in holy biography that developed in Europe out of the Counter-Reformation and included “new world” settlements.23 Together, these works link the centres and peripheries of early modern Christian life, the colonial world and the Catholic Church, and the universal and local aspects of lived religious experience. Local sanctity appears in the historical record in reports of miraculous interventions, in accounts and investigations of local Church officials, in the observations of ecclesiastics and laymen and women who witnessed performances of the traditions of sanctity, and in the writings of would-be saints. Live performances of the traditions of holiness in the presence of eyewitnesses made it directly clear that something extraordinary was going on. Among the faithful in the colonies, news about holy persons would have spread readily and swiftly by word of mouth. Evidence of such transfers survives in the spread of reputations in the colony, accounts of miraculous interventions, and recommendations from neighbours and friends to seek the help of one local holy patron or another. And, since there were no printing presses in New France, news of the holy also spread more widely in letters and unpublished documents and in texts published in France and re-imported into the colony. In order to reflect their embeddedness in locality and community, the case studies examined here are revealed through sources that include, but go well beyond, formal holy biographies composed by authoritative ecclesiastics. Taken together, these sources for colonial holiness might loosely be termed “hagiographic discourse.” Hagiographic discourse is not a literary genre. Indeed, hagiography was only defined as such in the late nineteenth century with the rise of positivist approaches to history that identified stories of sainthood as different and less worthy of scientific study than other kinds of historical sources. Hagiography’s inherent biases toward the spiritual and the miraculous made it ­easily dismissible as overly formulaic, derivative, and historically unreliable.24 As a result, hagiography gradually acquired a poor ­reputation among historians. Hagiographic discourse, on the other hand, refers to any discussion of holiness and traditions associated with sanctity, no matter in what genre or text they appear. These include, but are not limited to, biography itself, mission reports,

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accounts of miracles, personal letters, chronicles, spiritual journals, diaries, material culture, and oral history. The written sources available for this study are therefore considerable, diverse, and generally well preserved. Because most of them were produced before any formal canonization procedures were initiated for the holy persons they discuss (though many of them certainly anticipate such procedures), they allow for greater access to the original performance of holiness that first endeared local saints to their communities. In other words, they offer access to a local, lived sanctity and the communities that nurtured it, revealing the processes of becoming holy within local relationships rather than simply praising the finished product – the saint – as endorsed and approved by the Church through canonization and more traditional or constructed forms of hagiography.

P e rf o r m a n c e a n d t h e R i tuals of Holi nes s The colonial period is particularly suited to a study of culturally and socially situated holiness. While the history of sanctity in the Western tradition and in the Catholic Church is chronologically extensive and geographically diffuse, Canada’s Catholic history is relatively circumscribed and focused, allowing for a concentrated focus that can still be sensitive to change over time. Holiness in this context is best understood as the performance of a specific cultural scenario with deep traditions in the Catholic Church and in lived religion that took place against a backdrop of real communities. Along with locality, therefore, performance is fundamental to my approach. In focusing on performance, I do not mean to suggest that holiness was not real for those who embraced it, or for those who watched it unfold in their communities. As I understand it, performance refers to the lived contexts in which holiness was originally expressed and experienced in the public sphere. Aspirants to sainthood adapted the traditions of holiness to personal and local needs, involving the faith community in a recoprical process of recognition and validation that established legitimate social and cultural spaces for holy figures in local society. Cultural theorist Diana Taylor sees performance, like written text, as a tool for the storage and transmission of knowledge. Performance, she says, includes embodied behaviour and social dramas that express particular meanings for people who share beliefs and a culture. In New France would-be holy persons engaged in behaviours

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that recalled the communio sanctorum, and in so doing manifested their claim to holiness and their wish to be recognized as saints and treated as such by their communities. Performances of this type were both real and constructed. Real in that they took place within lived relationships, and constructed in that they were formed of, and invoked, shared experiences, beliefs, and ideals about society and the sacred. Local holy persons arose out of all the forces, influences, contexts, and traditions that shaped ideas about sanctity, and were conditioned, says Taylor, by the “immediate environment and issues surrounding them.”25 Lived relationships between local people and local saints were immediate and fluid; people often knew the holy person directly, or knew someone who did. Colonists saw the performance of the traditions of holiness as a kind of ritual that transmitted certain ideas and knowledge about what the colony was or should be, and expressed common ambitions and anxieties that invoked a shared experience of the sacred. Several recent studies of European colonization have addressed rituals (of trade, war, and gender, for instance) and knowledge transfer in imperialism, intercultural communication, non-verbal exchange, and colonial cultural change.26 Religious rituals constitute some of the most significant and best-documented forms of interaction and cultural expression in the early colonial Americas. Anthropologists Victor Turner and, more recently, Roy Rappaport both highlight the importance of religious ritual as a form of communication that may involve many different peoples. Rappaport defines ritual as a social act basic to all humanity and distinguishable to outside observers everywhere. Rituals, he says, consist of performative events of “more or less invariant sequences and utterances that are not entirely encoded or scripted by performers.”27 Robert Levy adds that religious rituals, in particular, tend toward the creation and generation of shared experiences of spiritual power.28 They are also, in the view of Michael Lambek, tools both for maintaining order in the face of radical change and for adapting to that change.29 As such, ritual performances that expressed and transmitted sanctity were not individual pursuits or paradigms of ideal personal behaviour; as creations of an entire community, they were public, moral, and a link to sacred truths. Likewise, Victor Turner defines rituals as social dramas that help to express and facilitate change in society by creating new solidarities among their participants.30 Performers of ritual, says Turner,

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enter into a state of “social limbo” or “liminality,” ambiguous states that have the potential to formulate new social arrangements and solidarities. In such states, participants can begin to effect the transformation of society by altering the existing order and entering into what he calls communitas with like-minded people.31 Early Canada itself constituted just such a liminal space – abundant in ritual, meaning, and the potential for change. Its performers of rituals of holiness transcended the everyday and worked toward transformation – of themselves and of their society. They hoped to advance their own social status from that of someone who lived only in this world to that of someone who had one foot (at least) in the next. They also represented and embodied transition by building solidarities and facilitating meaningful and immediate relationships between the human community and the divine, working toward the creation of an ideal religious community. The colonial community, meanwhile, benefitted from having in their midst a holy person who might draw the favour of God down upon them, provide reassurance in trying times, and offer evidence of divine favour for the colonization project. To these ends, faith communities might impose some of their own expectations on the holy, and in exchange offer the local saint recognition and legitimation. Although, according to theological principle, saints are united by participation in recognizable standards of behaviour preordained by the Catholic doctrine of the cult of the saints, in practice they perform those standards and become holy in society in an infinite variety of ways. Holy men and women do not start out as saints. They begin as members of a community who engaged in particular rituals and behaviours that become recognized over a lifetime as those of a holy person. In such performances and their recognition by community members, therefore, we see some of the first stirrings of a local religious culture in New France that, as tied as it was to French Catholicism and the universal doctrines of the Catholic Church at the time, nevertheless expressed needs specific to individuals and the local community, both French and, at times, also Indigenous. The study of lived holiness has much to tell us about life and community in early colonial Canada – about its social relations, and the strategies people deployed to confront colonial realities and create viable lives. This book, then, is in part an examination of religious rituals of holiness as historical objects that might bridge the gap between history and anthropology and between social, religious, and cultural history; and in part a study of the social structures and

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relationships created in and around local performances of holiness. It is an examination of how the lives and acts of the holy entered into and became a part of the public life and culture of the colony, and the kinds of relationships the faithful and their saints built with each other and with the divine. Religious ritual, writes historian Ollivier Hubert, “drives to the heart of humanity, embracing, however conflictually, both transcendence and socialization” – the constructed and the real.32 To understand what performances of sanctity might have meant to the performers themselves, and those who participated in them, investigated them, accepted and rejected them, we must delve deeply into the aspirations, needs, and fears of performers, participants, and audiences alike, into the miracles and devotions that gave people hope and a way of interacting with the divine, into the traditions that informed their lives, and finally into all the public roles played by living holy persons in colonial society. Performances of holiness grant unique access to the lived religion, and the social and cultural world of the colony-in-formation. This approach is far from straightforward. While my notion of performance owes a great deal to the work of Turner and Rappaport, both conceive of ritual as a time-limited, yet repeatable event. The performance of holiness, however, played out over an entire lifetime and sometimes beyond. Rituals were certainly repeatable, but with almost unlimited possibilities for variation. Furthermore, the challenge of reconstructing past performative events is to find enough sources to adequately recreate them. Even when this is possible, the historian is necessarily at a significant remove from the performancein-practice, and can know it only as mediated through its representation in the texts of historical authors. The danger here, as historian Philippe Buc has pointed out, is that the meanings communicated in lived ritual could become so distorted through the process of creating archives that the event itself is lost, and all that can be recovered is what commentators saw – or more to the point, believed they saw.33 As performances were inscribed into text and entered into authoritative archives, meanings were attached that may not have been present or intended in the original event. It is essential, then, to consider not only how a performance may have shaped the hagiographic text but also how traditions, expectations, and text could shape memories of real events and living people. While a surviving text may provide only one interpretation of a ritual performance, we can in many cases at least speculate

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about the competing meanings and intentions that went into creating original events, rituals, and performances. The creation of the local saint is the result of all the ideas present in and around the original performance and reactions to it. This approach takes us into the spaces between performers and the various participants in the rituals of holiness, the performance itself, and its representation in surviving historical sources. Becoming Holy in Early Canada proceeds by exploring in turn five broad aspects of the holy life that made up Early Modern traditions and expectations of sanctity: evangelical activity (missions and ­martyrdom), charity, asceticism, miracles, and hagiography.34 (The “good death” was also an essential feature of any successful performance of holiness, but rather than focus on holy deaths in any single chapter, I have placed accounts of them, and analysis and responses, in different case studies throughout the book.) After a brief introduction to Early Modern Catholicism, the colonial Church, and holiness in the first chapter, I proceed through in-depth case studies that illustrate the issues raised in each chapter. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on evangelism. In chapter 2, I look at acts and narratives of Christian martyrdom involving Jesuit missionaries, with the aim of revealing the local contexts, rituals, performers, and audiences that made up the live drama of ritual Christian death. Chapter 3 continues this theme, but switches focus from Jesuit to Indigenous martyrs. My purpose here is to try to understand how and why an Algonquin man called Joseph / Onaharé came to see himself as a Christian martyr in relation to both Christian and Algonquin audiences of the drama of his death. Chapter 4 turns from the mission field to the settler community of Canada, nestled along the banks of the St Lawrence. Here I look at the rhetoric and practice of charity in performances of holiness to elucidate connections between gender, place, colonialism, and local holiness. Continuing in this same vein, the fifth chapter specifically examines asceticism and ascetic acts as a primary way in which aspiring saints expressed their holiness, shaped themselves as holy persons, acquired local audiences, and sought to change the social order in which they lived. In chapters 6 and 7 my emphasis shifts from live performances of holiness to the after-death careers of several would-be saints in the public realm of the colony. Chapter 6 considers miracles and their role in forming relationships, not just between holy persons and their faith communities, but also among

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members of the colonial community; family, friends, and neighbours who experienced divine intervention through the intercession of a local saint. In the final chapter I evaluate historical legacies and the process of securing reputations in texts. I ask why some colonial saints achieved lasting reputations while others did not, and what role hagiographic texts about holy persons in early French Canada may have played in determining the success of a cult. Overall, I trace a rough chronology of a typical or generic “saint’s life” from early expressions of religious enthusiasm, conversion experiences, and evangelism, through demonstrations of the shaping of the personal will through charity and asceticism, to the holy death and after-death favours that the faithful expected to receive from their departed patrons, and finally to the crafting and shaping of memories in hagiographic text. Saints’ Lives feature prominently among the stories that pre-­ modern European societies told about themselves, helping to forge (and explain) relationships with place, community, others, and the divine. This was particularly true in New France, where holy persons and the stories told about them survive as a prominent cultural legacy. A significant purpose of this book, then, is to use stories as a way of entering into the culture and society then being built in New France. In many cases, these are stories – or versions of stories – that people at the time told themselves and each other. In sum, I hope to show how stories of holiness grant access to a past world, in which holy persons were important mediators between the profane and the divine, helped to shape and sometimes challenge the prevailing social order, and provided colonists with ways of understanding their lives and evidence that their endeavours were favoured by God.

A N o t e o n T e r mi nology Unless otherwise noted, I try to follow the terminology pertaining to Indigenous peoples and nations used in the primary sources I have consulted. I am nevertheless aware of and acknowledge the political importance of naming in the postcolonial context. I have chosen to use historical terms deployed in settler texts, terms such as “Iroquois” (rather than “Haudenosaunee”), because historical and modern names of groups and nations frequently describe incommensurable realities. My choice rests on a desire to avoid confusion while acknowledging the importance of naming and its difficulty in colonial histories.

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1 The Cult of the Saints and Early Canada

For two thousand years the cult of the saints has proven extraordinarily adaptable. It has survived in innumerable cultures, touched all classes, genders and ages, and spread to every corner of the globe affected by Catholicism. Saints and sanctity are most often associated with the Middle Ages, and most academic research on the subject concentrates on that period.1 Far from dying out after the Renaissance, however, the cult of the saints and hagiographic writing enjoyed great popularity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and accompanied the expansion of Christianity overseas after 1492.2 Religious conflict in the Renaissance and Early Modern periods of European history (1500–1800) created new martyrs, both Catholic and Protestant, while European global expansion created opportunities for missionaries and other religious enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the faith. As a result, the Catholic Church offered up new exemplars of the ideal Christian life to believers; the reforming Carmelite nun Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), the reforming priest and archbishop of Milan, Charles Borromeo (1538–1584), and the missionary Francis Xavier (1506–1552). Protestants, too, offered their own dead, if not exactly as saints for the faithful to venerate, then certainly as individuals worthy of praise and emulation.3 Formal recognition of saints by the Holy See, however, was not common in the Early Modern period; official saints dating from this time are relatively few. Protestant assaults on the cult of the saints raised questions about the cult’s legitimacy and authenticity, and aroused caution on the part of the Catholic Church. Though the Church affirmed sainthood as a part of Catholic dogma and theology at the Council of Trent (1545–63), new rules about who could

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and could not be a saint, new requirements for vigorous investigation into the “heroic virtues” of candidates, and new guidelines for veneration brought restraint to the number of saints officially canonized. Only fifty-five people were canonized between 1588 and 1767. The preponderance of these were men, almost all of whom belonged in some fashion to the Church as clergy or members of a monastic order, and most came either from Italy or Spain, where the Church drew most of its strength. Only one, Rosa de Lima, came from the Americas.4 The sanctioned cult of the saints was a conservative body in a time when the Church was trying to recover and grow after the Reformation. Historians of sanctity have long struggled with the question of whether saints should be considered witnesses to the social and cultural history of the times in which they lived, or to the times in which they were canonized. Some cultural historians argue that saints must be treated as witnesses to the age in which they were canonized because that is the period when others recognized them as worthy of such a designation.5 This practice is useful, however, only in cases where historical evidence comes from a canonization procedure or hagiographies written after the death of the individual. It does not recognize locally situated holiness. If it were applied to Canada, there would be no saints at all from the French colonial period. Fortunately, the hagiographic record from New France supports a study of historically situated holiness, clearly revealing that a significant number of holy persons did resonate in local society during the times in which they lived, regardless of how the institutional Church later came to view them. Official reluctance to canonize saints in the Early Modern period did not prevent members of local belief communities from venerating informal and unrecognized holy persons whose piety, virtue, and seeming ability to draw down the favour of God onto their communities made them important local figures. Nor did it prevent members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy from supporting and encouraging such devotions. Though official canonization may have been the ultimate goal of a given holy person, and also of his or her faith community, it is the original performance and believers’ reactions to it that provide historians a road into the lived religion of New France and a glimpse of the public roles holy persons occupied in the colony. The religious, political, and theological contexts of Early Modern Christian holiness are vital for understanding live performances in the Americas, and in this chapter I examine the

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forces that shaped local holy persons and the writing of hagiographic discourses from the colonies.

T h e R e f o r m at io n a nd the Cult o f t h e S a ints Sanctity is not an immutable category. Even as the formal narrative and dogma of holiness appear timeless, the character of sanctity has  changed significantly over the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. The first saints of the Christian Church were the martyrs who died in Roman arenas as enemies of the state and emperor. With the legalization of Christianity and its establishment as the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, new categories of saint were created as the faith went mainstream and lost some of its militancy. These categories – confessors, virgins, mystics, founders, anchorites, to name a few – allowed the extraordinary religious to continue to proclaim publicly their special status and to serve as models for others. Hermits and anchorites who retreated to the deserts on the fringes of the eastern Empire in the third and fourth centuries earned reputations for extreme asceticism and great spiritual wisdom. In the new Christian kingdoms of the western empire, it was the bishops, missionaries, kings, and queens who brought the new religion to the pagans of France, Britain, and Germany and later to eastern Europe, who became the religious heroes. At the same time, local populations slowly reshaped their pagan practices according to Christian fashion, and renamed their sacred sites after Christian monks, nuns, martyrs, and miracle workers. The result was a proliferation of local cults, many of which local bishops recognized at the urging of their flocks. As time passed, however, little more than a name and perhaps a tradition of devotion and a shifting myth remained to remind the faithful of those who had once walked among them.6 Alongside cults of this nature arose apocryphal saints like Saint George, who were never more than legend.7 By the High Middle Ages, this unchecked expansion of sainthood was becoming a problem for the Church; it was impossible to verify the histories of thousands of holy figures. In response, reforming popes such as Innocent III (1160–1216) began to revise and reform the doctrine of sanctity and reserve to the Holy See the right to name saints. As the historian of medieval sanctity Andre Vauchez has

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shown, sainthood was a social construction; one that the ecclesiastical hierarchy sought to control by granting formal recognition to legitimate “saints,” at the same time as trying to discourage or jettison altogether unapproved devotions.8 Even so, local traditions and hagiographic texts such as the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), published for the first time in 1275, kept the image and practice of sanctity before the faithful. The martyrs may have died long ago in ancient Rome, but images in texts and frescoes on Church walls, grottos and holy wells, and new hagiographic interpretations of long-past lives, kept the sufferings and virtues of the holy before the eyes and minds of believers. When schism ripped the Church apart in the sixteenth century, martyrs reappeared and again dominated the ranks of the holy. Even as Catholics and Protestants alike honoured those of their brethren who they believed had died or were put to death in defence of their beliefs, the cult of the saints itself came under fire.9 Protestants objected to the Catholic doctrine of sanctity on the grounds that it was akin to the worship of human idols. Protestant leaders charged that the theology of sainthood was an abuse that had crept into the faith in the fourth and fifth centuries and threatened the monotheism of Christianity. In rejecting the cult of the saints, Protestants argued that they were returning to the original faith of the apostles, of the Gospels, and of Christ, and to the original meaning of the word “saint,” which had denoted all those who believed in Christ and were saved, and not only those authenticated by Church functionaries. The Confession of Augsburg (1530), the most significant early statement of Lutheranism, reads: Of the Worship of Saints [Catholics] teach that the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling, as the [Holy Roman Emperor Charles V] may follow the example of David in making war to drive away the Turk from his country; for both are kings. But the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor. He is to be prayed to, and has promised that He will hear our prayer; and this worship He approves above all, to wit, that in all afflictions He be called upon, 1 John 2, 1: If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, etc.10

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To reformers, the saints offered only another barrier between the faithful and God. In the Protestant view, all the functions that the Church granted to the saints, the Gospel had granted to Christ. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, Rome undertook an examination of its own doctrines and practices, among them the cult of the saints. The Council of Trent, convened by Pope Paul III in 1545, marked the high point of a Catholic Reform that sought to eliminate corruption in the Church and improve the education standards and moral quality of the clergy while emphasizing the continuity of Christian history and branding Protestants as dangerous innovators. The council affirmed the Bible, as clarified by centuries of tradition and exegesis, as the basis of faith; and in doing so affirmed the cult of the saints as a primary point of access for the faithful into Catholic spirituality – one of the main ways that Catholics might experience the faith and engage with the divine. The council also determined, however, that stricter controls were needed to ensure that the abuses that had crept into the Cult over the centuries were eliminated and the proliferation of unsanctioned saints’ cults was controlled. According to decrees proclaimed in 1564: The saints, reigning together with Christ, offer their prayers to God for people; that it is a good and beneficial thing to invoke them and have recourse to their prayers and helpful assistance to obtain blessings from God through his son our lord Jesus Christ, who is our sole redeemer and saviour … And [bishops and priests] should teach that the holy bodies of the blessed martyrs and others who live with Christ, in that they were living members of Christ and a temple of the holy Spirit (1 Cor 3, 16; 6, 15, 19), due to be raised by him to eternal and glorified life, are to be venerated by the faithful, and that through them many blessings are given to us by God […] All superstition must be removed from invocation of the saints, veneration of relics and use of sacred images; all aiming at base profit must be eliminated; all sensual appeal must be avoided … and people are not to abuse the celebration of the saints and visits to their relics for the purpose of drunken feasting, as if feast days in honour of the saints were to be celebrated with sensual luxury.11 This statement sets forth what, in its most basic form, priests would have taught believers in New France about sanctity. It identifies the

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important social roles the Church envisaged for the holy: saints were to be intermediaries between God and the faithful; they represented the interests and concerns of believers, and served as advocates for the faith community; and they were a focus of community cohesiveness, bringing people together for festivals and providing hope in people’s lives. The saints offered an accessible way into the faith at a time when concerns over orthodoxy and questions about the role of the priest in Christianity threatened to limit lay involvement with the more esoteric practices and rituals of the Church. The Church may have desired to remove less salubrious elements of celebration from the cult of the saints in order to bring increased decorum to practice, but in no way did it want to do away with saints altogether.12 Trent reinforced the important place holy persons occupied in the life of the Church and in the lives of the faithful. From this expression of the appropriate ways the faithful might invoke and venerate the holy, the council turned its attention to the performance of holiness itself. Individuals who wanted to live holy lives or experienced powerful mystical calls, the council decreed, were to follow their callings within sanctioned religious communities. Regulations enforcing cloister, particularly for religious women, however, threatened public charitable vocations at the very time when the Church needed them most – to reach the mass of the European peasantry and reform general religious practices. In order to provide health, educational, and charitable services to the poor, women as well as men needed to be uncloistered, to have contact with the world and not be shut away in contemplative monasteries. Despite such pronouncements, involvement of women in the Church, not just as contemplative nuns, but in many cases as active participants in the devotional revolution then sweeping the Catholic world, only increased. New female institutions, and congregations that combined a limited monastic rule with a public vocation and a vow to serve, quickly became vital to the Catholic Reform in countries like France and Spain, as well as in their overseas colonies.13 Communities of women, such as the Ursuline teaching sisters, positioned themselves to take advantage of the changes sweeping the Catholic world and new opportunities in religious life.14 Rome’s response to the Protestant Reformation, then, was to reinforce many of its most cherished and fundamental theological positions and traditional practices within a spirit of sober reform.15 The pronouncements of Trent affirmed the social role of the holy among

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the faithful both as objects of veneration and as sources of social and religious action. Not all the results of these initiatives were intended, particularly in the case of the new practitioners and institutions of (female) charitable holiness, but the spirit of experimentation engendered by the Catholic Reform proved vitally important for shaping Catholic Europe and its overseas missions. Along with a growing awareness among the Catholic hierarchy of the need to reform practices came a recognition that the Church had to rediscover its apostolic roots in order to grow. The new saints of the Catholic reform would serve as excellent propaganda tools for confronting Protestant critics and showcasing the best of what the Church had to offer.16

E a r ly M o d e r n H agi ography In this project of renewal and expansion, hagiography itself might prove a particularly useful tool, especially if it too could be reformed. The hagiographer Luigi Lippomano, for example, hoped that the Lives of the Church Fathers he published in the 1560s might “demonstrate the truth of Catholic dogma against the heretics of our time just as one would sustain an impregnable fortress.”17 For that to happen, however, hagiography had to be rationalized along with the cult of the saints, with clear procedures provided for assessing and judging sanctity. New guidelines were designed to curtail the legendary quality of high medieval hagiography, which quickly fell out of favour among early modern writers (if not always readers). Following the spirit of the times, hagiographers cut back their emphasis on the fantastical in favour of a concern for historicity and the authenticity that credible eyewitnesses and meticulous official Church investigations of the lives and doings of the holy could guarantee. These initiatives were intended to strengthen public confidence in the quality of those designated as saints, but had the side effect of making canonization an increasingly exclusive category. The first Saints Lives in the reformed tradition to reach France were translated from Italian and Spanish. These Lives arrived during the reign of Henry IV (1589–1610) and inspired a process of imitation, both in holy performances and in the writing of new Lives in French. Even the first holy biography in the new style about a French Reform figure came to France via Rome. The Life of Pierre Favre (1506–1546), a companion and disciple of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of the Jesus (Jesuits), was

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written by an Italian, Nicolas Orlandini, and published first in Rome (1614) and only subsequently in Lyon (1617). It was translated into French from Latin the following year.18 The new emphasis on the eyewitness can be seen in this early work, which privileges firsthand accounts as a way of imparting confidence and veracity in the subject.19 It is unrealistic, however, to view the reform of Early Modern hagiographic writing as a linear process leading from legendary myth- and miracle-laden texts to something empirical and rooted in causal rationality. The popularity of legendary narratives rife with miracles endured alongside the burgeoning new humanist biographical form in the Early Modern period.20 Even among the Bollandists, a group of Belgian Jesuits who began preserving hagiographies on a massive scale in the mid-seventeenth century using a critical method rooted in historical veracity, the humanist turn did not entirely strip hagiography of its miraculous element. In fact, at the same time that the Bollandists were developing and propagating a spirit of critical rigour in their selection of only the most authentic texts for inclusion in their Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the Saints), they were also preserving miracle stories on a massive scale.21 As historian Simon Ditchfield points out, “we must be prepared to tolerate not only the chronological overlap of continued interest in the miraculous with Bollandist rigour but the fact that these two strands did not exist in isolation from one another.” In the thinking of the time, greater rigour in the investigation of lives and the selection of texts could only lead to greater trust in the stories preserved, even the miraculous ones. The Council of Trent reaffirmed the cult of the saints as well as the miraculous within orthodox belief, and both remained essential parts of official and unofficial sainthood.22 Bollandists, meanwhile, preserved historically authentic texts, but without eschewing miracle stories, which they collected by the hundreds and thousands. To further reinforce the authenticity of the saints in this context, the Holy See worked steadily from the thirteenth century onward to secure to itself the exclusive right to proclaim saints, overriding local episcopal authorities and the vox populi. With the creation of the Sacred Congregation of Rites in 1588, Rome instituted a multi-step process for investigating the lives and deaths of candidates for canonization. In 1625 and 1634, Pope Urban VIII (1623–44) issued guidelines for the reform of the cult of the saints that set out new procedures for investigating the lives and deaths of potential

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candidates. Investigations were henceforth to be based on legal principles – the need to prove sanctity according to the terms of Canon Law. All candidates except for martyrs had to satisfy three general requirements: doctrinal purity, heroic virtue, and miraculous intercession after death. The writings of a candidate were to be closely scrutinized for doctrinal purity. In the context of the Reformation, it was particularly important to ensure that no heretics or pretenders were accidentally declared saints. The 1634 regulations forbade the publication of books about saints pending official recognition, and banned the veneration of any unofficially recognized holy figure. Even so, the existence of a popular cult remained a requirement of canonization, although it did not guarantee a candidate’s success. The Church measured heroic virtue according to the candidate’s practice of the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and the four cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, evaluating these through a careful interrogation of ­ witnesses and an investigation of writings about the life of the candidate. In practice, however, heroic virtue was more a matter of personality and action. A combination of charisma, humility, self-denial, and good works carried out in public to an eminent, but ultimately unquantifiable degree, might have convinced the faith community that a holy person had lived among them.23 Finally, but still fundamentally important for establishing a holy reputation among both the laity and the clergy, was evidence of miraculous intercession. A cult, official or otherwise, rarely succeeded without evidence that a holy person could benefit his or her community in some way by acting as a patron for believers and an intercessor with God after death. Holy persons were expected to serve as advocates for the faithful. Miracles were the proof that a candidate was able to intercede with God in heaven on behalf of those left behind. Consequently, only after-death intercessions counted officially as miracles on the checklist of sainthood. For the faithful, however, miracles performed or arranged for during life could be just as valid for indicating blessedness. It was the job of Vatican investigators to authenticate reported miracles and determine if miracle-working power came from God or the Devil.24 Prior to the advent of modern scientific methods, however, “the zeal and credulity of the faithful usually prevailed.”25 These new rules slowed down the saint-making mechanism in  Rome, but did little to stop people from regarding certain

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individuals in their communities as saints and asking these local figures for divine favours. As a result, saint making evolved as a mix between local veneration and official investigation, where the doctrine of sanctity and local credulity both played key roles in the performance and reception of holiness. Early Modern hagiographic discourse tends to reflect this dual aspect by invoking both local and universal narratives – the historical and the metaphysical.26 Historian R. Po-chai Hsia suggests that the purpose of the reformed post-­Tridentine style was to “particularize the universal and universalize the particular” in the belief that new local saints would prove more edifying and accessible to believers than saints distant in time and place.27 To get around the new limitations on hagiographic writing, Lives published following the Council of Trent and the decrees of Urban VIII were often accompanied by paratextual disclaimers in which the authors denied any knowledge of whether or not the subject was a saint according to canon law, claiming to leave the final judgment up to the Church. Meanwhile, with little restraint other than semantic artifice, the text might relate miraculous interventions and refer to the subject as a saint. In his 1668 collection of miracles attributed to St Anne at her shrine at Beaupré in New France, for example, the parish priest Thomas Morel (1636–1687) uses the term “marvels” (merueilles) rather than miracles to refer to the intercessions that believers attributed to the shrine’s patron, “in order not to transgress in the least the mandates of the Holy Church.”28 Anne, grandmother to Jesus, was of course already a saint of the Church, but these new miracles required authentication. Morel, unwilling to wait, simply pushed ahead with his conviction that the marvels he wrote about were divine in origin. Likewise, François Vachon de Belmont wrote in the Life of the Montreal holy woman Jeanne Le Ber in 1722: “No one felt free to call her a saint because they well knew how the Holy See defined this word and that only those whom the sovereign pontiff had declared worthy could be honoured with a public cult.” Nevertheless, he went on to urge his community to consider her their protectress and to pray to her.29 Such disclaimers allowed new biographies to be published quickly after the death of a holy person, in order to take best advantage of eyewitness testimony without impinging on the prerogative of the Church to officially name saints. Indeed, it is a feature of Early Modern holy biographies that they were generally published very

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soon after the deaths of their subjects; in New France prior to 1701, the average interval between a holy death and the composition of a hagiographic text was less than a year and a half. Hagiographic discourses also appeared in other forms very rapidly without waiting for official sanction. Such accounts were most often composed by people who had known the holy person very well in life and witnessed his or her death. New France offers a wealth of hagiographic sources produced soon after a holy death outside the specific confines of official investigations about individuals who were beatified and canonized only much later or not at all.

Re l ig io n , M is s io n s , a nd Coloni ali s m in t h e A m eri cas Religious change in Europe was closely related with overseas exploration and empire building in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reform of the Church begun at Trent was generally quickly embraced in southern Europe and coincided with overseas colonial expansion and extensive missionary efforts in Spanish and Portuguese territories. In northern Europe, however, the dynastic quarrels and spiritual tumult caused by the embrace of Protestantism eventually prompted religious dissenters of many stripes to look upon the new world as a promised land of religious freedom. France, in many ways caught between these extremes, was slow to implement the decrees of Trent and also to develop a sustained colonial interest. In the mid1530s and again in 1541–42, France had taken initial steps to explore and settle the lands it claimed in North America, and the 1560s saw several attempts to carve out colonies and trading interests in Florida, claimed by Spain, and regions of Brazil claimed by the Portuguese. But these efforts, plagued by internal religious divisions between Catholic and Protestant members of expeditionary groups and external resistance from Portugal, Spain, and Indigenous nations, were unsuccessful and not followed up.30 For four decades thereafter civil wars in France that pitted Protestant Huguenots against Catholics and, various Catholic factions against each other and against Henry Bourbon, the Protestant claimant to the French throne, put a pause on colonial ambitions. It was not until the opening years of the seventeenth century, once Henry had converted to Catholicism and secured the throne as Henry IV, that France followed Spain to the Americas and built colonies in lands unsettled by other European powers.

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Through the years of civil war, however, the seeds were sown for a religious revival in France that would deeply affect the development of future colonies in North America. In 1598 the Edict of Nantes granted religious freedom to Huguenots, and in the first years of the seventeenth century France once again sent explorers to the Americas. Henry IV, as part of a sweeping effort to reward and placate his Protestant followers after his conversion to Catholicism, at first granted trading monopolies in New France to powerful Protestant noblemen. Pierre du Gua de Monts, the first to receive such a commission, was nevertheless required by the terms of his monopoly to establish Catholic missions among the Indigenous population. Despite the presence of some Huguenots in the earliest of France’s renewed colonial efforts in Acadia and Canada, there was little doubt that the new colonies would be anything but Catholic. Notwithstanding an unprecedented degree of religious tolerance after 1598, Huguenots were still virtual foreigners in their own country. Historian Alain Tallon argues that despite the Edict of Nantes, the civil wars demonstrated how it was impossible to be French and anything but Catholic. Henry himself had had to convert to Catholicism in order to take the throne. The seed of a national myth was planted that France was the Christian nation par excellence and, as such, it would dominate Europe and had at least an equal (if not greater) right to an overseas empire as its Catholic rivals Spain and Portugal.31 When De Monts ultimately lost his monopoly in 1607, he was replaced by Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt, a former member of the Catholic League who had fought against Henry in the civil wars. After Henry’s conversion, however, he became the king’s loyal supporter. Poutrincourt was interested in establishing an agricultural settlement in Acadia, and as a Catholic he also hoped to open missions. It was Poutrincourt who brought the first Catholic missionary, Jessé Fléché, to Acadia in 1610. The following year, with the backing of the extremely wealthy noblewoman and courtier Madame de Guercheville, two Jesuits were also sent to the new colony.32 So began the missions that would become such an essential part of early French colonial efforts in Canada. This initiative also marked the beginning of the involvement of wealthy and highly devout laymen and women, known as les dévot(e)s, in the religious project of New France. Many of these dévot(e)s were former members of the Catholic League in search of an outlet for their religious zeal and reforming

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ethos after the end of the civil wars. Despite Poutrincourt’s plan to build an agricultural settlement, interests at the French court leaned precipitously toward trade and religion in the new world, rather than toward settlement. For much of the first half of the seventeenth century, New France was little more than a fur-trading and fishing post. But for missionaries and those who supported them in France, New France was first and foremost a mission field. Male and female missionaries travelled there with the intention of sanctifying themselves, the land, and those who lived there, and building a new society among French settlers and Indigenous converts on the basis of an ideal Tridentine model of Catholicism. Indeed, the early colony might be described as a religious experiment engineered by devout men and women in France and the new world missionaries they financed. State-sponsored settlement schemes and colony building, at least until the 1660s, carried little weight next to the merchant and religious interests that ran the colony. Just as these new colonizing endeavours were setting out from France in the first years of the seventeenth century, the French Church finally began to formally implement the decrees of Trent. Although there had been a reforming ethos among the higher clergy since the fifteenth century, the new seminaries and colleges founded at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries contributed greatly to the improved quality of the lower clergy. At the same time, new Tridentine orders began to establish themselves in France. The Jesuits in particular had an enormous impact on the French Church and royal court, bringing together a northern-European rigorist theology with southern baroque humanism, and advocating for a worldly spirituality aimed at humanizing religion and making it accessible to all.33 Although the decrees of the Council of Trent initially met opposition from Gallican clergy, who relished the traditional independence of the French Church from Rome, the clergy of France nevertheless declared their acceptance of all of Trent’s decrees.34 By the reckoning of some, French clergy were among the most reformed by the mid-seventeenth century, as indicated by their general separation from the mass of the population through behavioural standards, education, and rigorism in theology and practice.35 The Catholic reform and the civil wars of religion in France had resulted in an intensification of religious life at just the time that state and commercial interests once again took an active role in

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­colonizing

the Americas.36 This congruence significantly shaped the colony as missionaries, alongside fur traders, took the lead in establishing a political, religious, and commercial presence for France in North America. It was, therefore, within an environment of religious fervour and missionary zeal that a tiny French settlement located primarily along the banks of the St Lawrence River began to witness holy performances and produce holy persons in numbers entirely disproportionate to the size of its tiny Christian population.

H ag io g r a p h ic Di s cours e Holiness in both Catholic and Protestant colonies closely replicated the form it took in Europe. In New England, for instance, four Quakers who were executed by authorities in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1660–61 for holding religious views that differed from the Puritan majority were regarded by their co-religionists as martyrs. Writings and depictions from the time show them dying in ways typical of Christian martyrs familiar from centuries of European ­tradition, hagiographic writing, preaching and art; expressing joy, love, and confidence in their God.37 Susan Juster suggests that religious violence in the colonies such as the Quakers suffered was an extension of the conflicts and wars of religion in Europe, and that these lent a particular ferocity and viciousness to conflicts between Christians and Indigenous peoples who refused to convert.38 The wars in Europe also contributed to a religious zeal and enthusiasm that reached across the Atlantic and made American colonies into experiments in reformed brands of European religion. In New France, New Spain, and New England holy persons appeared with persistent regularity and enjoyed significant influence over the religious lives of their communities. In New Spain figures such as Rosa de Lima helped to forge local creole identities.39 Elsewhere, Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s, and later Sarah Edwards and Abigail Hutchinson drew the attention of New England settlers with their ecstatic religious experiences, visions, and asceticism –­ features common in traditional and contemporary female piety in Europe.40 Likewise, holy persons in early colonial Canada occupied important social roles. Their performances of holiness all developed within the trans-Atlantic contexts of the Catholic Reform, the wars of religion, and the rush to claim lands and convert peoples of the new world to Christianity. Christians on both sides of the Atlantic

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were attuned to narratives of religious suffering and heroism, and the tenor of the times ensured that performances of extraordinary piety received great attention and admiration. The texts that described the lives and deeds of these colonial holy persons to contemporary audiences varied considerably in form and function: detailed biographies written in the new Early Modern style; short unpublished texts contained within mission reports, letters, annals, and other correspondence; images; and no doubt stories that circulated orally among local populations but were never written down. Among the biographies is the first hagiographic text to narrate the life of the foundress of the Quebec Ursulines, Marie de l’Incarnation. Although about a colonial figure, this book is a quintessentially post-Tridentine holy biography of Early Modern France. It appeared only five years after Marie’s death, and was written by Claude Martin, her son, primary correspondent, and informal confessor and spiritual director. Needless to say, Martin knew his mother very well even though she had abandoned him as a young boy when she followed what she believed was God’s call to go to New France in 1639. As Martin grew up and, in his turn, joined the Church, he remained in constant communication with his mother. As her biographer, he combined the roles of dutiful son and authoritative priest. The biography he wrote, however, draws extensively on Marie’s own writings, which she sent to him in confidence, and on Martin’s formal interpretations of them. What Martin could not provide on his own, he obtained from eyewitnesses. “But what I am about to say in this Life,” he wrote, “is supported by the most certain memories and recognized by so many people who were eyewitnesses and who are still living, that any reasonable person could never doubt it.”41 All of which, in his view, lent great credibility to the work and hence to his mother’s holiness. This technique of direct quotation supported by eyewitness testimony, common especially in seventeenth-century female Lives, allowed Marie’s holiness to speak for itself on the one hand; but it also offered Martin the opportunity to shape her holiness according to prevailing guidelines, orthodoxies, and preferences. Rather than allow Marie’s writings to circulate freely, raising the possibility of misinterpretation or worse – charges of heterodoxy – this strategy allowed for a male religious authority to shape the legacy of a spiritual woman. The authoritative voice of the male ecclesiastic, which was essential for the wide acceptance of a holy life, was deployed to

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strengthen his mother’s cause. In the minds of ecclesiastical readers, Martin’s status as a priest, eyewitness, and unofficial confessor reinforced the authenticity of her holiness and lent legitimacy to her performance. This type of confessor-authored hagiography enjoyed particular popularity in Spain and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.42 Martin’s work and others like it stand out for the amount of detail they relate, and the practice of employing their subjects’ own writings as primary source material. Such biographies preserved on a large scale the autographic writings of female holy persons that might otherwise have been lost. Sadly, such works from New France are rare – limited to just two examples, this one and a life of the hospital nun Catherine de Saint-Augustin, discussed in chapter five. These biographies, as historian Jodi Bilinkoff observes, connected their subjects, and by extension the colony, to “a pan-European, trans-Atlantic, inter-American community of believers,” but they did so within the limits imposed by doctrinal and hagiographic expectations developed and upheld in the metropole.43 The faith community of New France, as we shall see, also had their own ways of engaging with these holy women without the mediation of texts that were not, at any rate, written for them. Although formal holy biographies from New France are rare, hagiographic discourses nevertheless survive in significant volume in other forms. The Jesuit Relations, for instance, published in France between 1632 and 1673, were a favourite medium for relating accounts of colonial holy lives to metropolitan audiences. Included in these yearly accounts of Jesuit activity in the mission fields of the Americas were heroic tales of the deaths of Jesuit missionaries who were considered martyrs to the faith, reports on the exemplary religious devotions of selected Indigenous converts, and the obituaries and biographies of other prominent French religious figures from the period. Hagiographic passages, if not formal biographies, also appear in  works of colonial history such as François Dollier de Casson’s Histoire de Montréal (1672) and in institutional records such as the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.44 Compiled around 1717 by several sisters of the Augustinian Order, this latter text gathers material from the community archives and the recollections of older members to provide a year-by-year history of colonial and institutional events, biographies of prominent colonial and Church officials, and

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obituaries of all the Augustinian sisters from the lowliest soeur converse (lay sister) to choir nuns such as Catherine de Saint-Augustin, one of the most highly documented early modern French holy women. The full collection of colonial hagiography, ranging from short biographical notices to lengthy entries in collections such as the Relations and the Annales, and finally to complete biographies, represents a major contribution to colonial writing and Atlantic world literature, and is a significant resource that historians have often overlooked in their caution regarding its hagiographic content and structure. The sources for the present study include not just traditional “Lives of the Saints,” but all biographical accounts of persons considered holy or exemplary in their own time, as well as discourses on sanctity and holy virtues and deeds such as miracles. These hagiographic accounts nevertheless have their limitations. The burden of tradition and official expectation weighs heavily upon them. For the most part, male ecclesiastical authorities dominated the writing of hagiography and used it to promote the colony. However, women were also authors, and nuns at times intervened in the processes of becoming holy in order to impose their own ideas and ideals on the foundress and sisters of their orders. Marie de l’Incarnation, for example, was not just a holy woman in her own right; she was also the author of several texts about the lives and virtues of three of her contemporaries: Marie-Madeleine de Chauvigny, Madame de la Peltrie, the lay foundress and primary financial backer of the Ursulines in Canada: Marie de Savonnières de la Troche de Saint-Joseph, a founding member of the Ursuline convent; and Anne Bataille, a lowranking Ursuline nun whom Marie noted for her great piety. Her accounts of all three women were originally composed in epistolary form meant for circulation within the Ursuline network of France, but two of them (of Madame de la Peltrie and Marie de Saint-Joseph) also found their way into the Jesuit Relations, and from there reached a much wider audience than otherwise would have been possible.45 To some degree, then, female voices, in addition to female performers, are represented in the hagiographic discourse of seventeenth-century New France. What is missing from the hagiographic record is any account written by a lay settler. Many texts allude to local belief communities and their piety and veneration of the faithful, but no texts exist that were written by members of this community. What remains are transcribed testimonies of, for instance, miraculous experiences collected by the Church, and other evidence that allows for the discernment of

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the existence of a faith community and some of its voices. Likewise, evidence of Indigenous attitudes toward Christian sanctity or Indigenous performances of sanctity is difficult but not impossible to ascertain in documents that, almost exclusively, were written by and for Europeans. Hagiographic sources begin to dry up in the early years of the eighteenth century. The first century of New France’s history produced compelling holy performances and hagiographic texts but, as the colony developed into a strategic military asset in the eighteenth-­century French empire, the spirit of Tridentine experimentation that had characterized the early years of settlement faded. The Jesuit Relations ceased publication in 1673 as general interest in the religious mission of the colony was gradually supplanted in France by a focus on imperial rivalries, commerce, and war. Although holy ­performances continued in the colony, their proponents struggled to find audiences beyond the immediate community. As the fervour of the Tridentine reform passed, the urgency that had characterized colonial religiosity in earlier years also subsided. The number and frequency of holy biographies diminished after 1701. The few new accounts that were written were often not published, and when they were, appeared an average of eighteen years after the deaths of their subjects. In some cases, it could take many years for a holy performance to be recognized and a text written. The first biographies of some who died during the French regime were not composed until well into the nineteenth century, and it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that official canonization procedures for any colonial candidates were formally introduced at the Vatican.46 The full range of hagiographic discourse from New France displays great variety, and also reflects the prevailing trends and changing concerns, interests, and assumptions of the times in which these texts were written. As a source for historical study, colonial hagiography invokes the formal aspects of the cult of the saints; but it also cuts through much of the narrative formalism of generic hagiography, thanks to the fact that much of it remained unpublished or appeared only in contexts outside of formal biographies and canonization procedures during the period under discussion. When read with an attention to detail and nuance, these various texts and discourses reflect the attitudes and reactions of local audiences at all levels of society to the performances they had witnessed. By skirting, and in some cases avoiding altogether, the confines of the formal categories of institutional Catholicism and its rules for hagiography, these sources can

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reveal much about the idiosyncrasies of everyday life and belief that originally endeared local holy persons to their communities.

C o n c l u s ion In the years following the Reformation, Europe experienced a devotional revolution that was accompanied by dramatic changes in religious vocations, holy performances, and hagiographic writing. The schism in Christianity between Protestants and Catholics, and the wars of religion that followed sparked an eschatological crisis that sent men and women alike back to religion in search of penance and  salvation. At the same time, the European “discovery” of the Americas contributed to the difficult spiritual questions Christians were asking themselves. The Reformation and Catholic Reform prompted a revitalization of interest in martyrdom, mysticism, and holiness, and in individuals who seemed to embody the ethos of a saint of the apostolic Church. In reforming the cult of the saints, the Council of Trent affirmed the role of saints as intermediaries between the faithful on earth and God in heaven as a fundamental part of Catholic doctrine and practice. In so doing, the Church granted holy persons a public role in the lives of the Catholic faithful as patrons, representatives, and models of heroic virtue. Meanwhile, institutional efforts to limit the right to proclaim saints to the Holy See were only partially successful, in that the prerogative of recognizing a holy performance remained with local communities. In New France, extraordinary ­displays of religiosity took place within a spirit of experimental Catholicism and before a very small Catholic population that lived on the extreme margins of Christendom. All these factors, from Trent’s pronouncements to the religious contexts of the establishment of the early colonies in Canada, shaped colonial holy performances and reactions to them in the settler communities of early Canada.

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2 Evangelism: Martyrdom

On 1 August 1642 a party of about fifty Hurons and Frenchmen departed the tiny French settlement of Trois-Rivières, heading west along the St Lawrence River. They faced weeks of hard paddling as they journeyed to the interior of the continent, to Huron country near Georgian Bay. In addition to Huron traders and warriors, the company included Father Isaac Jogues, a seasoned Jesuit missionary with six years of experience in Canada, and René Goupil, a recently arrived surgeon and Jesuit donné (a secular volunteer). The first day of travel passed well enough, but on the second, when a landing was made, footprints were discovered on the sandy shore. After disembarking, the travellers debated among themselves whether the prints belonged to their Iroquois enemies or their Algonquin friends. Unable to make a clear determination, they pushed on. Very soon, Jogues would later report, “the enemy, concealed among the grass and brushwood, [rose] with a great outcry, discharging at our canoes a volley of balls.”1 Many in the company fled at the first assault. Jogues, Goupil, a third Frenchman called Guillaume Cousture, and perhaps a dozen Hurons remained to face double that number of Iroquois. They did not have a chance. Goupil was the first to be taken captive. Soon the entire group was surrounded. Jogues alone managed to conceal himself in the brush, where he watched the fight unfold and struggled with his own conscience; “Could I, indeed,” I said to myself, “abandon our French and leave these good Neophytes and poor Catechumens, without giving them the help which the Church of my God has entrusted to me?” Flight seemed horrible to me; “It must be,” I said in my

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heart, “that my body suffer the fire of earth, in order to deliver these poor souls from the flames of Hell; it must die a transient death in order to procure for them an eternal life.”2 Jesuits were carefully trained to attempt to discern God’s will through a strict program of spiritual meditation and prayer known as the Spiritual Exercises.3 Just weeks before, Jogues had kneeled in prayer before the sacrament in the tiny chapel of the Jesuit mission in Huronia and asked God to grant him “the favor and grace of suffering for [God’s] glory.”4 It must have seemed to him on that August morning that his prayer had been answered. Calmly, he stepped from his hiding place among the scrub and called out to the nearest Iroquois warrior, giving himself up and joining the rest of the French and Huron captives. As war captives Jogues and Goupil joined well-established Iroquois rituals of warfare, captivity, and adoption. Long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, the Iroquois and other Indigenous nations of the northeast had used captivity to adopt new members into their societies and replace others who had died. Adoption involved ritual torture, but not everyone who was captured in war was chosen for incorporation into the host community. Warriors, especially, were expected to suffer torture bravely in the expectation of death. The party’s Iroquois captors treated the two Jesuits, one Frenchmen, and the untold number of Hurons taken captive that day in a manner typical for enemies taken in war. But to French observers, captivity in warfare looked a lot like slavery, and the deaths that would eventually come to Catholic missionaries strongly resembled Christian martyrdom. Goupil would die first followed by Jogues, but only after a long captivity, escape, and a return to the lands of the Iroquois in 1646. By the end of the decade other missionaries would join these two in death; some, likewise, as captives of the Iroquois, others killed in the conflicts that gripped northeastern North America in the mid-seventeenth century. French observers and, in particular, Jesuit commentators, would transform these deaths into martyrdoms; a consequence, they believed, of odium fidei ex partis persecutoris (hatred of the faith on the part of the persecutor) and the willing choice of the victim to sacrifice himself – the most basic criteria of Christian martyrdom.5 Over the centuries much hagiographic ink has been spilled in describing the sufferings and deaths of these evangelists, eight of

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whom the Catholic Church ultimately canonized in 1930.6 Much remains to be said, however, about the ritual contexts in which they actually died and how Iroquois practices may have shaped the creation and reception of the martyr’s narrative in colonial New France. In this chapter I situate the deaths of these missionaries (and their often-forgotten Indigenous companions) within the context of Indigenous–European contact history and ritual culture, in an effort to understand how deaths that took place within and as a result of Indigenous ritual practices of warfare, captivity, and adoption became re-inscribed as performances of the drama of Christian martyrdom.7 By exploring the ritual and performative contexts that lie behind the martyrs’ narrative, I reconsider how Christian and Indigenous audiences created meaning out of violent death and probe into the great multiplicity of meanings available locally and within the universal category of Christian sanctity.

C a p t iv it y a n d Adopti on Knowledge of the capture of the Huron party and their French travelling companions reached French settlements in the St Lawrence valley in a slow trickle that autumn. With little to rely on, and assuming the worst, Jesuits in Huronia jumped to conclusions when the expected canoe brigade failed to appear. The missionary Claude Pijart went so far as to compose Jogues’s eulogy.8 In Quebec, the Jesuits knew of the ambush and capture of their colleagues, but little of their fate. Jean de Brébeuf wrote to Rome to inform the Jesuit superior general of Jogues’s captivity and of their concern for his well-being.9 In a letter dated 23 May 1643, the Jesuit Charles Garnier told his brother that Jogues and Goupil had been murdered and burned.10 These assumptions reflect both the persecutions Jesuit missionaries were beginning to experience in the Huron mission as European diseases ravaged the population beginning in the late 1630s, and also the Jesuits’ desire for martyrdom to grace their mission. Eventually, escaped Huron captives reached French settlements bearing news of the true fate of the travelling party.11 Following the short skirmish by the river, the Iroquois immediately and without ceremony dispatched the elderly, weak, and seriously wounded in the company – those who were unlikely to survive the long road back to Iroquois country south of Lake Ontario. With the rest suffering only mild wounds sustained in the fight, the entire

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group embarked on a gruelling thirteen-day march to the village of Ossernenon. Eight days into their journey they encountered another Iroquois war party. The captives were forced to run a gauntlet of about a hundred people ranged in two lines, who beat them mercilessly as they passed through. Next, the warriors bound the captives to posts erected on a scaffold they had hastily constructed on the crest of a small hill. There, the captives endured a barrage of insults and physical torments. Fingers were burned, knuckles crushed, and old wounds opened. While no doubt greatly painful, these torments were also superficial, intended to prevent escape but not to inflict lasting damage. The Iroquois wished their captives to survive so that the community as a whole could determine whether they would be adopted or killed. The worst of these assaults was inflicted upon the Huron captain, a Christian convert the Jesuits called Eustache, who had his thumbs cut off and sharp sticks inserted into the wounds.12 After some time the journey continued. When the group finally arrived at their destination, the captives were forced once again to run the gauntlet. The villagers constructed a scaffold and bound the prisoners to posts. There Jogues and the others endured three days of torture, but each night were taken into the cabins, fed, and allowed to rest. The captives were then paraded to two other villages where they endured the same. The tortures then suddenly ceased. Eustache, along with at least two other Hurons called Paul and Stephen by the Jesuits, were killed as befitted enemy warriors.13 But the remaining Hurons, along with the Frenchmen, were spared. Wounded and exhausted, but alive, Jogues reported in letters he was finally able to write to anxious friends in Canada that he and Goupil were to remain as captives in Ossernenon.14 The experiences of Jogues, Goupil, Eustache, and the rest were typical for war captives in this period. For the Indigenous nations of the northeast, war was first and foremost a cultural and social enterprise aimed toward taking captives and transforming these threatening Others into becoming friends and even relatives.15 Among the Iroquois, these practices developed out of long traditions of bereavement and condolence that had developed alongside and in conjunction with the Iroquois League itself.The League of the Haudenousaunee (or Iroquois, as the French called it) had formed among five nations – the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga – some time prior to the arrival of Europeans in North America, out of a need to

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curtail endemic violence. In the Condolence Ritual, which was key to League diplomacy, the clear-minded consoled those grieving the deaths of loved ones and restored them to their right minds, thereby ending cycles of revenge and violence against the perpetrators of unnatural deaths. These ceremonies led to the violence being turned outward beyond the League, often with the purpose of taking captives who might replace lost leaders, clan members, and family, thus sustaining established relationships and sociability among the members of the League.16 Beginning in the mid-1630s, however, it seems the practice of taking captives for adoption expanded as a result of the devastating assault of European epidemic diseases on League populations. Traditional practices were modified to allow for the adoption of large numbers of captured enemies to sustain the population of the five member nations of the League. Ethnohistorian Daniel Richter calls the wars that resulted, especially against the Huron, “mourning wars” because of their association with the Condolence Ritual and the need for captives to assuage grief.17 The Huron, likewise a confederacy of Iroquoian-speaking nations with cultures and ways of life similar to those of the Iroquois League, were especially targeted for integration, although anyone, including Frenchmen, might be adopted if they demonstrated a willingness to become Iroquois. In a letter dated 30 June 1643 Jogues explained the Iroquois strategy to colonial officials in Quebec. “The design of the Iroquois, at least as far as I can see, is to take, if they can, all the Hurons; and, having put to death the most considerable ones and a good part of the others, to make of them both one people and only one land.”18 Once the warriors and leaders unlikely to easily assimilate into the League had been killed, remaining captives were initiated into their new culture and family through rituals of torture and adoption. As a result of epidemic disease and these mourning wars, as much as two-thirds of the population of many Iroquois villages may have been adoptees by the 1660s. Overall, then, a strategy born of necessity and tradition, cultural adaptation, and expediency was successful. League population levels remained steady at about ten thousand, despite the massive loss of life attributable to European diseases.19 Even so, integration and assimilation often remained incomplete; adoptees were expected to become one people with the Iroquois by acting like Iroquois, but some maintained separate identities for decades.20

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The practice of captivity, ritual torture, and adoption extended well beyond the Iroquois. The French in Canada observed these practices many times both among their enemies and among their allies, the Hurons, Montagnais, and Algonquin.21 Indigenous peoples may likewise have viewed French baptismal rituals that assigned godparents to converts as a kind of adoption. For all, both adoption and the ritual deaths of enemy captives undoubtedly held spiritual and religious, as well as political significance. Since ritual torture frequently coincided with significant times of day, such as sunset or sunrise, ethnohistorians speculate that victims may have been viewed as sacrifices to appease the spiritual forces that inhabited Indigenous cosmologies.22 Individual captives who suffered bravely were revered and honoured after their deaths by ritual ingestion, generally of the heart. The bravery of the victims and the performance of the ritual likely helped to instill a sense of awe among audiences and participants, and contributed to a shared experience of the sacred. It is this sense of mystery – a feeling of communion with spiritual forces – that anthropologist Roy Rappaport identifies with religious rituals, saying they create the necessary shared experiences that bind the community together.23 If the captive was offered life, however, tortures ceased and the captive was showered with affection by the adopting relatives, who conducted a “requickening” ceremony to integrate the newcomer into their lineage, often in place of a recently deceased family member. Jogues writes: “Mothers or other relatives who love a son, or a daughter, or any of their kindred, cause such persons to be resuscitated, through a desire to see them close by them, – transferring the affection that they felt for the deceased to the persons who take their names. This ceremony takes place at a solemn feast in the presence of many guests.”24 If the adoptee selected for adoption by senior women accepted his new identity, life could be very good; but those who resisted or tried to escape were quickly and unceremoniously dispatched.25 Captives who were spared might be integrated into Iroquois society in one of two ways: adoption, which transformed a stranger into a relative, or a form of probation that denied the captive essential social relations and left him at risk of death at any moment.26 “When they spare the life of any slave,” Jogues wrote, “they usually receive him into some family in the place of some dead kinsman, whom the slave is said to bring to life again, by taking the name and the same

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degree of relationship; so that they call him, like the dead man, “father,” “brother,” “son,” etc. But, in the case of René and myself, because we were not so strong the final decision was not taken, but they left us together, as it were, in a free slavery.”27 Goupil and Jogues were spared execution but were not formally adopted. “When they retain some public prisoner, like the Father, without giving him to any individual,” wrote Jérôme Lalemant in the Relation of 1647, “this poor man is every day within two finger-lengths of death.”28 Such a probationary period could last months or an entire lifetime during which the host society expected the captive to prove his willingness to integrate by acting like an Iroquois.29 Initially, Jogues and Goupil were permitted to move around the village with relative freedom. Despite their precarious status, however, the two Frenchmen continued to do what they believed God had sent them there to do. They preached to the Iroquois, and offered spiritual support to Christian Hurons who lived as adoptees with them. As a consequence, the two were closely watched with growing suspicion. The stage was set for a dramatic confrontation.

H o p e s a n d E x p ectati ons By the time Jogues and Goupil fell captive to the Iroquois, the Jesuits were closing in on two decades of mission work in Canada. The results to that point had been meagre and hard-won. The “harvest of souls” they had expected had not materialized and the missionaries were disappointed and frustrated. Christian history, their training, and corporate experience in other mission fields, however, taught them that such setbacks were to be expected. For the first missionaries, mission was a war for souls waged against ignorance and the devil. It was not expected that it should be conducted without casualties. Sanctity and suffering were inextricably linked in the minds of early missionaries to the point that a mission might be regarded as unsuccessful if martyrs were not made. Paul Le Jeune wrote in the Relation of 1639: We have sometimes wondered whether we could hope for the conversion of this country without the shedding of blood; the principle received, it seems, in the Church of God, that the blood of Martyrs is the seed of Christians, made me at one time conclude that this was not to be expected, – indeed, that it was not

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even to be desired; considering the glory that redounds to God from the constancy of the Martyrs, with whose blood all the rest of the earth has been so lately drenched, it would be a sort of curse if this quarter of the world should not participate in the happiness of having contributed to the splendour of this glory.30 The Jesuits who came to Canada thought of themselves as the inheritors of the evangelists of the ancient Church who had died while propagating the faith in pagan Europe. In their minds, they confronted the same challenges as the first apostles: persecution, error, magicians and miracle workers, inhospitable peoples, slander, long and dangerous travel, and disbelief – in short, mental and physical sufferings of all kinds. At the same time, when they experienced success in learning Indigenous languages, achieved hard-won conversions, or enjoyed the ability to cure or work other wonders as the apostles of the ancient Church had done, they considered these as signs that God favoured their mission.31 In recalling the third-­ century Christian writer Tertullian’s maxim that the blood of martyrs nourished the Church (sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum), Le Jeune directly linked the Canadian mission to its apostolic model at the same time that he recalled more recent bouts of religious bloodshed.32 In the absence of true martyrdom to that point, Le Jeune concluded that the sufferings the Jesuits endured every day in Canada were sufficient to claim similar spiritual benefits for their mission. But I confess, – now that I am here, and see what is taking place, namely, the combats, battles, attacks, and the general assaults against all Nature, which the Gospel laborers suffer here every day, and at the same time their patience, their courage, and the continual assiduity in pursuing their object, – that I begin to wonder whether any other martyrdom is necessary for the results we aim at; and I do not doubt that many persons could be found who would prefer to receive at once a hatchet blow upon the head, than to spend their years enduring the life one must every day lead here, working for the conversion of these barbarians.33 The conviction that suffering, if not martyrdom, was vital for success was rooted in the vigorous penitential spirituality of the time, and was a part of the training many of the early missionaries received

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before they departed for Canada.34 Several of the most prominent missionaries – Paul Le Jeune, Jérôme Lalemant, Paul Ragueneau, Antoine Daniel, Isaac Jogues, and Jean de Brébeuf – all trained at the Collège du Rouen with the famous Jesuit ascetic and mystic Louis Lallemant. Lallemant taught them that mission was an opportunity first and foremost for personal suffering directed toward interior spiritual development.35 Jesus, he told his students, achieved the redemption of the world through the cross, blood, and death, not through miracles or preaching, and missionaries should likewise “not expect a great harvest from their works, if they are not accompanied by failures, slanders, injuries and sufferings.”36 First among the ranks of the holy were the martyrs, said Lallemant, because it was they who suffered most and spread the faith throughout the world. Personal sacrifice was such a central component of Jesuit mission identity and ideology that early missionaries could not really imagine a successful mission without it. Inspired by their training and centuries of Christian tradition, the Jesuits who embarked for Canada in the first half of the seventeenth century regarded the discernment of God’s will and their own salvation as being at least as important as the salvation of those they hoped to convert.37 Historian Joseph de Guibert argues that the goal of inner development – the discernment and fulfilment of God’s will – was always the most important aspect of Jesuit spirituality. The achievement of this goal was the purpose of the Spiritual Exercises, which all Jesuits had to complete regularly as a part of their training.38 The Exercises were designed to assist someone in making a choice about the future direction of his life, and assist that person in stripping away all external factors in order to listen to deeply personal affective responses leading to “election” – a decision. Lallemant taught his protégés that becoming a more perfect apostolic worker would be achieved only through prayer, contemplation, and interior development, without which the best preacher in the world would not be effective. Missionaries who found themselves in a foreign environment surrounded by peoples whose culture and language they could scarcely begin to understand found in the Spiritual Exercises a ready-made program for making choices that gave profound meaning to actions and especially outcomes. In his personal writings, Jean de Brébeuf vowed his commitment to die for the faith: “Therefore to you, my lord Jesus, I offer gladly my blood, my body and my spirit now this

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day so that I may die for you, who deigned to die for me, if you grant it.”39 Jogues too seems to have engaged in just such a meditation as he lay in hiding following the ambush along the St Lawrence, as well as in the weeks leading up to his departure for Huron country, when he believed God had called him to sacrifice himself. Later he would regard the gauntlet he and Goupil were forced to endure as the “narrow way to paradise,” the sticks and clubs of the Iroquois as “weapons of the passion,” and the scaffold upon which they were bound as  a stage where, “we offered ourselves with great courage to his fatherly goodness in order to be victims sacrificed to his good ­pleasure and to his anger, lovingly zealous for the salvation of these peoples.”40 All were means to martyrdom, which, through deep meditation and prayer, he came to believe was God’s will for him. Martyrdom not only consisted in the physical act of dying but in  itself was a process of discernment and dramatic encounter.41 According to Medievalist Alison Elliott, the real drama of any martyrdom takes place in the moments that precede death. It is here that the martyr confronts his or her persecutors in a theatrical scene rich in symbolic meaning and deeply rooted in Christian hagiographic tradition and ritual. In those moments, the victim takes the opportunity to address an audience far beyond the seemingly intended receiver of his discourse through the text that ultimately records what took place and ensures the victim’s legacy within the Church.42 Although death only came much later for Jogues, the ritual of martyrdom – the performance and the drama – began on the Iroquois scaffold and perhaps even earlier, in his prayers and meditations that led him to believe God wished him to be a victim for his faith. In the midst of his sufferings Jogues engaged in the kind of meditation that must have been so familiar to him from the Spiritual Exercises, reminding himself of I Corinthians 4:9–10, “We have been made a spectacle in the eyes of the world, the angels and men for Jesus Christ!”43 Just as rituals of captivity took place before the entire Iroquois community and reinforced its identity and cohesion, martyrdom too was a performance – a spectacle – that took place before the world’s Christians, God, and the entire history of the Church.

M a k in g M a rtyrs Despite their similar understandings of the power of ritual death, for both Iroquois captors and Jesuits captives the rituals of torture,

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adoption and execution remained to this point frustratingly incomplete. Jogues and Goupil languished as prisoners in Ossernenon. Although they prepared through meditation and prayer, their martyrdom did not immediately come. Perhaps life grew dull. The spiritual heights achieved in the midst of the physical sufferings they had initially endured faded and left a feeling of emptiness and perhaps even a concern that God had abandoned them. Despite efforts to discern God’s will, they could not be sure what God planned for them. Martyrdom was a special grace, and actively seeking it could mean second-guessing the divine will, which could call into question their obedience and humility.44 Meanwhile, the Iroquois also found themselves in an ambiguous relationship with their captives. Jogues describes how confusion arose among the Iroquois over what to do with the two Jesuits. Some wished to put them to death, while others thought they should be ransomed.45 They could not agree on the fate of the two Frenchmen. Even as the routines of life asserted themselves, tensions grew. It was Goupil who ultimately pushed the strain to the breaking point. Jogues describes what happened next. “One day, seeing a little child of three or four years in the cabin, – with an excess of devotion and of love for the cross, and with a simplicity which we who are more prudent than he, according to the flesh, would not have shown, – [Goupil] took off his cap, put it on a child’s head, and made a great sign of the cross upon its body.”46 Close by, observing the actions of the missionary, was the child’s grandfather. Seeing what Goupil did, the man called on a young warrior to kill the missionary. When Goupil left the cabin to join Jogues, the warrior followed him. As the Frenchmen walked together, the warrior struck from behind, felling Goupil with a hatchet blow to the head and finishing him off with two more. Jogues, as eyewitness, penned the text that interpreted this drama. Calling Goupil a martyr, he wrote: “I give him this title not only because he was killed by the enemies of God and of his Church, and in the exercise of an ardent charity towards his neighbor, – placing himself in evident peril for the love of God, – but especially because he was killed on account of prayer, and notably for the sake of the holy cross.”47 In Jogues’s interpretation, it was not so much death per se that made Goupil a martyr, but rather the actions, moments, and intentions that preceded it. Jogues describes Goupil’s death quickly, but lingers over the days and hours that led up to it. He

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suggests that Goupil had actually anticipated what was to come, confessing several times and informally taking the final vows of a Jesuit just prior to his death.48 The climactic moment in the martyrological account comes with the blessing of the child. This action both seals Goupil’s fate and makes it undeniable from Jogues’s perspective that Goupil was killed out of odium fidei – a profound hatred of the faith that forced the martyr into a choice between death or betraying what he believed God wanted of him. For those who killed Goupil, on the other hand, this death served to resolve tensions that had been festering since the breakdown of the captivity rituals, and mitigated a palpable threat posed by an outsider who refused to conform to Iroquois standards of behaviour. Jogues and Goupil flouted the rituals and conventions of captivity by refusing to play the part of willing adoptees. They ignored warnings not to provoke others by preaching, they continued to pray both on their own and in public, and they tried to win new converts. Socially, they remained outsiders, and because of their behaviour, continued to threaten the solidarity of a community already severely challenged by the impact of disease. In this context, the sign of the cross made on the forehead of a child was no innocent act. It was a statement of Goupil’s refusal to adhere to conventions the Iroquois considered vital for political and cultural stability and survival in the post-contact colonial world. It was a threat to social cohesion, and possibly an invitation to the diseases that so often brought death shortly after the appearance of missionaries in a village.49 In the context of the deep entanglements of the early colonial northeast, the sign of the cross made on the forehead of a child was a powerful and dangerous statement of cultural authority, disunity, provocation, and aggression. A few days after Goupil was killed, Jogues went to eat with the child’s grandfather – the man who had demanded Goupil’s death. When Jogues offered a blessing using the sign of the cross, the man said to him: “That is what we hate. That is why they have killed your companion, and why they will kill you.”50 Reading against the grain of Jogues’s text, we can perhaps venture that Goupil was killed for the violence he did to Iroquois adoption rituals – rituals that were so vital to the continuing social and political stability of the League. Still another interpretation of Goupil’s death is possible. It may have been a statement of power made by factions within the Iroquois League. Shortly after news of the capture of Jogues and

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Goupil reached Quebec late in the summer of 1642, an Algonquin captain had warned Jesuit Father Jacques Buteux that just such an outcome was possible. This time we will see whether the Hiroquois fear you; whether they are afraid of your arquebuses; whether they dread your cannons, or whether they despise you. As soon as your brother reaches their country, the Captains will assemble, and, if the French name frighten them, they will speak thus: “Let us not eat the flesh of the Frenchmen: that flesh is not good food, – it is poison, that will kill us if we taste it. Let us take them back to their brothers and countrymen.” … If, on the contrary, they despise you, they will call out, on the arrival of your brother and of the Frenchmen who accompany him: “Now let us eat, let us see how the flesh of the French tastes; let us swallow them all whole.” Thereupon, they will burn them; they will make them suffer a thousand torments; they will cut them in pieces and throw them by quarters into great kettles; they will eat them with pleasure; every one will want to taste them.51 That the actual outcome fell somewhere between these two poles hints at the uncertainties that continued to characterize the new political realities of the northeast. Jogues was not killed along with Goupil. Rather, he was given to a family, which he served by chopping wood and fetching water. As time passed, his adopted family treated him with increasing mildness, and gave him the name Ondesson, indicating his growing integration into local society. Seizing the opportunity offered by a lightened burden, however, Jogues resumed preaching and began to baptize children, sick people, and other captives as he journeyed extensively among Mohawk villages.52 Although numerous opportunities to escape presented themselves, Jogues came to consider his ongoing work too important and valuable to leave behind. His renewed proselytizing, however, made him once again vulnerable, and highlighted the ongoing tensions his presence seems to have caused among the Mohawk community. On Good Friday of 1643 he came very close to meeting the same end as Goupil.53 So, when next an opportunity to escape arrived late in that year, Jogues took it. He made his way to the Dutch colonies, from there to England, and eventually to France. There he remained until returning to Canada in May of 1646 to resume his mission.

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His return to Canada coincided with peace negotiations between the Iroquois and the French that had begun the year before in TroisRivières. Another missionary, Joseph Bressani, would later describe the treaty agreed to on this occasion as “feigned” by the Iroquois, but even so, Jogues volunteered for a new mission into Mohawk country.54 That summer, he made two journeys and on the second he was killed almost as soon as he set foot in Ossernenon, the village of his former captivity. The date was 18 October 1646. He was thirty-nine years old. His companion, Jean de Lalande, was also killed, along with twenty-four Hurons, who are virtually ignored in French texts.55

F ro m C a p t iv e to Martyr Jogues’s Jesuit brethren immediately regarded him as a martyr. Yet, the suddenness of his death and its separation in time from his initial captivity and torture four years before presented a narrative problem for those who would write his martyrology. Where was the drama that gave meaning to the death? Why had he escaped death once only to find it so suddenly four years later? Was he, after all, a political casualty rather than a martyr? To make the ritual of martyrdom work within the Christian hagiographic tradition and Catholic categories of evangelical sanctity, this narrative and ritual gap needed to be closed. The Jesuit superior in Canada, Jérôme Lalemant, argued in the biography he published in the 1647 Relation that Jogues had escaped in 1643 only because he knew he would one day return to complete his martyrdom. “If he had not seen that it was all over with his life, and that he could no longer help those poor Barbarians unless he escaped, so that he might come and find them at another time, never could he have abandoned them; but our Lord prolonged his life, that he might come and present it to him another time, as a burnt-offering at the place where he had already begun his sacrifice.”56 Lalemant goes on to describes how several people who saw Jogues during the period between his escape and his second departure for Iroquois country in 1646 recognized him already as a martyr. In Dutch Manhattan a young Lutheran boy who did not know Jogues or even speak his language (he was Polish), reportedly threw himself at the missionary’s feet, kissed his hands and exclaimed, “Martyr, Martyr of Christ!”57 Jogues’s experiences had certainly left him

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physically scarred and likely also emotionally wounded. Later, an unnamed Jesuit father “plainly recognized that God was preparing him for Heaven.”58 In France, the pope himself intervened to ensure that the injuries Jogues had suffered, including severed fingers, would not prevent him from saying mass by violating the ritual rule that priests must be physically whole. “It would be unjust that a martyr for Christ should not drink the blood of Christ.”59 Back in Canada and just prior to departing on his final mission, Jogues himself appeared to predict his own death, writing to a friend, “Ibo et non redibo” (I will go, but I will not return). “I would be happy if the Lord were willing to finish the sacrifice where he began it.”60 All of this provided Lalemant with the material he needed to link Jogues’s extended life to the suffering and odium fidei required for Christian martyrdom in hagiographic tradition. Although death had been delayed, Jogues’s hagiographers claimed the dramatic high point of martyrdom, the ritual performance, had, indeed, taken place years before. The superior of the Quebec Ursulines, Marie de l’Incarnation, in fact, attributed to Jogues three martyrdoms, one for each trip he took into Iroquois country. “We could even say that he is three times a martyr; that is to say as many times as he went to the Iroquois nations. The first time he did not die, but he suffered enough to have done so. The second time he did not suffer, and died only in desire; his heart burning continually for martyrdom. But the third time God gave him what his heart had so long wished for.”61 This passage reveals how martyrdom was constructed in text. It shows how Marie de l’Incarnation was able to present Jogues’s death as the outcome of his choice to follow God’s will even though the actual event of his murder was out of his hands. Emma Anderson argues that choice – the victim’s decision to endure suffering and death for the faith when abjuring it might save his or her life – is a key factor in the Christian doctrine and narrative of martyrdom.62 The hagiographic discourses composed by Lalemant and Marie de l’Incarnation present Jogues’s life as an uninterrupted progression toward martyrdom, which he chose, willingly accepted, and indeed longed for. In fact, however, Jogues could not have prevented his death by abjuring his faith because he was never offered the choice. Other motivating factors likely stood behind the Mohawk decision to kill him, factors that carefully constructed Jesuit narratives ignore. As

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the first Jesuit to hear of Jogues’s death, Jacques Buteux hints at these in a letter he wrote to his superior in Quebec after some Hurons visiting Trois-Rivières told him what had happened.63 His account begins in typical hagiographic fashion, narrating in Latin Jogues’s life as a student in France, his accomplishments as an academic, and his decision to become a missionary in Canada. Buteux describes Jogues’s virtues, his humility, and strict obedience, but then switches to French and moves away from the hagiographic mode, explaining potential motives for the murder. He tells Lalemant that a council of the Iroquois had, in fact, decided in advance not to kill Jogues, but that a small group of conspirators who did not want peace with the French had committed the murder to disrupt negotiations. This group, Buteux explains, blamed Jogues for an epidemic then raging among them, and for an infestation of caterpillars, which they said came from a small chest, possibly a mass kit, he had left behind when he escaped in 1643.64 The murder, in Buteux’s view, was politically motivated, pre-planned, and a response to issues within the Iroquois League. Buteux’s explanation, which likely originated with his Huron sources, reflects reports received by the French from the Dutch at Fort Orange which warned of Iroquois plans against them. In a letter, the Dutch governor reported what he described as the “massacre that these barbarian and inhuman Mohawks or Iroquois made of Father Isaac de Jogues and his companion.” The Mohawk suspected that “the said Father had left behind the devil among some clothing that he had left in their care, which had made worms eat their wheat or corn crop.”65 Enclosed within this letter was a second from a Dutch agent among the Mohawk, Jean Labatie, addressed to Sieur Bourdon (1601–1668), the king’s engineer at Quebec who had been on a previous trip into Iroquois country with Jogues earlier that summer.66 Labatie also alludes to divisions among the Mohawk, blaming the deaths entirely on the Bear clan, adding that both the Wolf and Tortoise clans had tried to save the missionaries. “You need to know that it was only the Bear nation that put them to death, and the Wolf and Turtle nations did everything that they could to save their lives, and they told the Bears to kill us first, but alas [the Fathers] are nevertheless dead.”67 Buteux reported to his superiors that some Iroquois leaders worried that the murder would bring reprisals. Yet, neither the French nor their allies ultimately took any direct action to avenge Jogues,

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Goupil, Lalande, or their murdered Huron allies.68 This lack of response may well have emboldened the anti-French party among the Iroquois, as the remainder of the decade would see a steady intensification of conflict between France and its allies (especially the Huron) on one side, and the Iroquois League on the other, and further missionary deaths.69 If Jogues’s murder can now be said to have been political rather than religious, for people at the time, whether French or Iroquois, such a distinction was not easily made. Evidence of political motivation certainly did not prevent Christian observers, especially Jesuits, from transforming Jogues into the martyr they had long desired. Hagiographic narratives steadfastly reinforced the innocence of the  martyrs and the consequent hatred of Christianity that Jesuits believed the Iroquois bore. Jérôme Lalemant wrote in the Relation of 1647: Now, just as of old in the primitive Church, the reproach was cast against the children of Jesus Christ, that they caused misfortunes everywhere, and as some of them were slain on that account, likewise we are persecuted because by our doctrine, which is no other than that of Jesus Christ, we depopulate – as they say – their countries; and it is for this doctrine that they have killed the Father, and consequently we may regard him as a martyr before God.70 Jesuit apologists vigorously denied that noble policies backed by “innocent” motives could produce anything but blameless victims. Hagiographic accounts quickly squeezed out more political interpretations of Jogues’s murder, and odium fidei displaced other, perhaps more nuanced, interpretations. “It is on this account [odium fidei] that we have expected to be murdered in all the places where we have been.” In Jesuit texts, Jogues and Goupil were simply victims and the Iroquois, therefore, must be persecutors. This interpretation, however, went against earlier French observations that Indigenous peoples seldom if ever put anyone to death on account of their views. An early Récollet missionary to the Huron, Joseph Le Caron, wrote in 1626: “They will believe all you please, or at least, will not contradict you; and they will let you, too, believe what you will … No one must come here in hopes of suffering martyrdom, if we take the word in its strict theological sense, for we are

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not in a country where savages put Christians to death on account of their religion. They leave everyone in their own belief.”71 Despite such observations and Christian writers’ evident awareness of Iroquois motivations, politics, beliefs, and ritual practices, the desire for and appearance of martyrdom won out in the texts that narrated the lives and deaths of Jesuit missionaries. Martyrological texts reformulated Iroquois rituals of captivity and adoption, as well as the meanings that accompanied them, to conform with exclusively Christian scenarios and traditions.

P a rt ic ipa n t s a n d Obs ervers Historian Philippe Buc warns that it is one of the dangers of ritual that, once performed, its interpretation is left open to anyone.72 A duality can be set up between events and their interpretation, and the views of participants in rituals and those of outside observers. Outsiders often claim to be in the best position to dispassionately evaluate the true meaning of the rituals of others. Anthropologist Catherine Bell suggests that by erecting a duality between themselves (the thinking observers who perceive the truth in events) and others (actors in predetermined cultural rituals), outsider observers cast themselves as credible interpreters before audiences who share their own particular viewpoint.73 In the texts that interpreted Jogues’s death as martyrdom (and have continued to do so over the centuries), the Iroquois essentially lost control over the meanings of their own rituals and actions. Jogues’s own account of his captivity illustrates the narrative strategies used to separate the Jesuit from the action and impose the authority of the outsider. In the midst of excruciating torture he appears to recall Biblical quotations that offer comforting explanations of his suffering, quotations that are credible to him and to the audiences for which he writes because they reinforce views and expectations that originated elsewhere. Jogues believed that God was making an example of him – a spectacle for the whole world. His narrative turned a personal story into a seemingly universal one in which the Iroquois became faceless characters in a centuries-old Christian tale. The Jesuit telling of the torture and death of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant in 1649 further reinforces this duality between participants and observers. On 16 March 1649, during an Iroquois attack on the village where they were staying, Brébeuf and Lalemant

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were taken captive and subjected to ritual torture and execution. Fleeing Huron refugees brought news of the attacks to other Jesuits sheltering nearby at the mission headquarters at Sainte-Marie. Despite the injuries these refugees had sustained in the fight, ranging in severity from a broken arm to a fractured skull, the Jesuit priority was to learn the fate of their own brethren. The missionaries questioned these witnesses about the “martyrdom and blessed death[s]” of de Brébeuf and Lalemant, and the donné Christophe Regnaut carefully recorded all they said.74 On the morning of March 16 a force of roughly twelve hundred Iroquois attacked and overran the mission village called St Louis by the Jesuits. They set fire to the longhouses and took many captives, among them the two Jesuits. These captives were then taken to the Iroquois-occupied village of Taenhatentaron (St Ignace), where they were stripped naked and bound to posts, their fingernails were torn out, and they were beaten with cudgels. The Iroquois “proceeded to vent their rage on those two fathers,” yet, amidst the torments, Brébeuf “did not cease to continually speak of God and to encourage all the new Christians who were captives like him to suffer well that they might die well in order to go in company with him to paradise.”75 Then, “a wretched Huron renegade,” a man whom Brébeuf himself had taught the Christian faith, but as a captive and adoptee of the Iroquois had abjured it, approached his former teacher. “Echon,” he said, calling Brébeuf by his Huron name, “you say that Baptism and the sufferings of this life lead straight to Paradise; you will go soon, for I am going to baptize you, and to make you suffer well in order to go sooner to your paradise.” He then took a kettle of boiling water and splashed it over the exposed scalp of the missionary three times “in derision of Holy baptism.” Each time he said, “Go to Heaven, for thou art well baptized.”76 Finally, nearing late afternoon and with the missionary flagging, a warrior removed Brébeuf’s heart, roasted it, and distributed it to the participating warriors, who ate it. Lalemant, who underwent similar torments, lived until the following day, when he was killed at sunrise in accordance with the usual practices of ritual execution. Ethnohistorian Daniel Richter has shown that captivity practices at this time were changing as a result of new pressures brought by the French presence.77 Regnaut notes that the baptism of boiling water was an element in the ritual that the Jesuits had not seen before.78 The Huron man who baptized Brébeuf was familiar with

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the rituals and beliefs of the Iroquois and the Christians, and ­combined them, turning the latter against his former teachers. This ­warrior must have known only too well the powerful effect that such an apparent mockery of Christian ritual would have on other Christians. Indeed, hagiographies penned through the centuries have not failed to mention this mock baptism, inevitably re-­ inscribing it with Christian meaning, providing an easy example of odium fidei, while the Huron and Iroquois who performed it are portrayed as ignorant of the true power of Christianity.79 Beginning with the first account of these deaths, Indigenous participants in what, under Jesuit treatment, turns out to be not an Iroquois ritual at all but a Christian one, unwittingly help to advance the Jesuit cause by making martyrs who will become advocates in heaven for the missionaries, observers, and writers who claim a special knowledge of what was really going on. Paul Ragueneau writes in the Relation of 1649: “These were infidel Hurons, former captives of the Iroquois, and, of old, enemies of the Faith, – who, having previously had sufficient instruction for their salvation, impiously abused it, – in reality, for the glory of the Fathers; but it is much to be feared that it was also for their own misfortune.”80 Hagiographic discourses do not reproduce an objective reality, but rather reflect how reality was understood by their authors and interpreted for readers. Medievalist Robert Mills describes the martyr as he or she appears in text as a “nexus of multiplicity … in which a body of contradictory discourses compete for attention.” In the case of the Huron mission, discourses of martyrdom, evangelism, and sanctity competed with those of captivity, adoption, and community. The resulting hagiography did not overwrite these competing interpretations, but rather incorporated them to its own advantage, showing how Iroquois narratives and rituals served the purposes of the Christian God to make the martyr even while the Iroquois themselves remained ignorant of the fact. The martyr-in-text is created from all the competing meanings present in the original performance, and from the ability of outside interpreters to take control of those meanings and add them to their own in authoritative texts, which are designed for audiences who shared the worldview and faith of the authors.81 As a result, the missionary enters the archive as a saint, a victim, a hero, an advocate for all peoples regardless of  class, gender, or race, while the operations of power present in the original rituals are blurred under moral arguments. Regnaut, and

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generations of Christian observers since, have easily transformed the Iroquois ritual executions of Brébeuf and Lalemant, Jogues and Goupil, into spectacles of Christian martyrdom, and Iroquois motivations into simple, uncomplicated, and irrational odium fidei. To the Jesuit observer, the irony of Brébeuf’s baptism was obvious. “Thou seest clearly that we treat thee as a friend,” an Iroquois says to Brébeuf in Regnaut’s telling, “since we shall be the cause of thy eternal happiness; thank us, then, for these good offices which we render thee, – for, the more thou shalt suffer, so much more will thy God reward thee.” Regnaut believed the Iroquois, in their ignorance and obstinacy, did not recognize that they were, in fact, advancing the very cause he believed they meant to attack and, therefore, discounted the meanings and interpretations that the participants brought to their own ritual practices.82 The early hagiographic ­ discourses that emanated from Canada began the work of rescuing Frenchmen from sauvages by transforming dead Jesuits into innocent victims of unprovoked violence, and linking them to a long history of Christian martyrdom narratives. Meanwhile, Jesuit accounts made the Iroquois into tyrants crueller “than any Nero or Diocletion,”83 Roman emperors well known in Christian lore as brutal persecutors of the faithful. Continuing the connection to the apostolic Church, Brébeuf, like the third-century Christian martyr Polycarp, stoically endures torture and derision only for his persecutors to achieve their own inevitable doom in his place.84 As we have seen, however, early modern hagiography demanded the credibility of eyewitness testimony. Yet, no Jesuit, no Frenchman, had witnessed what had happened to Brébeuf or Lalemant. The second half of Regnaut’s account, then, tells of the author’s own reconnaissance mission to view, verify, and recover the bodies of the holy dead. The uncorroborated word of Huron witnesses, no matter how “worthy of belief,” could not be trusted in a matter so important to Jesuit views of themselves as worthy and innocent victims.85 Once the enemy had departed, Regnaut set out with seven other Frenchmen to find the remains of the dead. He found their bodies lying close to one another, gathered them up, and began to examine them in a type of ritual autopsy that reads in the Relations like a litany recited at mass – a ritual performance of the Catholic liturgy. They were brought to our cabin and laid uncovered upon the bark of trees, – where I examined them at leisure, for more than

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two hours, to see if what the savages had told us of their martyrdom and death were true … I saw and touched a large number of great blisters, which he had on several places on his body, from the boiling water, which these barbarians had poured over him in mockery of Holy Baptism. I saw and touched the wound from the belt of bark, full of pitch and resin, which roasted his whole body. I saw and touched the marks of the burns from the collar of hatchets placed on his shoulders and stomach. I saw and touched his two lips, which they had cut off because he ­constantly spoke of God while they made him suffer.86 Regnaut goes on, describing with a methodical rhythm how he saw and touched all the parts of Brébeuf’s body that had received blows, finishing with an inspection of the hole in his chest where his heart had been removed. Through Regnaut’s official witnessing, these deaths became martyrdoms, stripped of any other possible meaning and infused with a Christian interpretation directed toward an audience that was offstage but centrally important to the appropriation of colonial space and peoples – the Jesuits huddled at Sainte-Marie, others in Quebec anxiously awaiting news of their most promising mission, settlers in the St Lawrence valley fearing Iroquois attacks, readers in France, and ultimately ecclesiastics in Rome who would, over time, formally declare that Christian martyrdom had occurred far in the interior of distant New France. Historian Michel de Certeau has shown that vision and the visual were essential to the appropriation of the spaces and knowledge of others in the colonial encounter. “Only an appeal to the senses and a direct link to the body” can bring the reader closer to what the eyewitness says in text that he saw, touched, heard, or tasted in the new world.87 By means of the hagiographic rendering offered by Regnaut, the immediate and local performance of the martyrdom paradigm acquired universal meaning and impact. Meanwhile, the Huron witnesses who first reported Brébeuf’s and Lalemant’s deaths to the Jesuits had only been “unauthorized spectators” at a performance that was not for them.88 They were considered unqualified to fulfill the role of credible observers. The presence of Huron apostates among the Iroquois warriors threatened to blur the lines between victims and oppressors, outsiders and insiders. The Jesuit textual record, therefore, reimposed clear distinctions between observers and participants, and drew an unambiguously Christian

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meaning from the nexus of multiple meanings – Christian and Iroquoian, local and universal – that merged to create these martyrs. Only in revisiting the original performance do the multiple, diverging, and ultimately deeply entangled causes and meanings that lay behind these deaths begin to appear.

T h e E n d o f t h e H uron Mi ssi on As Iroquois war parties closed in on Huronia over the summer of 1649, the remnants of the Huron Confederacy retreated to Christian Island in Georgian Bay. There they endured privation and starvation over the winter. In the spring, a council of the Huron met to determined what should be done.89 Some had resolved to go where the Iroquois could not find them, presumably to join kin and allies elsewhere.90 Others decided to give themselves up to the Iroquois in order to join their families already living among the Five Nations. A third group of about three hundred mostly Christians requested sanctuary at Quebec from the Jesuit missionaries sheltering with them. The missionaries agreed. After a journey of fifty days, the refugees arrived at France’s colonial capital. They were given quarter first on Île d’Orléans in the St Lawrence River and then on land near Quebec at a place the Jesuits called Lorette, now the HuronWendat nation of Wendake. It is possible, however, that the Huron in 1650 regarded this move as another migration within their territory. Today, the Wendat nation regards this land as traditional territory dating to pre-contact times when it was occupied by the St Lawrence Iroquois. From their earliest days in Canada, the Jesuits had regarded the Huron mission as their most promising. They believed that the relative prosperity of the Huron and their sedentary lifestyle, combined with their importance as allies of the French, offered the best chance for a stable Christian community in North America.91 Consequently, the failure of the mission in 1649, alongside the collapse of Huronia itself, was a significant blow to their ambitions. It required explanation. Letters exchanged between missionaries in New France and the Jesuit hierarchy in Paris and Rome before, during, and after the final decision to abandon Huronia and return to Quebec reveal the consternation this catastrophe caused within the order and tell also of some of the first steps that would lead eventually to the transformation of local casualties of colonial encounter into saints.

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Initially, the achievement of long-desired martyrdoms sparked considerable excitement. In a letter dated May 1649, the missionary Joseph Poncet told his brother of the death of their cousin Gabriel Lalemant two months before. “We have arrived, thanks be to God, at the time of the great mercies for which we have longed for many years. We have martyrs, and not one of us is without hope of receiving a similar crown.”92 Likewise, the Jesuit Charles Garnier wrote to his brother Henry in France, explaining why he considered Brébeuf and Lalemant martyrs. “I say that they were martyred not only because they chose death to save many souls, remaining to gather fruit in the village were they were when the enemy attacked, even though they could have easily saved themselves with many others, but also because the enemy having taken them to their fort, made them suffer all sorts of cruelties, and did so in hatred of the holy faith.”93 The fact these men had died in rituals and for reasons that had little, if anything, to do with Christianity found little space even in informal narratives. In gory detail, Garnier told his brother all that Brébeuf and Lalemant had endured, before expressing the wish that, should his turn come, he too might be found worthy of martyrdom. “Alas, pray to God for me that he will give me the grace to serve Him faithfully and to accomplish the great work that he has placed in my hands and to use my life in his service. Truly I consider myself from now on like a sacrificial host.” He concluded his letter in an even more ominous tone. “If I am still alive next year, I do not know where I will be.”94 Garnier was dead within the year, murdered in 1650 while journeying in the territory of the Neutral Nation. In his turn, Henry de Saint-Joseph, Garnier’s brother, took up the task of promoting the holy dead. In a memorial to his brother, he wrote that Charles had died “as a victim destined for the salvation and conversion of souls.”95 The work of transforming people into models of sanctity went on. The news of martyrdom was spread by others too. Marie de l’Incarnation, the superior of the Ursuline sisters of Quebec, wrote letters to various correspondents about the Jesuit dead. She ensured that their memory survived among the Ursulines of France, telling the sisters of Tours shortly after the death of Isaac Jogues, “We have in heaven our holy martyr.”96 Missionaries, male and female, sent letters to friends and family in France expressing the joy they felt in these sufferings, setbacks, and deaths, with the expectation that the news would spread. Hagiographic discourses not only made saints;

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they made examples and models of saints for those left behind. They offered dramatic scenes of the frontier heroes of Christianity endowing the “perilous labor of evangelization … with a richness of martyrs and relics.”97 They simplified colonial politics and inverted imperial hierarchies, casting missionaries as victims of Iroquois tyrants and unjust persecutors, and making New France into a ­centre of Catholic spirituality and religious experience. In France, receptive audiences found in these narratives evidence to support preconceived notions that painted Canada as a spiritual paradise because of the opportunity it offered Christians for meaningful suffering. Texts such as François-Joseph Bressani’s Italian composite version of the Jesuit Relations, published in Italy in 1653, François Du Creux’s similar project in Latin, the Historia Canadensis sev Novae-Franciae, published in France in 1664, and the Jesuit historian Pierre de Charlevoix’s extensive history of New France published in 1744 kept the stories of the martyrs alive.98 Within the Jesuit Order, however, the fallout of the collapse of the Huron mission could not pass unexplained. On 17 August 1650 Paul Ragueneau, who had been made superior of the entire Canadian mission after his return to Quebec from Huronia and the departure of Jérôme Lalemant for France the previous autumn, wrote to the new superior general in Rome, Father Francesco Piccolomini, to explain the decision to abandon the mission.99 By portraying the missionaries as meek and innocent victims of non-rational aggression, Ragueneau continued Regnaut’s and Lalemant’s work of simplifying the confused and fraught power relationships that had led to unsustainable tensions between missionaries and members of the Huron community and contributed to the deaths of Brébeuf, Jogues, and others. The following March, Piccolomini replied with words of support and understanding. And in subsequent letters to Barthélemy Vimont and François Le Mercier, also missionaries in Canada, the new superior general, Goschwen Nickel, made clear his approval of the decisions they had taken.100 Not everyone in Canada agreed with this assessment, however, or found it satisfactory. Some missionaries began to ask if the Jesuits themselves might have done anything to precipitate the disaster. Were any adjustments in tactics and strategies required to avoid a similar outcome in the future? Who, if anyone, should be held responsible for the failure of the Huron mission? The suspicions of some fell on Ragueneau, who had been superior in Huronia. Joseph Poncet, who had himself been taken captive by the Iroquois and

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lived, wrote to the Superior General in 1655 accusing Ragueneau of putting his own interests ahead of those of the Jesuits generally, of interfering in the political life of the colony, and of drawing down public resentment upon the order. In 1653 François Le Mercier had replaced Ragueneau as superior, but Poncet saw them as a team and continued his push to have both men recalled.101 A few weeks after Poncet’s missive, another missionary and former superior in Canada, Barthélemy Vimont, also sent a letter to Rome. Vimont claimed that Ragueneau and Mercier, together with a third missionary, Pierre Chastelain, had formed a triumvirate that had led the Jesuits to ruin in Huronia and was likely to do so again. “All this I attribute not to a weakness of virtue in those three, but a lack of experience, which none of them had because they led the Huron mission to ruin, which died in their hands … Now four years after that I shout out again, ‘The Quebec mission will die by that road that you hold to.’”102 As new opportunities to send missionaries into Iroquoia itself developed as a result of peace initiatives in the  mid-1650s, Ragueneau’s opponents spoke out against him.103 Although the main issue was Ragueneau’s alleged political interference, his leadership was considered a threat to the survival of the entire mission and a blatant reminder of the disasters of 1649–50. While the Society of Jesus as a whole was officially apolitical, individual Jesuits could and did become politically involved. Jesuits were some of the best-travelled and most knowledgeable people in the early modern world and so came to hold a certain influence and authority. Generally, political activity was condoned as long as it advanced the goals of the society as a whole, but when it threatened the Jesuits’ reputation it could become an issue of concern.104 The apprehensions of Poncet and Vimont were apparently heeded in Paris and Rome. In 1656 Jean de Quen replaced Le Mercier as superior in Quebec, and Paul Ragueneau was removed from the College at Quebec by request of the Provincial of France. He was sent to the Jesuit mission at Trois-Rivières, a placement that effectively exiled him, separating him from the centre of colonial power and seat of government.105 The new superior, Jean de Quen, wrote: ”I admit that Father Ragueneau is a man of singular virtue, but he has been implicated in too many political negotiations, which are not useful for our Society and have caused many quarrels and much bad feeling among us. This bad feeling will cease if he disengages himself from such negotiations and if he is sent to a remote mission.”106

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Ragueneau, however, was far from ruined. Within a year he was assigned to the new Iroquois mission the Jesuits had begun south of Lake Ontario. In 1662 he left New France for good to succeed Paul Le Jeune as procurator of the Canadian mission in Paris – a position no doubt suited to his political talents. Ragueneau was never formally accused of any misconduct and continued to enjoy an illustrious career for the remainder of his life, but he did not return to Canada.

C o n c l u s i on Martyrdom was a central element of the world of the seventeenthcentury missionary in New France. Jesuits were conditioned to expect it, recognize it, and perhaps even strive for it. For both French newcomers and Indigenous peoples alike, rituals such as martyrdom contributed to the creation of real and metaphorical spaces where people experienced the sacred and negotiated religious and social differences. Metaphysical understandings of the world were a fundamental part of daily life. Rituals did more than reflect the sacred; they actually worked to constitute it, and provided a way for French, Huron, Algonquin, Iroquois, and others to negotiate their spiritual, social, cultural, and political encounters. In the rituals in which Jesuit missionaries died, differing representations and understandings of the world met and confronted one another in a working-out of tensions over the social role of missionaries in Iroquois and Huron villages, the status of Jesuits as captives, political relationships between the Iroquois and European colonists, and politics internal to the Iroquois League and Jesuit Order respectively. The Jesuits, secure in their own view of themselves as purveyors of truth and victims of odium fidei, had the necessary historical and psychological tools to deal with what they believed were inevitable and even desirable losses in a war for souls. In hagiographic discourse, they took control of the meanings of the rituals of others by asserting the privilege of the outside observer to know and understand beyond what they believed Indigenous participants in rituals of captivity, torture, and execution / adoption could ever hope to realize. The active roles played by Indigenous peoples in shaping Jesuit experiences, although profound, were systematically subsumed to Christian performances, understandings, and narratives, which were incorporated into the nexus of meanings that made the Jesuit martyr.

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3 Evangelism: Indigenous Holiness

Late in the summer of 1650, as an almost imperceptible coolness began to lace the evening air and the first V’s of geese appeared in the sky heading south, a letter from Iroquois country arrived at the Jesuit house in Quebec. It confirmed what two Huron Christians who had escaped from captivity in Iroquois country several weeks earlier had just told the fathers. An Algonquin convert, known as Joseph to the Jesuits and Onaharé to the Algonquins, had been taken captive and put to death by the Iroquois.1 This news, devastating as it must have been, came at the end of what had been a long and difficult summer in Canada for missionaries and settlers alike. Only weeks earlier, Paul Ragueneau had arrived in Quebec with approximately three hundred Hurons after fifty days of fleeing the Iroquois through the wilderness. Moreover, the collapse of Huronia the previous summer had freed Iroquois warriors to harass French settlers in the St Lawrence valley, particularly in the western settlements around Montreal.2 Yet, as with the news of the deaths of Brébeuf and Lalemant the year before, the news of the death of this Algonquin man was not all bad. Both the Huron messengers and a Jesuit missionary, whose letter from Iroquoia later confirmed Onaharé’s death, believed the young Algonquin warrior had died in the defence of Christianity. He was a martyr to the faith.3 Onaharé is one of only a small handful of Indigenous individuals to receive significant consideration as saints in French colonial texts. The Huron convert Joseph Chiouatenhoua, the Onondaga headman, Garconthié, the Montagnais headman of Sillery, Negabamat, and pious women such as Cécile Gannendaris, Catherine Tekakwitha, and three unnamed individuals, who according to the Jesuit Relations

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were venerated as martyrs in Montreal, were apparently regarded as holy at various times.4 Yet, with the exception of Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha, few received significant attention in hagiographic discourse. Moreover, in most narratives of Indigenous holiness the Indigenous voice is absent.5 Speculations about sanctity come only from French voices and tend to depend on the individual’s having been one of the first of his or her nation to convert, or on a particularly pious life and good Christian death having been carried on generally in French colonial settlements or mission posts. Onaharé’s case stands out, then, for the relative detail with which his story is told in the Relation, for the fact that the drama of his performance took place in an entirely Indigenous context, and perhaps most significantly, for the claim he allegedly made himself that he died for the Christian cause. His case offers a unique example, therefore, of an Indigenous performance of Christian sanctity, and gives us a chance to ask important questions about why the French failed to recognize more Indigenous saints and martyrs, and how and why Onaharé came to see himself as a martyr.

“A n at iv e o f a p e t t y A lgonqui n nati on” Although Onaharé received a relatively significant degree of attention from Jesuit missionaries as a potential martyr, the story of his death is told in only one chapter of one edition of their yearly Relations.6 As a result, there is very little surviving evidence that might allow for a complex character sketch or deep analysis of Onharé’s life and personality. The Relation states simply that he came from a small Algonquin nation located far up the Ottawa River not far from Huron country, and that he left his home as a young man because his countrymen refused to consider the new religious beliefs brought by the French. Any attempt to reconstruct his life so as to better understand his death, therefore, requires immersion in Algonquin-French relations of the seventeenth century, and particularly in the social and religious life of the mission village of Sillery, founded by the Jesuits in 1638 at a location just upriver from Quebec. It was here that Onaharé arrived, perhaps in the summer of 1646.7 He was about eighteen years old. Marie de l’Incarnation, who served as godmother at his baptism a year later, says he was twenty-two years old when he died in 1650, thereby placing his birth around 1628.8

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The term “Algonquin” as used by the French in the early seventeenth century, designated not only the residents of the Ottawa valley but also several neighbouring groups with similar languages and customs. It may be that Onaharé came from one of these nations located closer to Huron country between what is now Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay.9 Contact between the French and Algonquins had been ongoing since at least the early seventeenth century through their mutual allies, the Montagnais, with whom French explorers, traders, and settlers had long been in contact along the north shore of the St Lawrence River between Quebec and Tadoussac. The Montagnais and Algonquins shared a similar culture and language, as well as a common enemy – the Iroquois. Onaharé was born into a world of developing trade and military alliance among the Algonquins, Montagnais, Huron, and French.10 Like the Montagnais, the Algonquins sought allies in their conflicts with the Iroquois and approached the French as partners and brothers. For Algonquins, brotherhood, the dominant metaphor of this early relationship, signalled a strong affective link that went beyond friendship, and came close to a blood tie.11 Mutual gift-giving and trade were first steps in creating lasting and beneficial relationships that included military alliance and anticipated deeper political, cultural, and social integration. As relations developed between Indigenous nations and French newcomers, the northeastern colonial world settled into a complex pattern of cultural and economic practices that facilitated trade and military support but stopped short of complete integration.12 Giftgiving or trade as a method of maintaining good relations was much more than an economic exchange for the Montagnais and Algonquins – it was in a sense a religious act that had the power to maintain good relations with apparently powerful and potentially dangerous outsiders.13 Such strategies were used to maintain positive relations with the spiritual forces that inhabited the Algonquin / Montagnais cosmology through ritual interaction, communication, and exchange, and might also be deployed to create and maintain more worldly alliances.14 However, when the French signalled their intention to resist deep incorporation into Indigenous communities, and instead offered conversion to French lifeways and Christianity to their new trading partners, Montagnais and Algonquins began to seek separation rather than integration. The missionary Paul Le Jeune observed that as a result of French reluctance to engage with their brothers, the  Montagnais began to treat them differently. He wrote: “If any

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stranger, whosoever he may be, unites with their party, they will treat him as one of their own nation … But if you carry on your affairs apart from them, despising their laws or their customs, they will drain from you, if they can, even your blood.”15 The imperative of trade and military cooperation kept the alliance together in the early part of the seventeenth century, but differing goals and understandings prevented deeper integration.16 In 1632, when Onaharé was about four years old and New France returned to French control after three years of English occupation, the Jesuits, in greater numbers and with greater determination, resumed their mission to bring about the conversion of the Indigenous population to Christianity. Their return, however, coincided with the first hunting failures caused by the impact of the fur trade on the beaver population, and with the first outbreaks of European diseases among vulnerable Indigenous populations.17 This combination of disasters struck the Algonquins and Montagnais hard, and over the next several decades steadily robbed them of their military and economic strength, shattering their previous cultural confidence. The Montagnais  /  Algonquins understood disease as having spiritual causes rooted in the failure of previously effective ritual actions that had maintained positive relations between humans and cosmological forces.18 In Algonquin understanding, the category of “person” was not limited to human beings; plants, animals, natural forces, and cultural artifacts could all possess will and wield power. Relations between humans and these other-than-human persons were controlled through ritual and networks of exchange.19 When these broke down, disease might result. Consequently, epidemic ­disease struck not only bodies, but also hearts and minds, signalling that something had gone wrong in the human-manitou (or otherthan-human) relationship to bring about imbalance and draw destruction down on the human community. Since disease was regarded as a spiritual ailment rather than a biological one in Algonquin and Montagnais cultures, treatment required the repair and amelioration of the relationship between the human and spirit worlds. Rituals of exchange and the power they produced could be medicinal. The strength and destructiveness of European epidemics, however, was unprecedented, prompting many to believe the old rituals were no longer working. In their search for the culprits who had disrupted their formally successful relations with the other-than-human powers that guided the universe, the

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Algonquins and Montagnais did not have to look far. In 1637 a group of Algonquins approached Paul Le Jeune, blaming the French for their misfortunes. “First they asked me why so many of them died, saying that since the coming of the French their nation was going to destruction, – that before they had seen Europeans only the old people died, but now more young than old died.”20 Such accusations, however, were frequently also accompanied by requests for help. When the ritual redressive actions used to improve relations with other-than-human forces failed, people became interested in, but also wary of, the spiritual power of the newcomers.21 Although many suspected the French of practising witchcraft to cause disease, in some cases they thought the correct course of action was to seek healing from the same witch. In Algonquin / Montagnais cosmology nothing was essentially good or evil, but only powerful or lacking in power. Some people, therefore, began to approach the missionaries to receive baptism in the hopes of gaining a share of the spiritual power that seemed to allow the French to cause disease in others while avoiding it themselves.22 According to Le Jeune’s accounting, just twenty-two Montagnais / Algonquins were baptized in 1635, but the following year 115 were received into the faith.23 Camps soon appeared nearby French settlements where previously close contact had been avoided. Finally, in 1638 the Jesuits secured stable funding from a wealthy French benefactor; enough to open a permanent mission village upriver from Quebec at a place that would become known as Sillery, which was settled initially by two Montagnais families. Others soon followed. The next year, eight hundred Algonquins arrived at Trois-Rivières, and the Jesuits opened a second village called La Conception to try to accommodate them.24 With Montagnais and Algonquins settled at Sillery and La Conception, the Jesuits embarked on a great experiment in assimilation, or francisation, as they termed their policy, encouraging Indigenous settlers to take up agriculture as well as Christianity and to live as the French did. These policies, however, created resentment at least as often as they resulted in converts. It was one thing to seek spiritual power in the religious rituals of the newcomers, but another entirely to transform ways of living and whole cultures. Epidemic disease and its resultant social and cultural crises had brought French and Indigenous closer together, but they also fostered persistent misunderstandings as French missionaries

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encouraged francisation and Algonquins and Montagnais sought the spiritual power they believed necessary to restore health to their communities. Characterization as simple dichotomy between acceptance and resistance fails, however, to grasp the complexity of the relationships most residents of these communities had with the newcomers. For the Algonquin / Montagnais, Christian rituals added to, but did not replace, the arsenal of redressive actions available to ameliorate relations with spiritual forces. The Jesuits, for their part, struggled to understand how they might be seen as powerful sorcerers capable of doing both good and evil at the same time. Le Jeune wrote, “On the one hand, they accuse us of causing death; and on the other, they ask us for the Sacrament of life.”25 Meanwhile, persistent hunger and disease at the mission villages continually disrupted and undermined the beliefs and routines the missionaries tried to impose. An outbreak of smallpox at Trois-Rivières in 1639 was blamed on the Jesuits and prompted many of the newcomers simply to leave the community.26 When food supplies were delayed or the village was threatened with attack, Sillery was frequently abandoned.27 Life was difficult in these mission villages at the best of times. The first families at Sillery agreed to settle only when the Jesuits promised them they would never be removed from the land. When news arrived from France in 1638 that Brûlart de Sillery had agreed to support the St Joseph mission, Negabamat, the leader of the first settlers, informed Le Jeune “that [Le Jeune] was now of their nation, and that they were going to tell everyone that they were also of ours … They published everywhere that [the Jesuits] were truthful; that we were their fathers, – that we wished to revive their nation, which was rapidly dying out.”28 Material and physical protection was a significant part of the agreement by which Montagnais and Algonquins agreed to settle among the French, and failure to provide these constituted a breach of contract. By agreeing to become sedentary, the inhabitants expected the French (increasingly refered to now as “father” rather than “brother”) to take care of them. Failure to provide all that had been promised undermined Jesuit credibility and the authority of the Christian God. In such cases, settlers regarded the agreement as broken and returned to their previous ways of living. For the majority of Montagnais and Algonquin residents, then, settlement at Sillery and La Conception offered a solution to a specific set of military and social problems stemming from disease and

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depopulation. Christianity was not the dominant belief system. The majority of settlers were far more interested in stability, food, shelter, and security than they were in the French religion. Indeed, the introduction of Christian evangelism at Sillery seems rather to have cooled enthusiasm for the settlement project than to have drawn people to it.29 While some residents certainly endorsed the Jesuit project, and even went so far as to call for non-Christians to be expelled from the community, the evidence suggests that Christians were always in the minority and francisation highly contested.30 For example, despite Jesuit efforts, farming remained at best a secondrate source of food, while the annual winter hunt continued to supply the basics of survival and to retain much of its previous spiritual significance.31 For the Montagnais / Algonquins hunting was a religious occupation that, in addition to providing the livelihood of the band, also explored the “status of relations between human and other-than-human persons.”32 Cultivation proceeded slowly, reaching only fifteen arpents at Sillery by 1646.33 Hunting rituals were considered essential for maintaining good relations with other-than-human forces, especially the animals that ensured the security of the group. When rituals were followed correctly and taboos avoided, animals might allow themselves to be captured, but when the relationship between the human and spirit worlds was disrupted, privation resulted. Despite the adoption of Christianity by some residents, versions of the rituals, traditions, and practices that had previously maintained positive relations between humans and animals continued, albeit in altered forms. “As soon as we killed an animal, we returned thanks to [God] on the spot, as the being who had given it to us.” When Sillery hunters offered Christian prayers and praised God after a successful hunt, were they carrying on older practices dressed up in the language of the new faith? When the hunt failed, they still prayed to God, “We have nothing left; give us our food; thou art our Father.”34 The relational categories of human and other-than-human that granted power and security to people were maintained, along with kinship notions that implied a protective and benevolent fatherhood and transferred the thanks traditionally offered to an animal that had sacrificed itself for the good of the human community to the benevolence of the Christian God. From its founding to its closure in 1663, Sillery remained an ethnically diverse and religiously divided community that experienced little stability. In 1645 it had only 167 residents.35 When Onaharé arrived there, he stepped into a complex world of mixed identities,

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traditions, and ethnicities. He had likely encountered French traders, and perhaps even missionaries before in his homeland and acquired at least a passing familiarity with the ways of these strange newcomers at an early age. As he grew up, he may have been one of those whose interest was aroused by Christianity. Perhaps he sought out French traders or passing missionaries and pressed them for information, asking questions about the sources of their spiritual power and the rituals they practised to access it. As time passed, it seems Onaharé’s interest in the newcomers only grew. “Having heard of our belief and seeing that his fellow countrymen had no relish for it, he went down to Trois-Rivières and from that place came as far as the mission of Saint Joseph at Sillery.”36 Around this time he met Paul Le Jeune, who is known to have been in Montreal over the winter of 1645–46. It was with his arrival at Sillery, however, that Onaharé’s investment and education in Christianity began in earnest. He had no relatives in the small community, and so for a year he resided at the Jesuit house. As a result, he was certainly more exposed to Jesuit influence than most members of the community. He quickly became a prized pupil, praised for being “naturally quick, vivacious and daring.”37 He was baptized within the relatively short space of about a year, but remained living as a catechumen with the Jesuits for another year after that. As a neophyte Onaharé would have entered a world of ritualized regimentation and Christian instruction punctuated by more familiar patterns of Algonquin / Montagnais life. He selected an Algonquin named Charles Kariskatisitch, known as “the good Charles,” to be his father and was adopted. He soon also married an Algonquin Christian. Marie de l’Incarnation claims that, as his godmother, Onaharé loved her as much as, or more than, he loved his own mother, who was apparently still living in his home community.38 Sillery therefore provided him not only with a new community and new beliefs but also with a new family, and, says the Relation, he had a great commitment to all three.39 When relatives in the west discovered what had become of him, they sent emissaries, including his own cousin, to persuade him to return home. Onaharé refused.

R e l ig io u s R it ua l a n d Performance at S il l ery At Sillery, Christians and non-Christians alike invoked and experienced the sacred through rituals and a never-ending series of

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performances, both major and minor, that gave life to doctrine, linked spirituality to daily living, and structured real and metaphorical kin relationships. Christian ritual performances could be liturgical, didactic, or practical and included attendance at Church, recitation of the catechism, public prayers, fasts, and confession – all of which would have helped to distinguish Christians from nonChristians in the community. Even so, more traditional practices also seem to have persisted. Gift-giving, for example, continued among Sillery Christians as a means of imposing order and regulation. “They visit those who have any quarrel, give them good advice, and make them presents in order to bring them back to their duty; and parents begin to take a very special care to teach the prayers to their children, bring them to confession, and make them remember their sins.”40 In Montagnais and Algonquin cultures gift-giving created an ethics of reciprocity that encouraged social solidarity. Christianity did not replace traditional practices such as this, but rather integrated with them and added to them.41 Gifting remained a powerful tool of persuasion, establishing social relationships and group coherence both among the Christian community and across the spiritual divide. Following the defeat of a Sillery war party dispatched against Iroquois forces in 1642, the Christian community, which resided to one side of the centrally located Jesuit house in the village, tried to console their non-Christian brethren, who lived on the other side. They invited the nonChristians to convert, but in a specifically Algonquin manner. “When the Neophytes of Saint Joseph [Sillery] heard of the deaths of the Algonquins slain by the Hiroquois, they sought to console those who survived the defeat, according to their old customs, which they sanctified with truly Christian zeal,” wrote the Jesuit missionary Jean de Quen. A feast was held during which the Christians presented three gifts. The first was offered to dry the tears of the bereaved, and the second to bring back to life the nephew of one of the headmen of the community. These gifts were metaphors used to assuage grief and clear minds in a manner reminiscent of the Iroquois Condolence Ritual, elements of which were practised by many northeast nations.42 To this point the Christians followed expected ritual forms. The third gift, however, invited the bereaved to accept Christianity. The recipients accepted the first two, but left the third – “for whosoever takes a present among the Savages, binds himself to do what the

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present expresses.” Christianity had been rejected. When non-­ Christian warriors organized a retaliatory war party, Christians joined it, but each group prepared in its own way and remained separate. “The Christians had recourse to God, while the pagans resorted to feasts and dances,” reported Jesuit observers. Once the expedition set out, the divisions within the party proved too powerful. It split along religious lines and failed to achieve its military goals.43 As a young man, Onaharé would have been expected to participate in the defence of his new home and to join the war parties that periodically set out against the Iroquois. Even for Christians, war remained an important rite of passage and an opportunity to gain prestige and a reputation for leadership.44 Onaharé joined his first expedition in the summer of 1649, a year before his death. The war band was made up entirely of Algonquins from Sillery, both Christians and non-Christians, but almost from the start religious questions divided the group. A traditional Algonquin spiritual expert joined the company; someone the Jesuits referred to as a sorcerer and juggler. When the captain of the company suggested that this spiritual expert hold a Shaking-Tent ceremony to consult the otherthan-human forces of the Algonquin cosmology to discover where best to attack the enemy, Joseph / Onaharé (alone it seems) opposed the plan. The purpose of the Shaking-Tent ceremony, which involved enclosing the shaman within a tent where he conversed with otherthan-human spirits, was to ameliorate human problems through consultation with spiritual forces.45 Despite Onaharé’s opposition, the ceremony went ahead, but it soon turned into a contest for legitimacy between Christian and traditionalist practices. Shaking-Tent rituals were generally held in the evening. A temporary lodge was erected and the spiritual leader was sealed inside to await the arrival of other-than-human persons. A dialogue took place during which participants gathered outside the tent might ask questions of the spiritual forces gathered inside. The ceremony often concluded with the shaman performing extraordinary feats such as walking the ridgeline of the tent. European observers tended to attribute the events in the tent solely to the work of the “sorcerer” performing multiple voices, but at times had trouble explaining away the prodigious acts that followed. Strong believers in miracles themselves, the Jesuits simply attributed the abilities of the sorcerer to diabolical forces.46 On this occasion, Onaharé, likewise, did not challenge the legitimacy of the ritual, but rather engaged the voices

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that emanated from the tent as if they were real.47 “I fear and honor him who made all things. He is my master and yours; you have only as much power as he grants,” he announced. He then challenged the voice to demonstrate its power, at which point he “received what seemed like a blow upon his side, which for three days impeded his breathing, every movement, causing suffering.”48 Thereafter, the ritual broke down, the expected performance of extraordinary feats did not take place. Instead, an argument erupted between Onaharé and his companions. “I repent of having undertaken this expedition with you,” one of them said. “I wish that we were still in the cabins where we began, I would never have left with you because you do not act as the others do, and you do not obey our captain.”49 By acting not as others, Onaharé disrupted the behavioural and performative ethics that stitched the war party together, and challenged others to defend their traditions against the new beliefs. The ceremony became a source and cause of conflict, the expedition a contest between Christianity and traditional ways of acting that challenged the shared experience of the sacred that was fundamental to membership in the Algonquin community and the success of the war party. Onaharé reminded the others that their “relatives and allies” back in Sillery had not sent them into the field to “set up tabernacles and revive the old superstitions,” but rather to “cut off the arms and legs of our enemies, that we may be able to pray to God and be instructed in peace.”50 Not all shared this view. The challenge posed by the Shaking-Tent ceremony exposed the weaknesses of a divided company and community. It is not difficult to imagine that it also helped to reinforce Onaharé’s growing identity as a Christian. The expedition soon returned to Sillery, unable to continue amid such discord. When Joseph / Onaharé again took the field the following summer the makeup of the company he joined differed significantly. This time the warriors came from many nations, but only one faith. There was no question of consulting the Manitou, or, if there was, the Jesuits did not report it. Even so, things did not go smoothly. The group was betrayed by a homesick Huron man more interested in finding his lost relatives than making Sillery safe for prayer. When he discovered an Iroquois war band while scouting, he approached it rather than return to his own group to prepare an attack. How lucky that I have met you … For a long time, my brothers, I have been seeking you … I am going to my country to seek out

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my relatives and friends. The country of the Hurons is no longer where it was, – you have transported it into your own: it is there I was going to join my relatives and compatriots, who are now but one people with yourselves.51 The Relation describes the decision of this Huron as the greatest possible act of betrayal.52 In the narrative of Onaharé’s life and death, this man is the Judas figure who makes Onaharé’s subsequent sacrifice all the more meaningful according to the Christian martyrological tradition. But to him, joining the Iroquois must have been a logical and viable response to extraordinary circumstances; within the logic of the mourning wars, adoption was an acceptable option open to Hurons displaced by the collapse of Huronia and the Huron Confederacy. Indeed, Jon Parmenter suggests in a recent study that the Iroquois expended considerable energy pursuing dispersed Hurons after 1649 for adoption, as part of a widening strategy to bring peace to the northeast on League terms.53 This warrior invoked the fictive kinship networks that existed between himself and the Iroquois war party as a result of the adoption of significant numbers of Hurons into the Iroquois League over the preceding several years. From his perspective, rejoining friends and family among the Iroquois must have seemed preferable to life as a refugee among foreigners. Moreover, doing so did not necessarily imply a rejection of Christianity.54 Many adopted Hurons retained their Christian beliefs. For this Huron warrior, adoption rituals were a tool he could use to invoke a shared kinship with the Iroquois and other Hurons living among them. Together with the Iroquois war party, this Huron warrior prepared an ambush for his former companions from Sillery. Several were killed and several more, including Onaharé, were taken captive. These captives would have been well aware of what awaited them among their enemies: torture and humiliation, followed either by a forced adoption or, more likely, death. According to witnesses, Onaharé began immediately to pray loudly and did not stop during the entire journey into Iroquoia. One Jesuit account claims he was tortured for three days and three nights, another for an astonishingly long eight days, as the Iroquois tried to silence him.55 If accurate, this latter time frame not only may indicate an interest in preserving and adopting the young Algonquin warrior, but may also reflect how the rituals were changing. Indeed, many of Onaharé’s companions, mostly Hurons whom the Iroquois perhaps considered promising

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candidates for adoption despite their being Christians, were spared. Onaharé, however, languished on the scaffold. His continued preaching no doubt represented a challenge to his successful integration into the Iroquois community. The Iroquois mocked him for it. “Ask for help from the one you invoke,” they told him. “Tell him to come and save you.” For Christian readers, words such as this would have called to mind the mockery of Christ on the cross. Such behaviour was an expected part of the martyrdom drama. Onaharé, too, seems to have embraced the idea of dying for the faith. When one of his freed former companions found on opportunity to speak with him in the final hours of his life, Onaharé asked his friend to deliver a last message to his people. “If ever, my dear friend, thou returnest to the country of the Algonquins, assure them that the Iroquois, with all their tortures, have not succeeded in stifling the prayer on my lips, nor the faith in my heart. Tell them that I died gladly, in the hope of going very soon to heaven.”56 Perhaps he had come to think of himself as a martyr. His choice of audience – his Algonquin blood kin, rather than his Christian fictive kin at Sillery – seems to indicate that he regarded his coming death as powerful in multiple contexts.

M a rt y r d om Algonquins, of course, would have been deeply familiar with these captivity rituals. They were common throughout the northeast and followed similar patterns among Iroquoian and Algonquian nations alike. Members of both valued the good death, bravery in the face of torture, and constancy. The adoption and death of captives were spiritual and highly ritualized affairs, possibly conceived as sacrifices to appease the other-than-human forces that populated the Algonquin universe.57 They were, indeed, powerful. In their spiritual capacity, these rituals displayed striking similarities in symbolism and meaning across Indigenous nations of the northeast, and were advanced by the understanding that suffering and bravery in the face of death would be rewarded. Christians, of course, also believed that meaningful sacrifice of the self would be rewarded. The drama of Onaharé’s death would have been meaningful to multiple audiences in not entirely dissimilar ways. Certainly, in the view of French missionaries, the martyrological pattern lay easily upon Onaharé’s performance and the drama of his

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death. Thomas Aquinas believed that death in holy war was sufficient cause to claim martyrdom.58 The Jesuits believed they, along with Christian Algonquins, Montagnais, and Hurons, were engaged in just such a conflict in Canada. So when two escaped Christian Hurons told them that Onaharé “deserved the martyr’s palm,” the missionaries responded with enthusiasm.59 Paul Ragueneau, author of the Relation of 1650, set about recasting Onaharé’s life and death as a Christian epic. Onaharé had carried arms against the Iroquois, he wrote, “with the object only of preserving the Church … and he had made a resolution to suffer and die with constancy for his cause.” He looked upon the Iroquois “as nothing more than the enemies of faith and destroyers of Christians.”60 Ragueneau described how, fortuitously, young Joseph had made a general confession just before he departed Sillery, and then another at Trois-Rivières, thus ensuring by divine providence that his soul was pure as he went to face his death.61 While most Christians departing for war took the precaution of confessing, in hindsight it appeared to the Jesuits that “God was preparing [Onaharé] for so holy and glorious a death.” Ragueneau concluded by invoking the long association between apostolic Christianity and martyrdom. These Churches were born amid crosses: they have begotten their children amid sufferings, persecutions, epidemics, famines, and wars; they have fed on tears and anguish. They have almost no other members than widows and orphans; and if I were to speak as a savage, I would say that there remains naught else than phantoms, the living having gone to heaven. I cannot, after all, despair. The primitive Church was filled with exiles, and with people reduced to slavery or condemned to the flames, to the wheel, to the mines, to the public stables; and God has drawn from such abasement Tiaras and Miters, Scepters and crowns, which will only find their lasting solidity in the establishment of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.62 For Ragueneau the manner of Joseph / Onaharé’s death proved he had suffered “as a Christian, and not as a common savage.” His performance had transformed him. But into what? A saint? A martyr? If the Huron witnesses believed that Joseph / Onaharé had “suffered for Jesus Christ,” and Ragueneau was initially supportive of his cause, the Jesuits as a body ultimately proved skeptical.63 Overall,

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Jesuit opinions on the capacity of the Indigenous for Christian sanctity were ambiguous and conflicted at best. Even Ragueneau failed to provide the authoritative final judgment that martyrdom had indeed occurred in Onaharé’s case – something he did not fail to do for Brébeuf and others of his own order. In his retelling of Onaharé’s death, the claim to martyrdom remains in the voice of the Huron witnesses, dubious authorities at best in French colonial texts, as we have seen in the case of Brébeuf. In the absence of European witnesses and of Jesuit confirmation of what had happened, the best Ragueneau seems to have been able to offer was to speculate on Onaharé’s blessedness, and take the opportunity to praise the commitment and good death of a valued convert. Generally speaking, Jesuits in Canada were surprisingly reluctant to classify Indigenous peoples as martyrs and saints except in the broadest of terms that recognized some deaths as “precious.”64 Though examples of Indigenous piety frequently trumped missionary pessimism in texts that highlighted for French readers how converts were often more pious in their own way, and more innocent, than so-called Catholics back home, Jesuit writers far more often counted Indigenous peoples among a rhetorical “Other,” whose capacity for Christianity might be questioned – tepid Catholics, ignorant peasants, heretics, pagans, libertines, and idolaters.65 “To be a Barbarian and a good Christian, to live as a savage and as a child of God, are two very different things,” wrote Paul Le Jeune in 1636.66 On the rare occasion when Christian authorities in New France did promote an Indigenous person as holy, doing so often required the complete rhetorical separation of the subject from his or her ethnic background and cultural heritage, and close surveillance of the holy performance. Take, for instance, the case of Catherine / Tekakwitha, whose transformation was achieved through the trope of virginity. According to her official Jesuit biographer, Pierre Cholenec, Catherine maintained her virginity only through an extraordinary gift of God’s grace. Her purity, in Cholenec’s hagiography, is what separated her from other Iroquois, whom French missionaries tended to regard as generally sexually licentious and incapable of continence.67 By separating her from her culture, family, and people, and transforming her into a Christian virgin, the Jesuits recast her as a saint using a tried and true narrative strategy popular in the early modern period – the eyewitness. When Cholenec wrote the official version of her Life, he

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claimed the privileged authority of an eyewitness. “I have not told you anything, my Reverend Father, that I did not see myself when I had care of her conduct, or that I did not learn from the missionary (James de Lamberville) who baptized her.”68 The saintly model of the female virgin demanded the oversight and confirmation of the male authority figure. For the last four years of her life Catherine was a resident of Kahnawake, a mission village south of Montreal, where she died, closely observed by missionaries, in 1680. In the narrative of her sanctity she went from being an actor in her own right to being a character in someone else’s drama. Even so, it took many years for Jesuit authorities to declare in favour of Catherine’s holiness and support the publication of a holy biography.69 In contrast, Onaharé died in a place and in circumstances far beyond the ability even of Jesuit rhetoric to control. As the group of Canadian martyrs was being fixed during the 1650s and 1660s, Joseph / Onaharé’s inclusion in their ranks was sporadic and unpredictable. It was only two years after Onaharé’s death that Ragueneau gathered the material that would form the so-called “manuscript of 1652,” a collection intended to support an anticipated canonization cause for the martyrs. He included nothing about Onaharé. Indeed, all the subjects were French Jesuits. In François-Joseph Bressani’s Italian composite version of the Relations written a year later for an Italian audience, Joseph / Onaharé was mentioned only once as an example to reinforce the by-then familiar colonial trope of innate Iroquois cruelty and irrational hatred of Christianity.70 When François Du Creux published a condensed Latin version of the Jesuit Relations in Paris in 1664, however, he did include Onaharé as a martyr. “For in the final act,” he wrote, “this athlete of Christ had imitated all that the Church venerates in the holy martyrs.”71 Yet, in a woodcut depicting the mission’s martyrs that accompanied the text, Onaharé appeared only on the very fringe of the image, occupying a no-man’s land between the bifurcated world of Jesuit victims and Indigenous aggressors represented in the picture.72 Grégoire Huret’s woodcut, generally known as the “Martyrs’ Tableau,” ranks the Canadian martyrs, placing the most outstanding of them in the front row; Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and Gabriel Lalemant. Behind them are René Goupil and Charles Garnier. Further back still are others such as Antoine Daniel, who was shot during an Iroquois attack on a Huron village in 1648. Only at the very back, located at the image’s vanishing point and 

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almost imperceptible among the background foliage, stands Onaharé, identifiable only by the legend that accompanies the image. The image shows two distinct groups of men; Jesuit victims and Indigenous aggressors. One group is engaged in killing, the other suffering; one Native, the other European; one pagan, one made up of Catholic priests. Suffering Jesuits submit in attitudes of prayer or gaze placidly out at the viewer, emphasizing their spiritual distance from the action going on around them, while Iroquois warriors go about the grim business of slaughter with their backs turned to the (Christian) viewer. Joseph / Onaharé, alone and engaged in no activity, occupies an ambivalent state between these two extremes. Is Onaharé’s inconsistent inclusion in the ranks of the martyrs attributable, as Allan Greer has suggested, to disturbing questions his performance raised about the racial-religious hierarchy implicit in the missionary enterprise itself?73 While Onaharé’s case certainly seems to have complicated Jesuit narratives of colonial martyrdom, race is a difficult category to define in mid-seventeenth century colonial spaces. On the one hand, the French who came to Canada certainly recognized differences between themselves and those they encountered. On the other, those differences were more often behavioural than inherited, cultural rather than biological, reflecting the belief at the time that practices and customs defined peoples and nations and that these were not necessarily immutable. Several recent explorations of race in the French Atlantic world have argued that a biological understanding of difference, with accompanying social divisions and defined hierarchies, did not solidify until after the end of the French regime in Canada in 1763.74 While Christian sensitivity toward hierarchical divisions may have troubled Jesuit observers, attributing them to notions of race while omitting behavioural distinctions fails to entirely account for Onaharé’s exclusion from the ranks of the martyrs. Would an Indigenous martyr not have been a great triumph for the Jesuits and their Canadian mission? Had not native martyrs been recognized and praised in other mission fields such as Japan?75 To unfold Onaharé’s inconsistent inclusion in the martyrological pantheon we need to look to ritual and the dichotomy created between Jesuit observers and Indigenous participants in the creation of hagiographic discourses. For Jesuits observing from afar, Onaharé’s performance of the traditions of martyrdom must have been difficult to substantiate.

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3.1  Onaharé’s death in the “Martyrs’ Tableau” (where he is identified as figure 10). Grégoire Huret, Preciosa mors quorundam Patrum é Societé Jesu in nova Francia (1664) in Francois Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, vol. 2 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1952), 481. Courtesy of Eaton Special Collections, King’s University College at Western University.

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Despite his enthusiastic embrace of Christianity, Joseph / Onaharé continued to live betwixt and between worlds. From the Jesuit perspective, he must have remained potentially both an outside observer of Iroquois rituals of captivity and adoption, and an active participant in them. Whereas it was clear to the Christian observer that a Jesuit martyr had died for the faith even in captivity rituals, it could not have been similarly clear that a convert did so as well. Onaharé died in an Iroquois village and within well-established Indigenous rituals with only Hurons to render witness. His ability to effectively speak to the all-important, but absent Christian audience through the drama that preceded his death, therefore, remained severely limited. Onaharé may simply have been another Algonquin captive who sang his death song and met his fate bravely, but not as a result of odium fidei. Notions of difference rooted in behaviour limited the ability of Jesuit observers to effectively and confidently separate the Indigenous Christian performer from the rituals of captivity within which he died. In the final instance, Onaharé chose to speak to an Algonquin audience rather than a strictly Christian one, and his pronouncements must have failed to resolve for the missionaries the ambiguities inherent for them in his performance of both Indigenous and Christian rituals. Jesuit observers could easily extract their brethren from Iroquois rituals and insert them into scenarios of martyrdom, but Onaharé did not fit comfortably either into the category of thinking observer or that of mindless participant constructed in Jesuit texts. In Christian martyrdom, the victim / victor died for the faith in the Other’s rituals and became a martyr because he or she defied the meanings of those rituals and, in fact, recast them. There was an expected incommensurability between the victim and his persecutors that perhaps did not clearly appear for them in the case of Onaharé. He might simply have been another war captive; something a Jesuit could never have been. He may simply have died, like a first-century Roman thief, in a set of rituals that had nothing whatever to do with Christianity. So, while it was clear for European observers that the obviously Christian Jesuit, who stood apart from the ritual contexts in which he died and challenged their fundamental assumptions, was a martyr who suffered for the faith and on account of hatred of it, it was not clear that the ambiguously Christian convert did likewise, even when he claimed, as Onaharé did, that he died a Christian.

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Despite the bravado of their texts, the Jesuits remained painfully aware that conversions, even at Sillery, took place on Indigenous terms and that the results were Indigenous forms of Christianity. The case of the Huron warrior’s defection to the Iroquois served as a reminder of this fact in the midst of the seeming triumph of Onaharé’s death. Ultimately, the meaning of even such an apparently clearcut case as Onaharé’s remained obscure and uncertain. Doubt triumphed over whatever desire or need for an Indigenous martyr the Jesuits may have had. The question remains, however: did Onaharé see himself as a martyr? If so, how, and why did he address his Algonquin kin just before his death rather than the Jesuits who alone could legitimate his performance? These questions are not easily answered. Yet, it seems reasonable that Onaharé would have been inspired by the Christian devotional culture that surrounded him at Sillery in the late 1640s, and perhaps particularly by the examples of Brébeuf and Lalemant, who died at the hands of the Iroquois in strikingly similar ways as Onaharé himself. Perhaps it was this example that framed his understanding of his own death. Onaharé was a resident at Sillery when news of the deaths of these two missionaries reached the Jesuits, and also when Ragueneau arrived in Quebec carrying the bones of the martyrs and the remains of the Huron nation. We have already seen the kind of excitement that the achievement of martyrdom sparked among the missionaries in Canada. While the Jesuits did not record Onaharé’s reaction to the deaths of Brébeuf and Lalemant, they did record the reaction of another Algonquin neophyte from the mission village of La Conception near Trois-Rivières, which is found in the chapter that follows the one in which Onaharé’s death is recounted. It seems to me that we should not mourn over the death of these good Fathers; their torments are over, and their joy will never end. If they loved us on earth, they will still love us in heaven, for goodness does not go to ruin in that country … For myself, I desire to imitate them. I find myself in danger from our enemies, like them. They could have escaped, and I can do so, by shunning the paths along which our enemies proceed. They remained in peril that they might assist those who were unable to flee. They preferred to die while instructing the Savages, rather than to seek

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shelter by abandoning them. I will do the same; I will die rather than fail my fellow-countrymen.76 For this neophyte, the Jesuit martyrs became a personal model and their deaths were most definitely voluntary. If Onaharé shared these thoughts, they might account for his invocation of his Algonquin kin. Perhaps he had come to see himself as a missionary, an evangelist who fell to the forces of those who would resist Christian advancement, and hoped that even in death he might bring his kin to the faith by likewise becoming a model and a teacher. No doubt he realized just how much his death as a Christian mirrored the symbolic value associated with brave and noble deaths among the Algonquins. He must have known what kind of impact the manner of his death would have on his relatives. It seems reasonable, given the form and context of his death, and the spiritual and devotional contexts of his life, that Onaharé did see himself as something akin to what Jesuits and Christians regarded as martyrs to the faith, and that he hoped his death, already spiritually charged given its ritual manner, might have an impact on his kin. What the Algonquins made of his performance, however, is unfortunately not known.

C o n c l u s ion As a performative ritual, martyrdom had much in common with captivity. Both emphasized bravery and constancy in the face of death. Torture and suffering were vital, as was the acceptance and, indeed, embrace of one’s fate. Both were freighted with generations of meaning and were deeply ingrained in their respective cultures. Reading rituals, however, is challenging. The performance we have access to in text is not the original event, but rather the ritual-in-text, which was subject to all sorts of interpretations not necessarily present in the original performance.77 Ultimately, what we are left with in Onaharé’s case, as in so many others, is the Jesuit interpretation of what happened. Their ambiguous response to his death within the Christian categories and doctrines of martyrdom leaves only the local context of Onaharé’s performance and his own interpretations of its power for beginning to assess how he saw himself and how others around him may have viewed his performance. By reconstructing some of Onaharé’s background and life at Sillery, it is possible to infer that he had come to see himself as a

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martyr and perhaps also an evangelist within the frame of Algonquin Christianity. By invoking an Algonquin audience just prior to death, perhaps Onaharé hoped to express the power he believed lay within the new beliefs he had embraced. Or perhaps he intended his death as a challenge to those who continued to reject Christianity to recognize in it the spiritual power and meaning they would otherwise have attributed to the death of a brave warrior. Whatever the case, Onaharé’s performance suggests that he recognized and was able to reconcile Christian notions of holiness with Algonquin spirituality and lifeways. Converts like Onaharé did not reject their entire culture when they adopted Christianity, but rather adapted new practices to existing ones, blurring the lines between traditionalism and Christianity in ways that frequently made Jesuit missionaries uncomfortable. While Jesuits slowly turned their backs on Onaharé’s “martyrdom,” the potential power his performance carried for Iroquois and Algonquin audiences remained. These were the contexts in which Onaharé would have come to understand the significance of his own death as an Algonquin and a Christian, performed that death, and attempted to control its meaning.

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4 Charity: Domesticating Holiness

By the late summer of 1711, the War of the Spanish Succession, between France and Spain on one side, and Britain, Austria, and Holland on the other, had been raging for close to ten years. Primarily a conflict over dynastic and territorial ambitions in Europe, the war nevertheless spread to North America where control of Spanish American trade, and particularly of the lucrative asiento (the contract to supply slaves to Spanish territories), was at stake. Louis XIV charged New France with containing British expansion along the eastern seaboard. Although vastly outnumbered by English colonists, the northern colony managed to survive largely by relying on Indigenous allies and policies designed to ensure the neutrality of the Iroquois League.1 Even so, France’s North American colonies were vulnerable. In 1710 a force of New Englanders conquered Port Royal and took control of Acadia, encountering little resistance. A year later, news came to the French in the St Lawrence valley that “enemies of the Catholic Church” in Boston and New York were determined to make themselves masters of Canada too.2 In the spring about twelve thousand men left Boston by ship under the command of Admiral Hovenden Walker to lay siege to Quebec. At the same time, an army composed of about three thousand colonial militia and seven hundred Iroquois warriors amassed on New France’s southern flank preparing to converge on Montreal in a giant pincer move.3 Governor Vaudreuil gathered his advisors at Quebec and worked feverishly to reinforce the fortifications of the capital. In Montreal, the local militia was drilled and placed on alert, ready to march against the enemy at a moment’s notice.

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Vaudreuil, however, had few resources to call on to defend the colony. In the event of attack, Montreal was unlikely to receive help from the capital, and so residents of the city prepared for war as best they could, but prayed for peace. In an attempt to ward off catastrophe, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu fasted, held general communions, and paraded in procession throughout the town with bare feet and bowed heads. The vicar of Montreal ordered prayers said in all churches and in public places throughout the town. From May to September, the laywomen of the Congregation of the Holy Family offered novenas (a nine-day sequence of daily devotions) to the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph in every church on the island. The priests of the Sulpician seminary held public processions and preached penitence to anyone who would listen.4 People were nervous, frightened, and in search of consolation. All the while, deep within the chapel of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Anne Barroy approached the cell of the anchorite, Jeanne Le Ber. Anne, a lay sister in this community of teachers founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1657, had come seeking the reassurance in frightening times that only a reputed holy woman could offer. Once the most eligible and wealthy bachelorette in Montreal, Jeanne Le Ber by the summer of 1711 had voluntarily sequestered herself away from society for more than sixteen years, first in her father’s house, and then in a cramped, three-roomed cell, specially built for her behind the altar of the chapel of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. There she spent her days in prayer, gazing upon the holy sacrament through a small hole cut in the locked door and at work making the intricately embroidered church vestments that adorned the colony’s altars and priests.5 Although no one (aside from the bishop, her Sulpician confessor, and Anne Barroy, her cousin and maid6) was permitted to speak with her, Jeanne Le Ber’s extraordinary religious vocation was far from secret in Ville-Marie. According to her biographer, people “regarded her everywhere as a saint” because of her seclusion and dedication to God – her extraordinary performance of the anchoritic model of holiness.7 In the midst of the long summer months of 1711, the sisters of the Congregation decided to ask her for help against the colony’s enemies. Despite her self-imposed cloister, Jeanne Le Ber carried on business and received distinguished visitors at her cell from time to time with the permission of her confessor and the ever-vigilant bishop of

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Quebec.8 Consequently, she was perhaps already aware of what was going on in Montreal and the colony. Perhaps she even expected requests for help. Certainly, Jeanne Le Ber responded favourably to Anne Barroy’s pleadings. She gave assurances that New France was safely in the care of the Virgin Mary. The holy mother guarded the city, she told Anne, and she would not allow the colony’s enemies to prevail against it. Its citizens need fear nothing.9 She then took up an image of the Virgin, perhaps one she had prepared in advance, or one she had been working on when she was interrupted. Maybe it was a painting made by her brother Pierre, an amateur, if very pious painter. She wrote a short prayer upon it and gave it to Anne with instructions to hang it above the gates of the Congrégation’s farms outside the city at St Gabriel.10 The granaries there were full of wheat that the Congrégation and the people of the town could illafford to lose to marauding bands of soldiers if the attack came. Once word of Jeanne Le Ber’s promise spread, people of the town also began arriving at the Congrégation chapel with their own rough images of the Virgin for the reputed holy woman to bless. They asked Jeanne Le Ber to write prayers on them too, and thus grant her blessing over the entire community. These supplicants, however, were turned away. They did not have permission to speak with her, nor she with them. Undeterred, the people of Montreal turned toward the Congrégation’s farms, where they found what they wanted hanging over the granary door. They took the image with its inscribed prayer, forcing Jeanne to make another for the nuns.11 In this way, Jeanne Le Ber offered consolation to her community and fulfilled the social and spiritual roles expected of her as a holy woman without breaking her vows of seclusion and obedience. When, late in September, word reached Quebec of a naval disaster at the mouth of the St Lawrence River, the trust the local population had placed in her intercession appeared vindicated. The fabled English fleet had been destroyed in a storm and thick fog and by the treacherous currents of the lower St Lawrence. At the mouth of the river, near Île-aux-Oeufs, the remnants of English ships, military equipment, and the bodies of soldiers washed up on shore. The English army gathering to the south for an attack on Montreal melted away when it heard the news. New France was saved, and the War of the Spanish Succession was effectively over in Canada. Church officials and colonists alike credited the Virgin Mary with the victory. In Montreal, Marie Morin, chronicler of the Hôtel-Dieu

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de Montréal and an eyewitness to these events, wrote, “it is the Lord who has fought for us, everyone is convinced.”12 In Quebec, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu believed a miracle had occurred. “Everyone was truly struck by a great sense of gratitude, and even the least devout were touched by the grandeur of this miracle, because this defeat of our enemies was not regarded here as anything but the miraculous effect of the power of God and of his love for Canada.”13 In the years that followed, Jeanne Le Ber’s small role in this apparently divine victory was not forgotten. When she died in 1714, the people of Montreal flocked to her funeral seeking relics, and once again asking the holy woman for favours.14 François Vachon de Belmont, the superior of the Montreal seminary, in writing a brief biography of her in 1722, reminded readers what Jeanne Le Ber had accomplished and what she had meant to the community. “The Holy Virgin,” he wrote, “without doubt by [Jeanne Le Ber’s] prayers and those of the holy souls of this country made the enemy vessels flounder and sink with the loss of thousands by the greatest miracle which has occurred since the time of Moses.”15 In the colony holy persons were not distant figures, even those who kept themselves in seclusion. Nor were they merely long-dead symbols invoked at mass. They were living, vital members of the colonial community who performed acts of charity and service for local people, who in turn granted their praise and recognition for the favours they believed they received. By the second half of the seventeenth century the centre of colonial holiness had moved from the mission field to the settlements of the St Lawrence valley. The edifying, but largely inimitable performances of Jesuit martyrs were replaced by new holy persons, predominantly women, who followed a model of sanctity focused on charity, and offered colonists examples of how to live the devout Tridentine life. In the broad context of colonial social and public life, it was now heroic charity and the public performance of religious devotion that brought holiness to local communities and generated shared experiences of the sacred.

C h a r it y a n d H oly Women After roughly 1650, charity came to replace evangelism as the primary trope of colonial holiness. Although the Council of Trent (1545–63) had reaffirmed the necessity of good works for salvation,

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the theological notion of charity prominent in the seventeenth century differed from the acts of kindness toward the less fortunate motivated by altruism and civic-mindedness normally associated with the term today.16 Theologians considered charity (from Latin caritas, meaning “love”) a pure form of love for God, and ranked it first among the canonical virtues because they believed it united the soul most immediately with God, and thus facilitated the practice of the other two theological virtues (faith and hope), and the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude).17 “Charity has the virtue possessed of the hands of the fabulous Midas,” wrote Paul Le Jeune; “it changes everything that it touches into gold, or rather into a beauty of paradise; it dignifies the smallest actions and exalts them.”18 When performed out of charitable disinterest, the acts of the holy became acts of divine love. Theologians at the time considered acts of giving and service charitable only when performed out of religious disinterest, and as a manifestation of one’s love for the divine. When Paul Le Jeune, for instance, wondered whether a young Algonquin neophyte at Sillery named Ignace gave away all he had at a traditional Eat-All feast because of Christian charity, what he really questioned was whether, or to what degree, Ignace had a pure love of God that gave Christian meaning to his actions.19 Indeed, the Jesuits often preached against Eat-All feasts, at which successful hunters gave away what they had killed even as they abstained themselves, seeing in the feasts evidence of base gluttony while they struggled to distinguish gifts of food from true Christian charity and virtue.20 In Christian thought, disinterest, or apatheia, implied passionlessness, indifference, and the annihilation of the self as qualities separate from the divine.21 Theological charity came in degrees. It ranged from the benevolence of those who wished simply to expunge their own sins through good works, to the desire that perfecti felt to unite themselves with God and depart from the world of temptations.22 This latter form of charity lay at the very heart of performances of sanctity. In an initial draft version of the Life of Catherine / Tekakwitha, Claude Cholenec explained the connection: “Charity is not only the queen of virtues, enriching all others, but it is also the source of sanctity, the shortest and safest road to holiness and perfection … Without this virtue, however holy and perfect one appears before man, one is nothing before God.”23 The religiously ambitious believed that the greatest spiritual experiences were available only to

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those who first detached themselves from tempting, but ultimately detrimental worldly allurements, and sought a personal relationship with the divine before engaging in acts of public charity. The wouldbe holy person’s desire to seek out marginality, by joining a convent, engaging in ascetic practices, travelling to the new world to become a missionary, or retreating to a closed cell like Jeanne Le Ber, was bound up with aspirations to humiliate and eradicate the self and thereby achieve a more perfect union with God. In the French settlements of the St Lawrence valley, religious women in particular cultivated theological charity, which manifested itself in acts of self-sacrifice and service to their local communities.24 The predominance of women among the holy persons of New France, however, appears at first glance to go against the grain of prevailing trends of Early Modern sanctity. While the high Middle Ages (1200–1500) had witnessed a steady increase in the proportion of women among the ranks of recognized Catholic saints, reaching 27.7 percent of all canonizations in the 1400s, the sixteenth century witnessed a steep decline to 18.1 percent. In the seventeenth century this proportion slipped further still to 14.4 percent. Formal canonization procedures in the seventeenth century overwhelmingly favoured male over female candidates. Only 17 of the 118 saints canonized by the Vatican in the seventeenth century were women.25 One explanation for this trend cites overseas Catholic expansion, especially in New Spain, which tended to favour male missionaries over female contemplatives.26 New France, however, reflects this pattern only if holiness is limited to cases of formal canonization. During the French regime, ecclesiastical officials in Canada began just two processes, both for male candidates; the Jesuit martyrs and a Récollet lay brother named Frère Didace Pelletier (discussed in chapter 6).27 Neither cause proceeded very far along official channels. When informal performances and local reputations are considered, however, a different picture emerges. In New France, male holy figures dominate the early years of colonization when there were few settlers and little ecclesiastical structure. But after 1650, cases of female sanctity steadily increased and soon outstripped male cases (Table 4.1) as women took ever-more-prominent leadership roles in settlement. From 1650 to the end of the French regime, women consistently made up a high percentage of the total number of holy figures, and considerably more than the prevailing European average. After 1715, however, the trend changed again. As the evangelical

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Table 4.1 Women as a percentage of holy persons in New France

Men

Pre-1650

1650–1715

1715–1771*

Total

11

6

2

19

2

12

Women

0

10

% Female

0

62.5

50

38.7

d’Youville1

*End date extended to 1771 in order to include Marguerite Women as a percentage of holy persons in New France2 1 I have included Marguerite d’Youville on this list even though she died in 1771 because most of her career took place under the French regime and she properly belongs to that period. 2 Tabulations are based on a prosopographical survey of hagiographic writing from the ­earliest days of Catholic settlement in Canada to the present. Because of the difficulties of assessing hagiographic intention in regard to Indigenous converts, however, I have tabulated these percentages including only holy persons for whom a significant hagiographic tradition exists. For the complete survey and its terms see T. Pearson, “Becoming Holy in Early Canada,” 429–65. For a list of holy persons of New France see the appendix.

ethos that had animated early colonization efforts waned, recognition of holy figures, male and female, declined sharply, and the advantage women had enjoyed disappeared. As the settled centres of the colony became less dangerous places through the second half of the seventeenth century, new performances of holiness based on more domesticated models of Christian charity came to the fore. New performers, primarily female, relied less on off-stage audiences and abstract rituals of martyrdom and more on the needs of the people with whom they lived, as in the story of the Montrealers who sought Jeanne Le Ber’s prayers and reassurances in 1711, and in performances of familiar traditions of holiness.28 Female holy reputations derived overwhelmingly from their work in nursing and teaching, and the personal devotions and self-sacrifice they carried out in the heart of settler society. Beginning in 1639, nuns began arriving in the colony in answer toJesuit calls for assistance in evangelical work.29 The first to come were Ursuline teachers and Augustinian nurses. In general, these women were better positioned to build lasting relationships with the local community than male missionaries were. Priests generally stayed only a few years in the colony before their orders transferred them elsewhere, but nuns almost invariably remained in the colony for life and recruited new members from among the local population to carry on their work. In a letter to a correspondent in France, the

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first mother superior of the Augustinians of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec wrote shortly after arriving at Quebec, “My satisfaction is so great at seeing myself in Canada, that I cannot refrain from writing to your Reverence that I think more of being here than of being Empress of the whole world.”30 Postings to New France were difficult to come by and hard-won by female religious, and a return to France would have been regarded as a great failure.31 As a result, female religious, seemingly more so than their male counterparts, became integrated into the communities they served. Marie de l’Incarnation, for example, the Ursuline superior who arrived in Quebec in 1639 and remained there until her death in 1672, established a school for Indigenous girls. When this project ultimately failed because of lack of interest on the part of local Montagnais and Algonquin peoples in French-style education, the Ursulines turned their attention to the French population, teaching the daughters of colonists how to be French in the new world. Marie also maintained close relationships with governors, bishops and Indigenous peoples of various nations, and thanks to her voluminous writings, which stretch over several decades, she is one of the most prominent colonial voices of her generation.32 By combining an active vocation with penitential retreat, Marie and those who accompanied her to Canada found unique and multiple ways of living their faith and their vocations within the colonial community.33 The Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec likewise combined the penitential spirit of the time with service. The Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, wrote its foundress and financial backer, MarieMadeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon, was established “principally and particularly for the sauvages, with the goal of contributing to their conversion and salvation.”34 The rhetoric of charity and love that appears repeatedly in colonial texts to describe religious vocations presents Christianity as a gift that missionaries offered Indigenous peoples. Hospital care in early modern France was directed specifically toward the sick poor, les pauvres malades, but in New France this charitable mandate expanded to include Indigenous people, les pauvres sauvages. Here pauvre carries a sense of both economic and spiritual deprivation. The wealthy, whether in France or New France, when they fell ill, were treated in their homes and rarely entered hospitals except as an ascetic exercise.35 The poor, however, became the objects of a public religious charity. Vincent de Paul, who founded the Daughters of Charity along with Louise de

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4.1  Marie Guyart, de l’Incarnation, Anonymous, c. 1672, Musée des Ursulines de Québec, Collection du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec.

Marillac in 1633, urged members of the community to see the recipient of charity as Christ himself. “The poorest and most abandoned are our Lords and Masters … and we are unworthy of rendering them our little services.”36 They saw the pauper as Christ’s earthly surrogate. The notion of the pauper christi (the poor of Christ) had a long history within the Church. Virtually all hospitals for the sick and poor in ancien régime France owed their foundation and continued existence to private, religiously motivated charitable support such as the duchesse d’Aiguillon provided the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.37 She and the Augustinian nurses who staffed her hospital in Quebec were guided by a notion of charity deeply rooted in the ongoing

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search for God’s love. Those who offered sanctuary to the poor hoped to achieve spiritual charity, the love of God they sought, through their service. Service to the poor, therefore, constituted an imitatio christi, just as sanctity itself did, and it was reasonable for nursing sisters to expect an equal return from their investment – the Christianization of the recipients of their charity and their own salvation. In a not untypical case, the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec describe how a “hardened and opinionated” Indigenous man belonging to an unspecified nation, finding himself confined to the Quebec hospital, was reportedly so moved by the self-sacrifice of the sisters who cared for him that he abandoned his formerly strident opposition to Christianity. His “thoughts and reflections [on the charity of the nuns],” reported the annaliste, “softened his iron heart which gave in, and being made a good Christian, he showed that charity is an excellent preacher.”38 Through his conversion, this man reciprocated the charity the nuns had offered him, giving back to them the spiritual credit for having brought him to the faith. Although far more patients died than recovered in the Augustinian hospital, anecdotes like this one achieve a disproportionate presence in the historical record because they provided just the sort of didactic lessons nuns and priests liked to record for their reading audiences in France. Religious women participated openly and enthusiastically in the colonial project of conversion alongside male ecclesiastics, and often regarded themselves as missionaries. Yet, this aspect of their history is often elided in studies that emphasize the leadership roles women occupied in the colonies over their enthusiastic participation in colonialism and assaults on Indigenous cultures.39 Marie de l’Incarnation, for example, freely associated herself with the colonial project, writing on her arrival in Canada: “We have come with the evangelical workers, who go to try to bring [Indigenous peoples] to His Name and holy faith. We are all here for the same purpose.”40 Twenty years later, when she paused to reflect on her work and achievements, she observed: It is true that even though our cloister did not permit me to follow the Evangelical workers to the nations they were discovering every day: nevertheless, being a part, as I am, of this new Church, Our Lord, having done me the honour of calling me, binds me so strongly in spirit with Him, that it seems to me that I am

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everywhere, and that I work with [the Jesuits] in such a rich and noble conquest.41 This conquest was to be a gift Christians bestowed on Indigenous peoples. In the spiritual relation she penned in 1654, Marie de l’Incarnation recalled how, on her arrival in the St Lawrence River in the late summer of 1639, she had called out to the first people she saw on the shore even before the ship had landed. “These poor people, never having seen anyone like us, were all in admiration, and when we told them that we were the daughters of captains who had left our own country, our families and all comforts out of love for them they were astonished.” Such fantasies missionaries entertained of the welcome they would receive from Indigenous peoples are not unusual in colonial texts and illustrate the assumptions of religious and cultural superiority that missionaries of both sexes brought with them. The expectation that their sacrifices would be appreciated created a sense of grievance when they were not. Immediately upon landing, the Ursuline mission began its work. “For four or five years straight, we were in the continual exercise of charity towards these pauvres sauvages who arrived [at Quebec] from many nations,” Marie recalled. However, when disease and war reduced the number of catechists who came to the Ursulines, the sisters felt the loss deeply “as the deprivation of the [charity] that was most precious to us.”42 The spiritual return that the mission promised the nuns for their service depended on their ability to attract converts and sacrifice themselves for those in need. Charity redounded to the mission workers in the form of self-satisfaction, public recognition of their virtues, and in same cases, sanctification. Those who have these virtues, wrote Paul Le Jeune in 1635 about the religious women he envisaged coming to the colony, “will perform miracles greater than miracles, and will become a saint.”43

P l ac e a n d H o li ness Wanderings to far off places, both physical and spiritual, the desire to suffer and to invert (however temporarily) social hierarchies that placed France over New France, men over women, and the rich over the poor, all make place a significant theme in early modern colonial holiness. When she set foot ashore in Canada, Marie de l’Incarnation,

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along with her two Ursuline companions, bent and kissed the soil of their new home, “to consummate our lives in the service of God and our poor savages.”44 Place and holiness are deeply connected in the Christian imagination. Saints are made on the margins of society, in the deserts of Egypt and Syria where the ancient anchorites fled the temptations of late Roman society, in the wilds of pagan Europe where apostles went to convert Saxons, Franks, and Germans, and in monasteries and convents set both physically and spiritually beyond lay society. Indeed, this was not the first time Marie believed she had seen New France. Many years before, while still in France she had had a dream in which she visited a country she later came to believe was Canada. In her spiritual journal she described a harsh and barren landscape filled with immense boulders, great mountains, and deep valleys, but completely devoid of people. The land appeared “afflicted” she wrote, and shrouded in heavy fog. She walked a treacherous path filled with unseen obstacles that seemed to drag at her and resist her passage. Despite the inhospitableness of the place, however, she nevertheless “felt a very great inward attraction in that direction and an order (from God) to go there and build a house for Jesus and Mary.” It was this dream that inspired her to make a brash promise to become a missionary in New France.45 The dangerous wilderness Marie had seen in her dream called to her. It represented the inversion of all she knew in France and offered sufferings that would lead to her own sanctification. “Some described Canada to us as a place of horror,” Marie recalled a year after her arrival in Quebec. “They told us it was the gates of Hell, and there was no worse place on earth. We have experienced the opposite, because here we have found a Paradise that for me at least, I am unworthy to inhabit.”46 The metaphor of Christian paradise is a recurring motif in descriptions of Canada deployed by performers of the traditions of holiness such as Marie de l’Incarnation who travelled there to sanctify themselves in charitable service. Canada’s cold climate, its distance from Europe, and its strange inhabitants made it the perfect place to pursue heroic charity while highlighting the dedication and self-sacrifice of the missionaries. “The air is excellent,“ Marie proclaimed a year after her arrival, “and in consequence this is an earthly paradise where crosses and thorns grow so lovingly that the more one is pricked by them, the more filled with tenderness is the heart.”47 Crosses and thorns were also common metaphors for the spiritual

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and physical sufferings sought by the dévot(e)s. Canada’s dangers and challenges subverted the luxuries of France and offered the ­religious the chance to suffer for God and live the apostolic, post-­ Tridentine French Catholic ethos.48 The Jesuit Relations, which religious women in France devoured with apparent gusto, characterized Canada as a wilderness full of shadows and danger, home only to beasts and those ignorant of God.49 Canada, claimed early Jesuit observers, was the land God gave to Cain, and like Cain, the Natives of the country wandered and did not settle and farm.50 The original inhabitants, in these assessments, were no less a part of the savage landscape than the trees, rocks, and rivers, and like the land, they too needed cultivating. “In Judeo-Christian tradition,” writes anthropologist Carole Blackburn, “the wilderness included not only geographic spaces but moral and spiritual conditions. The wilderness appears in the Old Testament as both the site and the state of sin; it is that which prevails when the blessing of the Lord is withdrawn.”51 In Le Jeune’s view, it was the misfortune of the Native, “which I verily believe has descended from Cain, or from some other wanderer like him,” to live in the dark woods away from Christian truth.52 Les sauvages, literally “men of the woods,” did not know God and were doomed to live with the beasts and the plants, rather than rule over them as God had instructed in Genesis 9. The land Marie dreamed of in France, and later kissed, was barren and empty, waiting for her to populate it with Christians. And for these reasons, she saw it as a paradise. This vision of the colony ignited the fervour of the religious women who went there. “There are no difficulties that daunt us,” an Ursuline wrote to Le Jeune in 1636; “our lord so powerfully fortifies and enhances our courage, that we are emboldened to say with Saint Paul, we can do all in him who strengtheneth us; neither the sea nor tempests have horrors enough to frighten hearts which live and throb only for him.”53 Ironically, it was only by overturning those very things that made Canada a religious paradise – its wildness, natural environment, and the state of its inhabitants – that the missionaries would achieve their goals. As we have already seen, missionaries hoped to persuade the Indigenous peoples to settle and farm at places like Sillery, to leave the forests and occupy and use the land in ways Europeans considered productive, useful, and legitimate. It was by sowing seeds, literally and figuratively, that male and

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female missionaries hoped to occupy the empty and inhospitable place Marie had seen in her dream, and reap a great “harvest of souls.”54 When the nursing sister, Catherine de Saint-Augustin, arrived in Quebec nine years after Marie de l’Incarnation, she too described her new home as a paradise in a letter she sent to the superior of the Augustinian house in Bayeux. We have finally arrived in the land we have so longed for. But we did not get here without difficulties. We had to leave behind harsh struggles in France and suffer violent storms on the sea in order to arrive in this little paradise of Quebec, where now everything is changed to contentment. I say to you, my dearest Mother, that it is true that I left a house of holiness, but also that I have found another at the ends of the earth which cedes nothing to the first.55 Although she retired behind the cloister walls of the Quebec hospital immediately after her arrival, and for the most part led a life of quiet regulation and order, Catherine’s surviving writings are filled with a spirit of excitement and adventure, but also anticipation and uncertainty, about the colony, the land, and its inhabitants. “We are not in great danger in our house [from the Iroquois],” she wrote to her father soon after her arrival. Yet “we are between life and death … All of it, I assure you, causes me no fear.”56 Despite Catherine’s claims that she saw Canada as a paradise, her writings leave the impression that she, in fact, found the colony very difficult to love. To contend with its challenges, she quickly began to think not only of her own religious vocation, but also of the colony and its inhabitants, both French and Indigenous, as a form of spiritual charity. Long Christian tradition promised salvation and even sanctity to those who suffered to bring new places and peoples to God. When the superior of her order offered her the chance to return to France in 1659 without shame on account of her poor health, Catherine refused, saying that she “was nailed to the cross of Canada by three nails, which she would never remove”: the will of God, the salvation of souls, and a vow she had made before she departed France to die in Canada. “She added that, even if all the Nuns should choose to return to France, she would remain alone in Canada, – provided she were permitted to do so, – in order to end her life there

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in the service of the poor savages, and of the sick persons of the country.”57 Women’s vocations were charitable enterprises that combined nursing and teaching with evangelism in a place considered, without any inherent contradictions, both a paradise and a land deeply in need of salvation and domestication.

P o l ic in g F e m a l e P e rformances Once they arrived in Canada, however, religious women were quickly confined to spaces that must have seemed to them both very different and pressingly familiar: the cloister and the convent, the classroom and hospital ward. Prevailing gender divisions in French society easily carried overseas and dictated where religious vocations could be practised. Male missionaries could go out into the field and risk martyrdom, but female missionaries were to remain in the Europeanized spaces of the French settlements, cloistered in the new convents built for them. “Men can extricate themselves much more easily from difficulties,” wrote Paul Le Jeune in a warning to female religious coming to New France, “but, as for nuns, they must have a good house, some cleared land, and a good income on which to live.”58 Despite a rhetoric of precarity and adventure, most female religious in fact lived generally confined, even staid, lives. Their vocations played out within the physical and spiritual spaces men carved out for them and permitted them to inhabit. Despite her desire to travel inland on mission, Marie de l’Incarnation spent her life largely within the confining walls of the Ursuline house in Quebec. The bishop of Quebec eventually succeeded in requiring Marguerite Bourgeoys and her sisters in Montreal who formed the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, a teaching community, to take the formal vows of nuns despite their ambitions toward an itinerant teaching vocation.59 Upon arrival in the colony, religious women were quickly separated from the very place whose image had so motivated their imaginations from the start. As we have already seen, the Council of Trent mandated that female vocations be contemplative, and that female religious enter cloisters and orders.60 Although, these directives were implemented sporadically at best in Catholic Europe, they carried weight and were reinforced by tradition and expectation. Therefore, female holy persons in early New France had to negotiate not only the physical spaces between metropole and colony, but also those gaps

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between their own apostolic ambitions, tradition, normative expectations, and Tridentine restrictions. Different women dealt with these expectations in different ways. Catherine de Saint-Augustin seemingly embraced the contemplative life of the cloistered nun. Jeanne Le Ber, however, refused to join the Congrégation de NotreDame or any other order, and largely defined her own vocation in consultation with her Sulpician advisors and the bishop. Marie de l’Incarnation, although an Ursuline, found ways around official restrictions to pursue a vocation that was both contemplative and active. Marguerite Bourgeoys struggled her entire life to maintain the independence of her community in the face of ecclesiastical pressure to take formal vows.61 Overall, however, even in Canada, which some historians have argued granted increased opportunities for women thanks to its marginality, religious vocations for women remained highly re­strict­ed.62 It was a prevalent belief that women were more susceptible to the devil’s trickery, and in correspondingly greater need of male control and oversight. Conventions of female humility and obedience demanded that performances take place in private, behind cloister walls, and in meditation before the altar under the scrutiny of a qualified confessor, spiritual advisor, or bishop. In response to critics of  Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s mysticism, her confessor, Paul Ragueneau, acknowledged skepticism toward female mysticism. “It is only too true that the imaginations, principally of girls who are inclined towards piety, easily trick them, and that they believe too lightly that they have really seen or heard what they imagined.”63 Female religious themselves often supported the systemic limitations that male authorities placed on their vocations. Both Marie de l’Incarnation and Catherine de Saint-Augustin, for example, agreed to the demands of their confessors to keep spiritual journals in order to facilitate supervision. Marie de l’Incarnation’s own rhetoric advanced expectations that presented her religious experiences as entirely passive and submissive to the will of God. In the introduction to her 1654 spiritual autobiography addressed to her son, Claude Martin, she wrote: Do not think that the writings I have sent you were premeditated; in order to find there a structure like you would in welldigested works; that would not be possible in the state God held me. The way by which his divine Majesty led me could not

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permit me to retain any method in what I wrote. When I took the pen to begin I did not know a word of what I was going to say, but in writing the spirit of grace which guided me made me produce what pleased it.64 It was widely believed at the time that female religious, especially mystics like Marie, served essentially as passive receptors of the divine, requiring the interpretive guidance of male spiritual authorities.65 Even the most publicly active of early modern holy women framed their vocations according to such tropes of submission, humility, and passivity.66 As theologian Grace Jantzen warns, however, claims about pre-rational discourse made in early modern female spiritual writings were rhetorical constructions used by mystics and their confessors to make female holiness appear less threatening to Tridentine orthodoxy.67 The texts that followed disclaimers such as Marie’s above often go on to offer thoughtful and selfaware considerations of very personal religious experiences, and to describe active and voluntary vocations. Two such spiritual (auto) biographies survive from New France, contained and preserved within authoritative hagiographies penned by male confessors: one about Marie de l’Incarnation and the other about Catherine de Saint-Augustin. The spiritual journal was a standard tool of ecclesiastical oversight of extraordinary religious women.68 Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation’s son and a Benedictine monk, filled the role of confessor, spiritual director and biographer for his mother, and Claude Ragueneau acted in that capacity for Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Throughout Marie’s time in Canada, she remained in constant communication with her son and confessor, sharing reflections on spirituality and news about the colony and her life. For his part, Claude encouraged her to record her religious experiences in writing. The spiritual autobiography that resulted, combined with the thousands of letters she wrote over her years in the colony, formed the substance of a hagiography and a collection of letters that Martin would subsequently publish about her following her death in 1672.69 These texts describe not so much a life in biographical form, but rather the development of Marie’s spirituality and, ultimately, her sanctity. Martin employs lengthy direct quotations from Marie’s own writings, which he too claims she wrote without reflection, without ­lifting her pen, and with no corrections or revisions. Referring to

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himself as the echo of his mother’s voice, he then made extensive additions to the text, consisting of his own commentaries and interpretations of her writings, all the while supporting a rhetoric of female passivity and obedience.70 The result is an example of the “collaborative life” that combined the voices of confessor and penitent in works that enjoyed a great popularity among readers in Early Modern Europe.71 Although spiritual journals offered a key tool of male priestly oversight of female religious vocations, they were more than just instruments of power, and confessors were often much more than just remote authority figures.72 Holy women and their male confessors were often great spiritual friends who offered profound religious experiences not available to each individually. As mother and son, Marie de l’Incarnation and Claude Martin shared a bond that went well beyond the Church hierarchy. Catherine de Saint-Augustin and Paul Ragueneau kept up a deep and meaningful correspondence even after the latter left the colony in 1662. While male confessors offered holy women the chance for legitimacy and religious authority, spiritual women offered their male confessors equally profound gifts, writes historian Jodi Bilinkoff: direct access to an “ecstatic form of religious experience beyond anything they had learned at seminary and university.”73 A priest’s relationship with a spiritually famous woman could enhance his own religious experience and reputation. Ragueneau, who, as we have seen, left Canada under somewhat of a cloud, perhaps found in Catherine not only a confidante, but also someone who could improve his own fortunes and those of the Jesuits’ Canadian mission following the disasters of the 1640s and 1650s. In his 1671 biography of Catherine, he paints such an extraordinary picture of ascetic and mystical holiness that readers could be left in no doubt (he claims) that God continued to favour and bless the colony.74 While collaborative Lives of the type that Ragueneau and Martin produced might express a profound spiritual friendship between the male confessor and female penitent, they did not really negate or mitigate the profound gender divisions that defined male and female roles in the Early Modern Church. These works, writes literary ­historian Elizabeth Goldsmith, draw the reader “into an intimate knowledge of the woman writer’s secret self while at the same time sustaining the reader’s belief in the author’s modesty or reserve, and in the male hegemony over the printed text.”75 The relationship of

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religious women to male ecclesiastical authorities in New France reflects the double-helix metaphor invoked by gender theorists Margaret and Patrice Higonnet, in which the two parallel strands in the structure, representing male and female gender roles, give an impression of intertewining equality, but in fact remain separate, and ensure the subordination of one to the other. Radical social ­dislocations and upheavals caused, for example, by war or overseas migration, might create the appearance of equalizing relations between men and women, but in fact, male and female trajectories merely twist and turn around each other without ever meeting.76 The participation of female religious in the New France mission, while the result of the choices and desires of women themselves, was carried on within existing gender roles prevalent within France and the Catholic Church. Women did not become martyrs in early Canada, and holy men appeared only rarely in the domesticated sphere of the St Lawrence valley. Despite Ragueneau’s evident devotion to Catherine, or Claude Martin’s to his mother, in the end it was they who had the power to legitimize the extraordinary vocation and religious experience. It fell to them to defend the vocations of their spiritual friends against critics who doubted the women’s mysticism. Marie-Florine Bruneau suggests that there was something akin to an unwritten agreement between spiritual women and the male hierarchy to accept performances of sanctity as legitimate as long as they were performed within the bounds of official rules and expectations. Women whose performances could not be reconciled with prevailing ideology were likely to find themselves marginalized or worse, excommunicated.77 For example, in defence of Catherine, Ragueneau offered several reasons why he thought her performance ought to be believed and accepted. He claimed Catherine had a natural aversion to extraordinary ways. Indeed, had she been trying to deceive, she would not have revealed her most intimate and humiliating temptations and obsessions to him, her confessor. She was always constant in her faith, and displayed no sudden changes or variations; a prominent and expected feature of the Early Modern female biographical ­pattern.78 Those who bore the necessary authority to legitimize her performance – her directors, confessors, and even the Bishop of Quebec – had all examined her and they believed that God possessed her despite herself. Finally, Ragueneau offered many examples of universal saints of the Catholic Church who had done or

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experienced many of the same things Catherine had to show her adherence to well-established exemplars within the communio sanctorum. Thus the job of policing female holy performances in New France, as elsewhere in early modern Catholic Europe, involved not only ensuring proper oversight of extraordinary vocations, but also defending those vocations against critics after the deaths of holy women. Summing up his defence of Catherine, Ragueneau warned: “God grants graces to those he chooses when he chooses; and if at times he seems to favour women over men, it is often a lack of humility in [men] to want to deny [women] all credibility.”79 As the Church in France rapidly expanded into charitable work, hospital care, and education in the seventeenth century, it found the women who dominated these fields indispensable to its new pastoral role in society.80 In Canada, transplanted institutions like the Ursuline school and Augustinian hospital, as well as new colonial establishments like the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, combined traditional models of contemplative female piety with active charitable vocations. The women who led these movements and sacrificed themselves in the pursuit of heroic charity became the saints of settler society, performing familiar traditions of holiness. They did so, however, within the physical and spiritual limits defined by the gender categories of the universal Church and male overseers who maintained a vigilant surveillance over extraordinary religious performances.

H o l in e s s a n d t h e Coloni al Publi c Extraordinary performances of heroic charity, even when they took place behind cloister walls or in secluded cells deep within the European and Christian spaces of New France, found ways of becoming public. As a child, Jeanne Le Ber had frequently visited the nuns at the Hôtel-Dieu in her hometown of Montreal, where the secular foundress, Jeanne Mance, provided an example of how to live the religious life without joining a formal order. Later, Jeanne’s parents sent her to the Quebec Ursulines to be educated among the community founded by Marie de l’Incarnation. There she and the children of other colonists no doubt encountered nuns who told stories about Marie de l’Incarnation and provided models for future vocations. Meanwhile, parish priests encouraged their congregations to pray to the martyrs and saints of the Catholic Church, and at times to seek the help of local holy persons, both the living and the

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dead, and to have recourse to them in their needs.81 It was in such ways that local holy persons became a part of colonial public life. Paul Ragueneau regarded Catherine de Saint-Augustin as a public figure, and attributed her role as an example for the colony to the charity (love) she had for God and salvation. Her charity for the next life was truly all-powerful to undertake everything, to suffer everything and to do everything. Even when her entire heart turned against her salvation by the work of the demons that seemed to fill everything with their malignant qualities, even in the middle of such revulsions, she offered herself to God as a public victim who immolated herself for future salvation … She continued in this spirit of charity until her death.82 Religion was a central feature of colonial life and, aside from the parish priest, local holy women and men were perhaps its most prominent representatives. Marie de l’Incarnation lived a particularly public life despite her cloister. Claude Martin claims her charity allowed her to do all things for all people in the colony: her Ursuline sisters, French settlers, colonial leaders, and of course, Indigenous neophytes. “From her life out in the world,” he wrote, “she carried [the virtue of charity] into religion, and though it may seem that that state of solitude which joined her entirely to God ought to excuse her from doing good things for others, she nevertheless, found a thousand ways to give [God] signs of the tender love she had for him. This love gave her feet to run with, or rather wings to fly to the needs of her sisters.” The acts of charity Marie performed for her community were symbols of the love she bore for God. According to Martin, Marie’s favourite pass-time was to practise works of charity, “rendering to everyone incredible services.” She received people of “whatever quality,” and happily gave them advice and counsel, all of which, he assured his readers, was received as though it came from an oracle who spoke continually with God. Marie helped poor colonists by taking in their daughters and raising them for free, “as if they had brought huge pensions.” To other families she supplied alms secretly, channelling funds through various routes in order to hide her own hand and preserve her humility. Indigenous peoples, in particular, were recipients of her charity, says Martin. “Her heart and her monastery were always open [to them].” She cleaned them, washed their hair and dressed them, says Martin,

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all with such joy and dedication that it seemed “as if she had not been placed on the earth except for that reason.”83 Her charity led her to try to transform Indigenous people into Christians and to dress them and keep them as Europeans. Her performance of holy charity manifested itself within the colonial project that aimed toward the transformation of the colony itself into a European and Christian space. In doing so she engaged with the very audiences who would confirm her holiness when she died, all despite her formal cloister. Local holy persons were the informal religious heroes of the colony, existing alongside the established saints of the universal Catholic Church. For colonists, these figures, who embodied well-known and expected virtues and traditions, seemed to influence the divine, affect the course of personal and community events, and offer patronage and service during their lives and after their deaths. “The effects of [Marie de l’Incarnation’s] charity,” Martin wrote, “were marvellous: she sweetened the greatest bitterness, and rendered the heaviest ­burdens light and easy to carry.”84 The invocation of informal holy persons could be risky, however. There was no guarantee that such individuals were, in fact, saints in heaven; only the acclaim of the vox populi, and sometimes the endorsement of perhaps overly enthusiastic confessors and parish priests. Without the approval of the Church and the pope it was canonically impossible to determine if a performance was inspired by God or by the devil.85 Public acclaim of uncanonized holy persons could even violate canon law and destroy any chance the local saint might one day have of canonization.86 Such risks, however, did not stop local people and local authorities from promoting local figures and even encouraging people to pray to them. On the one hand, François Vachon de Belmont claimed in his eulogy of Jeanne Le Ber at her funeral in 1714: “No one dared to call her a saint because they knew well the limits the Holy See placed on this word and that it must appear that only those whom the sovereign pontiff has declared worthy have been honoured with a public cult.”87 On the other hand, he called on Jeanne to continue to protect the colony, and offered her to the gathered crowd as a heavenly patron. “O holy soul, become our advocate!” he cried. And to the sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame who had sheltered her through the many years of her enclosure as a hermit he urged belief that “Sister Le Ber was a saint.”88 Several years later, a

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hospitalière of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, Mère Marie-Andrée Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène (1687–1760), wrote in a letter to a corres­ pondent in France of her devotion to the Jesuit martyrs, “whom we revere in secret as martyrs.”89 She, too, was seemingly aware of the limits the Church placed on public veneration of the uncanonized, but continued to pray to the martyrs anyway. Local cults depended on local audiences. In general, however, when the goal was to achieve a helpful intercession, it was safer to invoke the canonized saints of the universal Church. To the faithful it must have seemed that a proven intercessor was more likely to achieve a positive outcome. Devotions to the Virgin Mary, St Anne, St Joseph, Jesus, and the Archangels, for example, all took place in New France with persistent regularity. In times of crisis, such as war or the periodic food shortages that plagued the colony, practical solutions such as military action or resource sharing were bolstered by recourse to these saints.90 Religious experts provided explanations that blamed negative events on God’s anger and led public devotions designed to mollify it. When an English force laid siege to Quebec in 1690, Mgr de Saint-Vallier, the bishop, hung a portrait of the Holy Family on the spire of the Cathedral as a talisman against the enemy. Despite the best efforts of the English to smash it with cannon fire from their ships moored in the river below, the image survived, and when the English withdrew seven days later, the Virgin Mary was widely credited with the victory. The processions of penance that had filled the streets to appease divine anger during the siege became parades of thanksgiving and celebration afterward.91 Following this victory, the bishop of Quebec instituted the feast of Notre-Dame de la Victoire throughout the diocese, and renamed a recently consecrated church in Quebec’s lower town in honour of the triumph.92 The Quebec catechism, published in 1702, taught the children of colonists the meaning of, and reason for, the feast. What is the feast of Our Lady of Victory? It is the feast at which we recognize the Holy Mother of God for the victories that we have had over her enemies. Why was it instituted in this diocese? For the remarkable victory and protection that we received from the Holy Virgin against the English heretics.

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What good did she conserve for us through this protection? The Faith, religion, all the spiritual and temporal advantages which we would have been stripped of without her help. What dispositions and sentiments should we have when honouring this feast? To thank very much the Holy Virgin for the singular services she has rendered this Church and this colony, and to do on that day some good work agreeable to her and in her honour.93 Every 7 October the people of New France were reminded of the favours with which the Virgin Mary had blessed them and celebrated victories over her enemies. As a part of the catechism, colonial children memorized this victory as a matter of faith in preparation for their formal entry into the adult belief community. When another English fleet threatened New France in 1711, as we have seen, the population turned again to prayer and to the Virgin Mary, but also to Jeanne Le Ber, for divine assistance. When the invading force was destroyed, Church authorities again credited the Virgin with saving the colony. The church in Quebec’s Basse-Ville, Notre-Dame-de-laVictoire, was renamed again; Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. And at Jeanne Le Ber’s funeral in 1714, Belmont reminded the crowd of what Jeanne had done. While most of them had slept, he said, “your servant, like a vigilant sentinel, prayed for her country and for the whole Church, and took the place of the sleeping.”94 Jeanne, the patron of her community, had assisted the Virgin in the protection of the colony. Public devotions such as processions, prayers, masses, and the invocation of saints helped forge a collective understanding of the crises that threatened the colony and bring about a collective response to them. Such actions not only eased people’s fears, but also provided an outlet for anxieties, foreshadowing a better future. Generally speaking, colonists invoked the universal saints of the Church in times of public crisis, and called on local saints for issues of a more personal nature such as cures. The fate of the entire colony required the unifying symbolism and intercessory power of the universal Church, but individuals might take a risk on a local holy person in a personal matter. Devotion and recourse to local intercessors remained informal throughout the French regime. At times, however, a local and informal holy person might be called upon to assist the

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great saints of the Church to bring about a desired and beneficial result. At the shrine to Saint Anne at Beaupré, for example, a pregnant woman named Marie prayed for a good delivery sometime in the 1660s. Beaupré was a very popular site of devotion, and the local priest, Thomas Morel, recorded many miracles there.95 Most of these miracles credit Saint Anne alone with the successful intervention, but this one combined the power of the universal with the local. Marie invoked not just Anne, but also the martyred Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf.96 It is not clear why she did this. Perhaps she had a personal connection of some sort with Brébeuf that she hoped to emphasize by linking him with Saint Anne. Perhaps she felt compelled to create a connection between herself and the new saints of the colony. Or, perhaps Jean de Brébeuf was actually her intercessor of first choice and Anne the helper and insurance policy. Whatever Marie’s thoughts and motivations, this dual invocation serves as a reminder of the risks associated with local sanctity, and also of the connections that local holy persons had with their immediate audiences. It is a reminder of the Catholic ability to combine great and minor saints, universal and local, according to the needs and desires of the believer. As performances of the traditions of holiness played out over time from charitable actions to the good death, and finally to intercessions and miracles, local holy persons came to occupy prominent places in the religious sentiments of the people. Jeanne Le Ber’s death on the morning of 3 October 1714 triggered an outpouring of grief in Montreal that lasted for two days as her body lay in the chapel of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, “to satisfy the devotion of the people who came to place their rosaries upon her body.”97 In sight of the place where Jeanne had spent almost twenty years of her life enclosed in her cell, the faithful and the curious of Montreal came in crowds to see and admire the holy woman they had known but rarely seen, and to make relics of their rosaries by touching them to her mortal remains. On 5 October she was presented a final time to the parish, accompanied by the clergy and “un grand concours.” A solemn funeral was sung, after which her body was taken back to the chapel and interred next to her father’s, according to her will.98 The eulogy that day praised her life and virtues, and encouraged the local faith community to trust in her sanctity and intercession. “The extraordinary life of this admirable recluse will give aid to your city and an advantage to the new world over the old which will make these recent times equal to the first age of the Church,”

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François Vachon de Belmont told the gathered crowds. Death had transformed Jeanne from a living holy person into a saint and a patron who might continue to serve the needs of the colony and its inhabitants through interventions in heaven. According to a short biography Belmont wrote in 1722, the passing of years did not diminish Jeanne’s reputation. “The odour of sanctity in which this great servant of God died was followed by a general confidence of all the people in her intercession.”99 Belmont believed that Jeanne Le Ber’s life offered proof that an evangelical religion persisted in New France even in the increasingly less mystical eighteenth century, and that the colony could compete with, and even outstrip, anything that Europe or Spanish America had to offer. “The Life of Mademoiselle Le Ber shows that this new world is still favoured enough by God to produce new examples of sanctity, and that he wishes to do in North America through Mademoiselle Le Ber, what he did in South America through the person of Ste Rose de Lima; but perhaps in a less ostentatious manner that will be manifested one day.”100 When he wrote these lines, Belmont had been a priest in Canada for over forty years and superior of the Sulpicians for more than twenty. He had seen many changes in the colony, ­contributed greatly to the development of the Sulpician Fathers in Montreal, and was nearing the end of his life. By paying tribute to Jeanne Le Ber, and to the other women he included in his 1722 collection of Lives (Marguerite Bourgeoys and two Iroquois women, Marie-Thérèse Gannant from the Sulpician mission at Montreal, and Catherine / Tekakwitha from the Jesuit mission at Sault SaintLouis), he hoped to make the needs of the colony known “in a time when it has such a great need of protection.”101 In his mind, these local saints were the defenders and advocates of the colony, its inhabitants, and its faith. Performances of sanctity presented to the public encouraged audiences to think about the ideals of their community and to act them out. Participation in ritual dramas, such as the collective request for Jeanne’s aid and the theft of her painting of the Virgin from the farm of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, bound the social group together into a community and affirmed its strength, resilience, and longevity. Holy women like Jeanne occupied prominent and important positions in public life and the collective public imagination, even when they were “invisible.” “This life alone is a miracle,” Belmont declared at Jeanne’s funeral, “a miracle reserved for the ends of the earth, for

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Canada, a miracle reserved uniquely for our days.”102 In his view, Jeanne Le Ber was intimately and uniquely connected with the colonial community and the community with her.

C o n c l u s i on Charity, both the love one bore for God and the public acts of altruistic gift-giving that stemmed from it and provided evidence of it, became the prominent trope of holiness that replaced, after 1650, the evangelical and martyrological themes that had dominated the early colony. The scene of holy performances shifted from the mission field to the domesticated spaces of French colonial settlement where female religious served as evangelical workers participating in the advancement of the faith alongside male missionaries, albeit in different spaces and through different means. In the Christian tradition, holiness, gender, and place are intimately connected – men and women staged their performances in the monastery, in the hermit’s cell, or out in the mission field, “at the ends of the earth” in Canada.103 Here, the hierarchies of European society might be partially and temporarily disrupted, but not completely overturned. Although constrained by societal expectations and male oversight, female religious acquired public roles in the colony and became important figures who contributed to the colonial project through carefully constructed reputations. As a result, female religious, especially the colonial holy women who performed the rituals and dramas of sanctity, helped to advance a language of colonialism and create scripts of religious triumphalism infused with notions of personal self-sacrifice, charity, and sanctity. Equally with men, female religious regarded Christianity as a gift that Europeans brought to peoples they regarded as lacking in true religion. Even so, the ways and means through which women might participate in the mission continued to be circumscribed by tradition and orthodoxy. If the evangelical ethos of the early colony waned toward the end of the century, gifts of holy charity continued to resonate among the settler populations where the services offered by a Marie de l’Incarnation or a Jeanne Le Ber contributed to local reputations and cults of devotion.

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5 Asceticism: Making a New Culture

On 5 February 1663, the Monday before Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, Catherine de Saint-Augustin found herself once again in prayer before the altar of the Hôtel-Dieu chapel in Quebec. As the inhabitants of New France prepared to enjoy themselves before the penitential season of Lent began, she was transported into one of the mystical flights that inflected her religious life, in which she experienced a deeply disturbing premonition.1 “I had then a considerable feeling, like an infallible certainty, that God was ready to punish the country for the sins that are committed here, and above all for the contempt that we show the Church. It seemed to me at that moment that God was very angry.” At the very same time the ground beneath her began to shake violently, and her feeling of doom resolved into a vision of destruction. “I saw in spirit four demons who occupied the four corners of the land, and they were shaking it violently, as if they wanted to turn everything right over; and without doubt they would have done so if a superior power, who gives motion to everything, had not got in the way of their will.”2 The earthquake that shook the St Lawrence valley that day was centred somewhere near the Saguenay region, northwest of Quebec, and measured about a seven on the Richter scale.3 Reports from the time indicate that it was powerful enough to flatten large hills, uproot entire forests, and alter the courses of rivers.4 Yet no one was killed or even seriously injured, and no great damage was done to buildings in nearby Quebec, in Trois-Rivières, or Montreal. Even so, the meaning for those who turned a religious eye on these events was unmistakable. What would now be considered a natural event was at the time not viewed that way at all. Rather, it was a sign that God

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was angry, and that worse would come if colonists did not mend their ways.5 On the eve of the penitential season, when the entire Catholic world was preparing for Mardi Gras festivities, God had sent New France a warning. “From that moment,” wrote the Jesuit superior Jérôme Lalemant, “a time which commonly introduces the debauches of the following day – every person gave his serious attention to the matter of his own salvation.”6 In the days and weeks that followed, a mini-religious revival took place in the colony as the penitent filled local churches and rushed to confession. A few days after the earthquake, Catherine had a second vision. This time, Saint Michael the Archangel appeared to her carrying in  his left hand a scale, the symbol of judgment he often carries in  Christian iconography, and in his right, three arrows, which Catherine believed he was about to unleash on the colony because of three sins she says were general in society: impiety, impurity, and lack of charity. Fearing a second divine assault, one that might reap a terrible cost, Catherine offered herself as a victim of divine suffering in exchange.7 In so doing, she hoped that God would spare New France and its people, and punish her in its stead. Although aftershocks continued to rattle the colony for months, spreading great fright whenever they occurred, the threatened destruction never came. Catherine, however, suffered an ever-deepening spiritual malaise, which manifested itself in the form of the demons she saw in her visions, which she tried to defeat through physical punishments inflicted upon herself. By the 1660s a rigorous asceticism had become an essential feature of her holy vocation, dedicated to the atonement and salvation of the colony itself – to changing its culture. The twenty years Catherine spent in Canada from 1648 until her death in 1668 were characterized by an ever-deepening descent into spiritual depression combined with an ever-expanding mystical and ascetic life. Although the direct encounters with the presence of God that she regularly experienced took place behind the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu, shrouded in the formal secrecy of ecclesiastical humility and obedience to superiors, Catherine nevertheless slowly acquired a public reputation for extraordinary holiness.8 Her prayers on behalf of the colony, and her voluntary sufferings, both physical and spiritual, undertaken on behalf of its inhabitants, lay at the heart of a holy performance that was officially secret, but spiritually vital. She embraced an extraordinary brand of charity that she believed would assuage God’s anger and rescue colonists from their sins

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through ascetic acts she inflicted on her own body. Hers was a vocation of charity enhanced by often-violent physical self-sacrifice, which she pursued for her own salvation but dedicated to the reform of the colony as a whole. Performances such as Catherine’s drove a message of repentance and change promoted by many contemporary religious enthusiasts, and stood behind an ambitious project to build a perfect post-Tridentine society in New France.

W r it in g a Holy Li fe Mère Marie-Catherine de Saint-Augustin was about to be elected superior of the Hôtel-Dieu for the first time when she died at the age of thirty-six on 8 May 1668. Over the following days crowds of people gathered at the Hôtel-Dieu to view her remains and mourn her passing.9 Through the convent grill colonists paid their respects to this local religious hero. Over the succeeding years miracles were reported and an informal cult of belief in her sanctity developed locally and in France, especially among the Augustinians. “This dear mother who died in the odour of sanctity,” the annaliste of the HôtelDieu de Québec later wrote, “was universally mourned by the entire community and all the colony, as a soul who drew down great graces upon this poor country.”10 Building on this outpouring of emotion, hagiographers produced the first accounts of Catherine’s life, death, and virtues very soon after her death. In September of 1668, Marie de l’Incarnation wrote to her son praising Catherine’s great religiosity, especially her charity, patience, and humility.11 The following month, the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu, Mère Marie de Saint-Bonaventure, completed a letter about Catherine destined for Augustinians in France. The Jesuit superior, François Le Mercier, published this letter in the Relation of 1668 followed by accounts of several miracles and marvels that had occurred during Catherine’s life, and passages drawn from her spiritual journal, thus ensuring that Catherine’s reputation reached a wider reading audience.12 Very soon thereafter, the Bishop of Quebec, Mgr de Laval, commissioned Catherine’s former confessor, the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau, then in Paris, to compose a fulllength holy biography. Although originally intended only for the Augustinians, this lengthy and detailed account was published throughout France in 1671.13 Ragueneau’s work is the first complete and independent hagiography written in the collaborative style to be produced about a holy

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figure from Canada. Rich and detailed, it narrates Catherine’s spiritual development as a nursing sister in New France. It is one of the few biographies about a non-Jesuit local saint to be written by a person who actually spent significant amounts of time in Canada and knew the country well. By contrast, Claude Martin, who wrote Marie de l’Incarnation’s biography a few years later, never set foot in Canada. Other biographies of colonial holy women, such as Vachon de Belmont’s account of Jeanne Le Ber, or even the Lives that Marie de l’Incarnation wrote about three of her sisters in religion, lack the depth and detail of Ragueneau’s biography, and in the latter case, the authoritative voice of the male ecclesiastic. What makes this biography particularly valuable, however, is the  manner in which it was written. Ragueneau drew heavily on Catherine’s own spiritual journal, which she kept as a record of her  mystical experiences, and on letters she wrote to him after he returned to France in 1662. As a result, the text preserves on a significant scale Catherine’s own voice and perspective on her religious vocation. Since her original journal and letters have been lost, however, it is necessary to ask to what degree Ragueneau may have edited or altered these texts for public and ecclesiastical consumption. Comparable examples of “collaborative” lives from the time suggest that Ragueneau likely altered Catherine’s writings very little. Surviving manuscripts of Marie de l’Incarnation’s writings, for example, show that Claude Martin did not significantly alter his mother’s words in the biography he wrote or in the edition of her letters he published in France following her death in 1672. Although he, at times, took pains to structure her writings, altered words here and there, added phrases of his own where he felt explanation was needed, and omitted some passages, he made very few substantive changes to the original text. According to Natalie Zemon Davis, who has compared Marie’s originals with Martin’s published versions, the latter’s editing was “restrained.”14 Likewise, it is possible to assert with considerable confidence that the quotations Ragueneau preserved in Catherine’s Vie differ only in detail from what Catherine actually wrote, and likely believed and wanted known, about her lifelong performance of the traditions of sanctity. Although certainly a collaborative work, Ragueneau’s Life of Catherine reveals the voice of its subject with considerable clarity, and so something of her own perceptions of her holy performance can be gleaned by reading this narrative, and particularly the

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extensive quotations from Catherine’s own spiritual journal. Nevertheless, it is important to bear in mind that the quotations that survive, and the stories they tell, never would have been included in the book had they not contributed to what Ragueneau considered an orthodox performance of holiness.15 Thus, while Ragueneau’s editing of Catherine’s journal may, like Martin’s of Marie’s, have been restrained, he nevertheless exerted editorial adjudication over what reached the reading public.16 It is unlikely that Catherine would have complained about this. She, like other mystics of the time, no doubt recognized the need for clerical control to ensure legitimacy and acceptance, not just locally, but also within the universal categories of Catholic sanctity. No small part of any performance was to mould the self to existing traditions and doctrines of the Church. It seems, for example, that Ragueneau chose to downplay Catherine’s worldly activities in favour of her otherworldly mysticism, perhaps to avoid accusations that her cloister was not strict enough or that she had stepped outside of the sanctioned boundaries of female religious activity. Neither Catherine nor Ragueneau was a religious radical. Indeed, like the vast majority of Christian holy biography, the Life of Catherine describes what in many ways was a conservative performance in that it largely conformed to existing categories and expectations of holiness within the hierarchical Church. The author of the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu claims that even after her death Catherine mystically approved of Ragueneau’s book as criticisms of it mounted in Paris.17 What comes through clearly in the text is Ragueneau’s high regard for his close spiritual friend, and his conviction that she was a saint in heaven, in the Church and, of course, in New France.

C at h e r in e d e S a i nt-Augusti n Marie-Catherine Simon de Longpré was born in the town of SaintSauveur-le-Vicomte in Normandy on 3 May 1632. She was the daughter of Jacques Simon de Longpré, a native of Cherbourg in Normandy, a lawyer and minor nobleman, and Françoise Jourdan, the daughter of the civil administrator of Saint-Sauveur. A member of the local elite, she was raised primarily by her maternal grandparents who themselves were, according to Ragueneau, extremely pious. When she was only two years old, her grandfather had a premonition of his granddaughter’s future sanctity, and from a very young

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age Catherine demonstrated a holy precociousness and inclination toward the religious life.18 She would later write in her spiritual journal that by the age of three and a half she felt herself touched by God and experienced a great desire to do God’s will. A meeting with a Jesuit priest left her with the powerful impression that those who suffered were in the best position to find salvation.19 At the age of ten she pledged her soul to the Virgin Mary in a written donation that she signed in her own blood.20 Shortly thereafter she joined the Augustinian nursing sisters of Bayeux, where she first expressed a desire to go to Canada. The convention of female sanctity in vogue at the time stipulated that holiness developed slowly over the course of a lifetime and did not generally involve radical transformations or profound conversion experiences. For instance, Marie de l’Incarnation, who came to cloistered religion relatively late in life, maintained that she had cultivated an interior spirituality from early childhood, and regarded her entry into religion as the culmination of a lifelong progression not a new or sudden disposition.21 François Vachon de Belmont declared that Jeanne Le Ber (1662–1714) had “sucked piety with milk.”22 Doctrinally, holiness was (and is) considered to be already present in those selected by God as his servants; lying dormant at birth, but developing over the course of a lifetime to a predetermined end. Shortly after Catherine de Saint-Augustin died, Mère SaintBonaventure wrote: “Her perfect responsiveness to all of God’s designs with regard to her, and the free entrance that she had, from her earliest infancy, given to that adorable spirit that she might become the tyrant over her self-love, gained for her a great facility in the practice of the most substantial virtues. Indeed, one would have said that they had been born with her, so perfectly did grace and nature act in concert in that dear soul.”23 Shortly after joining the Augustinians around the age of twelve, Catherine undertook another vow, which she again attempted to sign with her own blood. This time, she promised God and the Virgin Mary that someday she would go to live and die in Canada. Before she could sign, however, the mistress of novices interceded and put a stop to this early expression of an ascetic will that would only fully develop after several years in the colony.24 This vow was necessary because Catherine’s choice of vocation had not gone unchallenged. Her own father, although pious according to Ragueneau, feared losing the “dearest of all his children” to

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what must have seemed to him to be the mortmain of Canada. He forbade her to go, and even resorted to the law to thwart her ambitions by challenging her commitment to the fledgling colony in court. Parental opposition to the desires of a cherished daughter upon whom God has laid a prior claim is not an uncommon motif in Christian hagiography.25 Like the heroines in the saints’ stories Catherine had likely read as a child, she remained resolute in her choice, and sought God’s help to convince her father. By making a vow to God to go to Canada, she successfully transformed her teenaged stubbornness into a question of obedience to God. Her father could not stand in the way of a vow made to a higher power. Her strategy proved successful. Our Lord allowed that this good Gentleman should fall ill from grief and melancholy at this time. He asked to see a [Jesuit] Relation, newly arrived from Canada, which spoke of the death of Father Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit massacred by the Iroquois the previous year 1647 [sic] … This father, beaten down by sadness, was suddenly seized by an undoubtedly mysterious reverie and stupor during which he was inspired and strongly carried to allow our Catherine to make this great voyage.26 Inspired by what he had read, Catherine’s father recognized the holiness of his daughter’s chosen vocation and changed his mind. Paul Ragueneau’s narrative draws a direct link between the generous Père Jogues, who gave his life for God in Iroquoia, and the “généreux sacrifice” of Père de Longpré, who gave his daughter to Canada in order to continue the work of the fallen martyrs.27 The symmetry of these sorts of narrative devices and scenarios, repeated seemingly ad nauseam in hagiographic discourse, are banal in themselves, reducing complexity and conflict to stock elements and repeated narrative motifs; but when embodied, they become the frame for a real life.28 Through her vow, Catherine physically and symbolically committed herself to her vocation by imitating familiar examples of the Christian saints she had read about as a child. The actor asserted herself over the character of the saint, and the pious fiction became the narrative of her life. Her act was a performance of will that expressed her deep desire to be a saint, and confirmed Canada as the place where that ambition would be realized. By her vows, Catherine physically and symbolically inserted herself into the narrative of Christian holiness.

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Just one obstacle remained. At fifteen years of age, Catherine was still too young to enter religious life legally. In the spring of 1648, sailing schedules did not permit a delay until after May 3, her sixteenth birthday. Therefore, by special dispensation of the bishop and of the superior of the Augustinians, Catherine was granted permission to take her final vows as a nun a few days early in the port city of Nantes, just before she embarked for Quebec. Hagiographies down to the present have persistently highlighted her young age as evidence of the extraordinary quality of her divine calling, yet it was not entirely unusual that a novice should enter religion before the required age under special circumstances.29 What was unusual was that Catherine was given permission to go to Canada while still so young. Generally, the religious women who went to Canada at this time were in their late twenties or even thirties. Marie de l’Incarnation was already forty when she set out in 1639. Marguerite Bourgeoys was thirty-three when she embarked for Montreal in 1653, and Marie de Saint-Bonaventure, Catherine’s superior in Quebec, was a relatively young twenty-four when she arrived in Quebec with the first Augustinians in 1639. Even the Ursuline Marie de Saint-Joseph, who entered religion at the age of fourteen, did not go to Canada until she was twenty-three. That Catherine at such a young age would voluntarily accept, indeed insist upon, a virtual exile to a place considered by many in France to be beyond the pale must have been viewed by observers at the time as either extraordinarily pious or astonishingly reckless. Ragueneau writes: The great desires that she had to suffer and undertake, for the love of God and the salvation of souls – everything that presented itself to her courage and her zeal – caused her to take the resolution to leave her family and friends, and France itself, to go to Canada of which she had no knowledge, but where she knew there was much to suffer and much to fear; but she did not fear anything, being uniquely carried there by the love of God; which ought to accompany her there and in which she placed all her confidence.30 What she found in Canada would certainly test her courage and her confidence, but it would also help her to continue along the road of  imposing her will upon the traditional narrative of Christian sanctity.

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5.1  Catherine de Saint-Augustin, attributed to Abbé Hughes Pommier, c. 1668, Collection des Augustines de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec.

T h e C o l ony Although the colony is everpresent in Catherine’s vocation as both a source of and object for her suffering, she unfortunately wrote little about it directly (at least in those parts of her journal and letters that Ragueneau chose to preserve), concentrating instead on her spiritual experiences. This is in significant contrast to Marie de l’Incarnation, whose letters from New France are filled with news, but express a reluctance to speak of spiritual things, which she reserved for a separate text demanded by her son and completed in 1654.31 Even so, when examined in the context of other sources, the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu and the Jesuit Relations especially, even the most

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religious and mystical of Catherine’s writings conspire to convey the presence of the colonial frontier and its influence upon her, and give an indication of the public role she acquired as a local holy woman both during and after her life. After a perilous voyage across the Atlantic punctuated by close encounters with icebergs and bouts of infection, which almost ended Catherine’s vocation before it began, she and two companions, Mère Anne de l’Assomption and Mère Jeanne Thomas de Sainte-Agnès, arrived at Quebec on 19 August 1648. Their party was welcomed with great fanfare and enthusiasm by the population, and especially by the sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec. “From the very first interview,” Mère Saint-Bonaventure later recalled, “we esteemed her a precious treasure for this house.”32 Catherine’s religious commitment reflected the spiritual enthusiasm and millennialism current in France in the mid-seventeenth century and the spirit of post-Tridentine experimentation that gripped the early colony. The most committed investors, colonists, and colonizers in these early years were very often priests, missionaries, nuns, and lay religious enthusiasts; in France, les dévot(e)s turned their religious enthusiasm, attention, and worldly fortunes to the colony’s needs.33 Eschatological obsessions among them helped foster a belief that the new world might be a new Israel and the promised millennial kingdom might rise in New France.34 The devoted religious men and women who set out to colonize and sanctify Canada conceived of the colony as a purified realm, separate from the strife and religious dissension of Old France. Despite her enthusiasm and commitment, however, it is not difficult to imagine the fear Catherine must have felt as she disembarked on the banks of the St Lawrence for the first time, knowing she would likely never go home again. The cumulative effect of miracles and marvels in hagiographic discourse often has the ability to reduce the extraordinary to the mundane through the invocation of centuries of models and traditions, but for those who lived it and for their live audiences, the performance of holiness was very often astounding. Ragueneau later noted, “it was necessary that a girl have an invincible courage and an extraordinary strength to not fear the dangers of this land, and to love Canada.”35 From among the three hospitalières who arrived in Quebec that August day, the Jesuit Superior, Jérôme Lalemant, who met the ship at the landing, singled out Catherine, and commented on the “zeal which led her to desire

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Crosses with love,” marvelling that at such a young age she would voluntarily insist upon a virtual exile in New France.36 For Catherine, Canada offered the opportunity to become a saint. Mère Saint-Bonaventure writes: “She also had an ardent desire to make of herself a great saint; and it was only for this reason that she so desired Canada, having left behind for this reason all the comforts that she possessed so fully in France.”37 As we saw in the previous chapter, identification with New France, and a determination to remain in the colony despite all dangers and obstacles was a prominent feature of female religious vocations in the colony. For Catherine, as for many of the other missionaries and nuns who came to New France, Canada, with its dangers both physical and spiritual, was an ascetic undertaking. The country itself took a central role in their religious vocations. In 1648 the Hôtel-Dieu had been in existence for only nine years, yet it was already an important and significant institution in Quebec. Very early on in the colony’s history, officials in Paris had banned purely contemplative religious orders from the colony, believing such institutions to be useless for the advancement of settlements and little more than a drain on the colony’s meagre resources.38 When the first three nursing sisters arrived in Quebec in 1639 to establish the Hôtel-Dieu, they were treated to a lavish welcome. The governor of New France, the principal men of the colony, and the population of the town all went down to the dock to greet the new arrivals with rituals of public celebration. Le Jeune described the much-anticipated event in terms that suggest a transplantation of old France into the new. “When we were informed that a bark was about to arrive at Kebec bearing a college of Jesuits, an establishment of hospital nuns and a convent of Ursulines, the news seemed at first almost a dream.” Psalms were sung and cannon fired before the nuns were led away to the Jesuit church where the Te Deum (the hymn of thanksgiving) was sung. Following these rituals of welcome and thanksgiving, the nuns were conducted “to the houses set apart for them.” The following day they were given a tour of the Sillery réduction, and on the third day after their arrival, the nuns “entered their seclusion,” the sick were brought to the hospital, and they began their work.39 The arrival of the first nursing sisters coincided with an outbreak of disease among French and native populations, and the sisters

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were immediately overwhelmed with work. Le Jeune reports that between the months of August and the following May more than a hundred patients entered the hospital.40 In the spring of 1640, the nuns moved their hospital from Quebec to Sillery to be closer to the community there. The move took place in December even though the hospital building in Sillery was far from ready. The wind whipped through large gaps in the walls and snow accumulated inside. The cold was intense. “What we suffered in this time of cold and misery it is not possible to express,” the annaliste of the Hôtel-Dieu later wrote.41 Soon, all the sisters, including two who had arrived from France that year, fell ill from exhaustion and the Jesuits had to take over care of the patients. Despite an increase in the grant allotted to  the nuns by their foundress and financial backer, the duchesse d’Aiguillon, conditions in the hospital did not improve. The sisters came to depend upon the native population for survival. They were given a share of the winter hunt, and they purchased a goat for milk and cheese in the hope of nursing the recently arrived Mère Jeanne de Sainte-Marie back to health. Nevertheless, Mère Sainte-Marie, described as weak of constitution and unsuited to life in New France, died in March of 1641 at the age of twenty-eight, followed on the same night by the goat.42 Nor did conditions in the hospital noticeably improve over the next two years. In 1642, the sisters were forced to adopt a new grey habit to replace the white they were accustomed to wearing in France because in Canada it showed the dirt and blood too easily. Eventually, the hardships of living at Sillery, especially the increased threat of Iroquois attacks, became too great for even grey habits to disguise and the sisters moved back to Quebec. Less than a year later in 1645, no longer toiling directly among the native population, the sisters put aside their grey habits and resumed wearing white, symbolically marking their return to a European environment.43 It was this hospital that Catherine and her companions joined in 1648, and although the house was on a firmer foundation by then, the newcomers, like their predecessors, immediately faced the difficult challenges of colonial life. Their arrival anticipated by only a few months the dispersal of the Huron by the Iroquois. In the summer of 1650, Huron migrants descended upon the town, and established their camp just outside the gates of the hospital.44 In a letter dated 29 September, the superior, Marie de Saint-Bonaventure, told a Monsieur N. of Paris: “our little ward for sick people is full of poor

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French soldiers wounded in battle with the Hiroquois.” Meanwhile, so busy were the Jesuits attending to the needs of the refugees that the sisters of the hospital were required to fill in at the convent gate to hear the prayers and confessions of the Christian Hurons.45 From her arrival, Catherine’s day-to-day life was filled with the duties of  a  nurse, missionary, and aid to Indigenous and French alike. It was only in 1658 – ten years after her arrival in the colony – that Catherine experienced the mystical call that would define her religious vocation and holy performance, and give spiritual meaning to the temptations to abandon her vocation and the colony that continually plagued her. The following year she formally offered herself to the divine as a victim, and from then on, she experienced a deep and profound mystical life, which she recorded in the journal her confessor commanded she keep.

A s c e t ic is m a n d A s ceti c Acts Catherine’s mysticism and ascetic vocation grew slowly over time following her arrival in Quebec in 1648. In response to the challenges posed by the colony and the temptations she suffered against her vocation, she undertook ever greater devotions that developed from prayers and meditations, including a month-long engagement with the Jesuit’s Spiritual Exercises, to spiritual and physical mortifications of all kinds. Virtually from the time of her arrival, she suffered terrible temptations to flee and return to France. In an undated letter addressed to the superior of the Augustinian motherhouse at Bayeux (who also happened to be her aunt), Catherine admitted her struggle: “In truth, if God did not preserve me from loving my creature comforts too much, all the good things that you tell me [about life in France] would only give me the desire to taste it.” The religious vocation she embraced over the twenty years she spent as a nursing sister in Quebec often seems dedicated to keeping at bay the forces of evil that appeared to her to populate the land and, at the same time, to resisting the temptation to return home. The demons that she began to see everywhere represented, in a way that was all too real for her, the sins of the land, the country, and its inhabitants. She seems to have lapsed into a spiritual depression, which she tried to combat through strictly regimented work in the hospital and increasingly mystical and ascetic devotions and encounters. “Her mortifications were continual on all her senses,” Ragueneau writes,

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“on all her powers, on her body and her soul, on her spirit and her will. The more that violent and continual temptations obsessed her, caused by the infestation of an infinite number of demons from every side who wanted to make sin rule in her, the more her constancy was invincible.”46 She wore bracelets covered with iron points that pierced her skin as she worked in the hospital. She slept little at night and never took rests during the day. When she did sleep it was on a hard board. In winter she would bury herself in the snow to defeat her temptations. “She combined the austerity of fasts with bloody disciplines, and all the mortifications she could.” She would often tear at her body to root out the cause of a sin of which she believed herself guilty. All the while, her internal struggles with demons, and long days and nights spent in prayer, took their toll on her physical health. But, says Ragueneau, “she was always victorious by the grace of Jesus-Christ.”47 Asceticism has been a part of Christian holiness and community from the earliest days of the Church.48 It features prominently in the “flight to the desert” undertaken by holy men and women in the third and fourth centuries in the Christian Near East. Institutionalized and formalized within the monastic movement that grew out of  the flight to the desert, it spread throughout Christendom and enjoyed periodic revivals among the dedicated holy, especially during periods of religious flux and reform. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, plagued by schisms, religious wars, and persecutions but also inflected with the spirit of both Protestant and Catholic reforms, witnessed a revival of extraordinary religious practice when doctrine and the manner of one’s faith again became a source of public dispute, and often a question of life and death. France, especially, experienced the grip of a religious enthusiasm that overwhelmed social and political life. The devout religious culture of seventeenth-century France had more in common with sixteenth-century religiosity than with eighteenth-century rationalism and enlightenment. A strong penitential streak, which had endured in French society from the wars of religion and even the late-­medieval tradition, was evident in the religious motivations for overseas settlement and conquest, and the religious acts of evangelism and charity that followed missionaries and nuns overseas. The seventeenth century was a high-water mark for holy performances not just in

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New France, but in France too, where hagiographic writing enjoyed a revival in popularity among reading audiences.49 While Canada may in part have been the source of Catherine’s spiritual malaise, it also became the object toward which she dedicated her suffering. Theologian Ghislaine Boucher marks 1659 as a turning point in Catherine’s life, the moment when she left behind her worldly vocation as a nurse and missionary, and took up a mystical vocation of spiritual victimhood. From then on, she became “jailer, host and victim,” to the demons she believed God sent to her, but she also experienced visions of the divine, of Jesus, of various saints of the Church, and after 1662, of the martyred Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf, whom she regarded as her celestial spiritual advisor.50 On 18 July 1663, Catherine wrote in her journal that the former missionary had appeared to her in a vision asking her to help the Jesuits in their work. He told her he was greatly pained to see the country for which he had given his life “now a land of abomination and impiety.” “Sister Saint-Augustin! Have pity on us! Help us I pray you!”51 She agreed. Theorist Gavin Flood and historian Michel de Certeau both argue that mystical encounters are essentially dialogical. The holy person’s identity develops over time in conversations between the self and the divine, and between tradition and community.52 Two years later, Catherine says Brébeuf presented her again with the choice to continue to suffer for God or to return to a more ordinary vocation. When she prevaricated, responding that she wanted what God wanted, her answer was refused. “Absolutely he wanted me to make the choice myself.” She then committed herself to suffer for others, asking that in return her soul be entirely purified, and that all her sins, past and future, be forgiven.53 This engagement with Brébeuf emphasizes how suffering was often a choice for the mystic. Theorist Michel Foucault argues that ascetic acts are primarily technologies of the self, which “permit individuals to effect … a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conducts and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”54 The holy person seeks apatheia – passionlessness, or perfect indifference. The aim of the ascetic is to suppress desire caused by temptation, and thereby avoid bodily impurity altogether. To seek indifference in all things was to seek to do the will of

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God and to suppress the individual will, which allowed the self to be made into a sacrifice to God. Asceticism, however, is not purely a subjective or individual practice; nor does it necessarily seek to destroy the personal will. Rather, it is deeply rooted in society and tradition, and often seems a tool for asserting the will over the self and over society. Ascetic practices discipline the self, certainly; but they also take place within social contexts that give them a broader meaning. According to Flood, the ascetic self “shapes the narrative of [a] life to the narrative of tradition.” In this way, the ascete remains a part of society, acting on it and attempting to shape it according to a religious ideal even as she tries to separate herself from it and shape herself according to traditions of sanctity. Superficially anti-social behaviour acquires social meaning and import.55 By removing themselves physically from society, practitioners – both female and male – paradoxically gain a prominent place in local cultural and social life, becoming models and examples for others and forceful critics within the frame of long-held traditions. Although asceticism shapes the self, it does not, as historian Peter Brown discovered, take place in “splendid isolation,” but rather within “a world of shared values.”56 In shaping the self, the holy person claims a certain authority and special knowledge to shape the society she lives in and the people with whom she engages. Even though Catherine practised her devotions and experienced her visions behind the high walls of the Hôtel-Dieu, she nevertheless remained a part of her wider community and of a tradition that granted social meaning to her actions. Her asceticism remained a choice and a dialogue. Catherine’s religious vocation achieved its greatest expression in the physical and psychological sufferings she voluntarily undertook, making herself a victim in the place of others. Often, Ragueneau wrote, God would give her knowledge of sins committed by others, and of the resistance that others posed to God’s grace and justice, so that she might offer herself for their salvation, and for that of the country. Bearing “upon herself punishments which had been prepared for others,” she volunteered to bring outcasts back into society and rescue sinners from purgatory.57 In one instance, she promised to procure masses and offer monthly confessions in return for divine assurances that all the sick who died in the Hôtel-Dieu would receive God’s mercy.58 In another, a possessed girl, Barbe Hallay, was placed in her care. Marie de l’Incarnation reports that a great battle ensued

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between Catherine and the demon possessing the girl, a battle from which Catherine emerged battered and bruised, but victorious. Thanks to Catherine’s efforts, Barbe Hallay rejoined the sanctioned social and faith communities of the colony.59 Slowly, soul by saved soul, Catherine’s community in New France grew. Even so, her temptations against her vocation continued so that in 1666 she decided to undertake the Jesuits’ Spiritual Exercises in an effort to determine what it was that God wanted of her.60 The Exercises were not for Jesuits alone. They were applicable to anyone needing to make a choice under the inspiration of God, assuming that person was a believing Catholic and committed to the exercises in a spirit of good will.61 Catherine describes how, at this time, both Jean de Brébeuf and the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, appeared to her in a vision and agreed to guide her in her meditations. Loyola promised, “that in this practice [you] will find a hidden treasure and strong arms with which to combat the demons.”62 The first week of her retreat was harrowing, punctuated by visions and the assaults of demons, but by the eighth day she believed she knew what God wanted of her. He wanted her to serve him by suffering, to seek divine justice, carry many crosses, and live like a dead person.63 Her vocation had been confirmed once again. Most of her work on behalf of sinners and for divine justice in the colony took place spiritually as she knelt in prayer for hours on end in the community chapel, or during long periods of work in the hospital. The Annales de l’Hôtel Dieu relate how Catherine cured both the body and the soul of a Protestant heretic, a patient in the hospital, by pulverizing bone relics of Jean de Brébeuf and mixing them into the man’s water.64 The cure returned the man to the social and spiritual communities of the colony. In 1666 Bishop Laval insistently asked her to pray for someone whom he refused to name, but who nevertheless urgently required her aid. While in prayer on the day of Mary Magdalene (July 22) around two o’clock in the morning, she had a vision of Paul Le Jeune, the former missionary who had recently died in France. He, too, asked that she pray for the same unnamed person, and gave her to understand that she would render a great service by her efforts, even though she would suffer greatly and the sinner was unlikely to  repent. Catherine nevertheless abandoned herself completely to the task, upon which she immediately began to feel the afflictions of the demons that for some time had left her alone. She experienced

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sentiments of impiety, impurity, and hatred for God, as well as a powerful aversion toward her own vocation. Despite these temptations, she developed an overwhelming desire to achieve the total conversion of this sinner who obstinately refused the grace of God. In her journal, she described the mortifications she undertook. The second day of January (1667), while saying Matins with the community, I was so violently tempted that I was almost in total despair. After Matins, I turned against myself, and I promised Our Lord that as soon as I could leave the choir I would discipline this miserable rebel body to the law of the spirit. My intention was to strip naked, jump into the snow and bury myself completely and to remain there for such a long time that I would be happy for once. As I was getting ready to execute my plan, it occurred to me that I should not do it without permission. In the meantime until I could ask, I contented myself to stand in the snow up to my waist and to stay there for the length of time it took to say the Miserere twice. The rest of the night I was able to rest a little better than usual.65 For the most part, Catherine suffered for those who were outside society in one way or another. She offered herself for someone who was called to the religious life but was having trouble remaining faithful to her vocation. On another occasion, she converted a local man who had been experimenting in witchcraft.66 She took care of souls, physically as a part of her duties as a hospital nun, but also spiritually in the mystical sufferings she undertook according to what she believed was God’s will. She suffered for people she had known personally and, in some cases, for people she did not know at all, for people in the colonies and others in France, thus linking spiritually the two sides of the Atlantic.67 The community for which Catherine suffered also extended beyond the living to the realm of the dead. In her journal, she described how she suffered for souls in purgatory so that they might enter heaven that much sooner.68 Purgatory was a late-medieval development in Catholic theology that posited a place less distant than heaven or hell where the living could maintain some contact with the dead, and where penitential suffering could continue after death. The doctrine of purgatory, reinforced at Trent, meant that, to a degree, Christianity became a “cult of living friends in the service of dead ones.”69

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Catherine’s patronage linked the faithful departed to those left behind, and because many of the souls in purgatory for which she suffered had lived in France, she also showed how religious suffering in the colony could benefit the metropole as well. Even so, there was always a risk that the devil might try to trick the holy, and it was believed at the time that women were particularly susceptible to diabolical wiles. While at Mass on 2 April 1661, a Saturday, Catherine had a vision of Jesus. At first kind and filled with love for her, this “Jésus prétendu” (so-called Jesus) soon changed and became accusing and threatening. “He told me that the shortest and most assured route to my own damnation was that very one which I was on.” The vision briefly caused her to question her vocation and doubt her mystical visions. But, she later recalled, she soon began to suspect its authenticity. When communion was offered to her, this false Jesus disappeared.70 Incidents such as this one reveal some of the lingering doubts that plagued Catherine and encouraged in her a strict adherence to orthodoxy. She may have wondered how someone could become holy in a land infested with demons, and whether her vocation was really inspired by God or the Devil. It also shows the frequently deep conservatism of mysticism. Mystics on both sides of the Atlantic adhered strongly to established and approved protocols. Catherine tempered her mortifications, seeking permission from her confessors before engaging in more extreme actions like standing for hours in the snow and freezing cold. Ascetics certainly strove to reject temporal power and the ambitions that go with it, but in no way did Catherine rebel against the Church itself or even reject earthly offices as obligations of service. Indeed, she served as dépositaire (treasurer) of her community and, had she not died in 1668, would likely have been elected superior. She fervently sought acceptance in the universal Church by striving to have her religious experiences recognized as orthodox.71 As a result, her writings express an instantly recognizable brand of ascetic spirituality that adheres to long Catholic traditions. She mortified herself because she believed God willed it and Church authorities sanctioned it. Catherine maintained her cloister throughout her religious life, wrote only for her confessors, maintained a strict humility, and did not (overtly, at least) seek public audiences. Despite these efforts, Marie de l’Incarnation wrote what appears at first glance to be a critique of Catherine’s vocation not long after

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the holy woman died. While Marie praised Catherine’s religious virtues, she regarded her visions and ascetic acts as “extraordinary things, about which I have nothing to say.” In comparing her own vocation to Catherine’s, she declared that virtues and work were “more admirable than miracles.”72 Catherine, however, was careful to adhere closely to the oversight of her confessors and the official secrecy that enveloped her vocation. Indeed, in the context of midseventeenth-century female religious vocations, it was Marie de l’Incarnation’s performance that may well have appeared the more revolutionary. While Catherine cultivated a careful humility, Marie was a public figure in the colony. She largely abandoned the mysticism of her younger years when she went to Canada in 1639, where she took on a role of active leadership in conjunction with a writing career that saw her works distributed widely. News about the colony, opinions on public affairs, and suggestions for improvement dominate the letters she wrote to her son and others. Historian Marie-Florine Bruneau suggests that Marie de l’Incarnation abandoned her mysticism in New France not to conform to a more modest vocation, but rather to distinguish herself from the great number of ascetics and mystics already in the colony and thereby enhance her power.73 While it might be tempting to regard Marie’s assessment of Catherine’s vocation as a critique, perhaps it ought to be considered more as a defence of her own unusual vocation. Seventeenth-century devotional culture in France and Canada provided multiple roads to sanctification for ambitious holy men and women as long as reports of them were carefully couched in the language and traditions of Catholic sanctity.

As c e t ic is m a n d t h e Coloni al Publi c Firmly ensconced behind the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu, Catherine engaged in ever-greater feats of asceticism in the 1660s as her mystical experiences of the divine grew more numerous and she came to regard herself as a victim for Canada and its people. Perhaps nothing was a greater threat to the preservation of orthodoxy in a holy performance than the risk of losing humility, of developing an inflated sense of self as a result of believing oneself a saint, and seeking public audiences and adulations. To combat this risk, confessors often insisted that strict secrecy cloak such holy performances. Only after the death of the holy woman, in the vita composed by her confessor,

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could the full “truth” of what the ascetic had achieved be safely revealed. Beyond the circle of her confessors and the bishop, then, no one was to know about Catherine’s extraordinary vocation. Even the superior of the Hôtel-Dieu, Mère Saint-Bonaventure, claimed in the circular letter she wrote shortly after Catherine’s death that she knew nothing of the great temptations her sister had suffered or the visions she had experienced. “We were well aware that her bodily weaknesses were great and constant, and we saw that she bore them like a saint … But we were surprised, after her death, to learn that for sixteen years God had been trying that brave Soul by periods of aridity and temptation, seasons of spiritual abandonment and extreme destitution.”74 Nevertheless, clues in the sources reveal that knowledge of Catherine’s religious feats may not have been quite as secret as such rhetoric claims. A passage from the same letter in which Mère SaintBonaventure denied knowledge of Catherine’s trials seems to suggest that the opposite may have been closer to the truth. “We know that she spared no pains when an opportunity offered to win a soul to Our Lord, either by her prayers or her mortifications – even to the point of giving herself up to divine justice in the quality of a victim. And in truth, God did not spare her, but made her feel the weight of his arm, terribly punishing in her the sins of those for whom she made a sacrifice of herself.”75 It is difficult to image that the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu could have remained ignorant of the spiritual trials endured by one of their own within the close-knit community and confined living space of the convent. Word of Catherine’s extraordinary devotions also slowly leaked beyond the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu.76 Marie de l’Incarnation certainly knew at least some of what was happening at the Hôtel-Dieu, even though she declined to publicly name the recipient of the divine visions she discussed in the letters she wrote following the earthquake of 1663. In a letter dated 20 August of that year she mentions “a person of proven virtue who has frequent communications with God.”77 Only after Catherine died in 1668 did Marie reveal who this person was, in a letter to her son dated 7 September 1668. “You asked me in one of your letters, who the person was that had a certain vision I wrote of in letters to France after the earthquake. You perhaps believed it was I. No, God does not lead me by that way. The person in question having died this year, I shall name her to you. It was Mère de Saint-Augustin, a Hospitalière.”

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Marie goes on to say that Pierre Chastellain, who became Catherine’s confessor after Ragueneau left Canada in 1662, had in fact shown her parts of Catherine’s spiritual journal. Moreover, he had told her not just about Catherine’s visions of the earthquake, but also about bruises and wounds the nursing sister had received on other occasions – in combat with the demon that possessed Barbe Hallay, for example.78 Some knowledge at least of what Catherine suffered behind the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu clearly reached the wider religious community. Marie was not, however, the only one to learn of Catherine’s vision of the earthquake. Two others, the Jesuit superior Jérôme Lalemant and a visiting Jesuit Father, Charles Simon, also knew of and wrote about what had happened. In the Relation of 1663, Jérôme Lalemant expressed great concern over the earthquake’s physical repercussions on the colony and spiritual effects on colonists. He discussed Catherine’s first vision alongside that of an Algonquin woman who had also reportedly received a divine warning of what was to come.79 His account seems to stand more or less independently from the ­others, although he was clearly familiar with Catherine’s vision and willing to make it known to readers of the Relations, and also to colonists who no doubt read or heard about the contents of his annual report. Meanwhile, Simon’s account shows considerable similarity with that of Marie de l’Incarnation, and each closely resembles what Catherine herself wrote in her spiritual journal. Simon claims, without naming names, that he learned of these visions first-hand, from the one who had them. While it is perhaps not entirely surprising that Marie de l’Incarnation should have had some knowledge of what was happening among the Augustinians, the same cannot be said for Simon. This missionary spent less than a year in Canada, from November 1662 until the following September, and had no known relationship with Catherine. It is unlikely that a recently arrived priest, even a Jesuit, would receive permission to speak with a holy woman whose mystical vocation was, officially at least, a closely guarded secret. Reason would suggest, then, that Simon, the inexperienced missionary, had relied upon the prodigious knowledge of the aging Ursuline matriarch in producing his account of the earthquake.80 There is, however, another possible explanation for Simon’s seemingly intimate knowledge of Catherine’s secret mystical life. He may

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have acquired his information by way of Ragueneau, then living in France, whose brother, François, translated Simon’s account into Latin before sending it on to Jesuit officials in Rome. It was François’s Latin version that found its way into the 1663 Relation. Whatever the case, the end result was that someone with no obvious connection with Catherine or the Hôtel-Dieu learned of her visions and reported them in public. Simon, of course, refrained from naming Catherine, and, interestingly, a translation error in the commonly used English version of the text mistakenly uses the male personal pronoun rather than the female where the original Latin is ambiguous. Similarities between Simon’s version and Catherine’s own account, however, leave little doubt that it was her vision Simon had in mind.81 For a performance such as Catherine’s to be successful – to have an impact on the public she hoped to shape – it had to enter into public consciousness. The detail that Marie and Simon offer in their descriptions of her visions suggests that knowledge of Catherine’s communications with God, her mystical experiences, and her ascetic practices, extended at least to a small circle of the religious elite in New France who were willing to make them more broadly known. Her visions and “great communications with God” bolstered their interpretation of the earthquake as a chastisement, and enhanced warnings against a growing immorality and lack of religion in colonial society.82 All three accounts note the salutary effects the earthquake had on religious life. Soon, churches were filled as colonists flocked to confession. Carnival was forgotten, replaced by conversions and repentance. For a short time, a reformed and purified faith centred on penance was not only offered by religious specialists but also accepted by the wider community. And this was not only a top-down process. All accounts report what appears to be a calculated turn to religion by the general population. Holed up in the Hôtel-Dieu, the local holy woman whose exploits were not as unknown as the conventions of religious humility claimed, helped to transform a potentially devastating disaster into something salutary for the c­ ommunity, by pledging herself to temper God’s anger and save the colony. Catherine and her contemporaries in the New France Church such as Marie de l’Incarnation aimed for much more than just survival in the new world. On what they considered the blank c­ anvas of the colony, they hoped to build the Tridentine Church of which reformers in France could only dream, shaping the population to

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their ideal through the authority granted to them by their performances of the traditions of holiness. Theorist Richard Valantasis argues that asceticism can be a powerful motor for social change that reaches beyond the individual to her community. Asceticism, he says, works to create a new cultural venue that is separate from the centres of the old culture from which the ascetic wishes to remove herself – symbolically through internal devotions, and also physically through withdrawal and bodily mortifications.83 Canada not only offered Catherine and others the chance to remake themselves, as they strove toward perfection and salvation through ascetic selfdenial; it also offered the chance to make a new society in a new place on the margins of the old and degenerate society left behind. Writes Valantasis: “At the centre of ascetical activity is a self who, through behavioural changes, seeks to become a different person, a new self; to become a different person in new relationships; and to become a different person in a new society that forms a new culture.” Asceticism, he continues, consists of “performances designed to inaugurate an alternative culture, to enable different social relations, and to create a new identity.”84 Through symbolic and physical removal from the world she rejected, extreme disciplining of her body, and adherence to the traditions of sanctity, Catherine offered her community an alternative cultural model and awareness rooted in reformed Christianity. It was this performance and this message that gradually escaped the walls of the Hôtel-Dieu.85 In her seminal work Holy Feast, Holy Fast, medievalist Caroline Walker-Bynum argues that asceticism enabled holy women “to determine the shape of their lives” – to try to control their environments, to change or convert others, to criticize authority figures, “and to claim for themselves teaching, counseling, and reforming roles for which the religious tradition provided, at best, ambivalent support.”86 The power and influence denied to late medieval women by the demands of Church, family, and society were equally denied in the Early Modern period. In Canada, the absence of self-­ determination, combined with the rigours of the natural environment, the hostility of the Iroquois, and the general vulnerability of the colonial community to compound the sense of helplessness and isolation that French settlers must have felt daily. Asceticism publicly and physically manifested the sufferings and dangers inherent in colonial life and, specifically, the internal sufferings Catherine

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believed she endured for others and for the salvation of the colony. Far from denying the will, performances of holy suffering restored to practitioners a modicum of control and power over their circumstances, which the dangerous colonial world and the gendered hierarchy of the Church seemed to want to deny them. Far from aiming to destroy the ego and body, Catherine intended to have tangible effects on her surroundings – to become an example, to reintegrate the wayward into Christian society, and to reinforce the religious and cultural bonds and boundaries of the social group which, from her perspective, were paramount for survival in the new world. Canada was essential to her vocation, her conception of self, and the reputation she would cultivate. “If I had listened to the counsel of many persons [who encouraged me not to go to Canada],” she wrote in an undated letter, “I would never have possessed the good that I possess in Canada.” In the colony, she found spiritual fulfillment in “all the little crosses that are inseparable from the country.”87 “My poor Canada, such as it is, gives me everything I need,” she wrote to the superior of the Augustinians of Bayeux, her aunt. “I wish only for the grace that I hope for from Our Lord to stay here my whole life.”88 Ragueneau, too, directly connected Catherine’s willingness to suffer with her commitment to the colony. He writes, “She left Bayeux, therefore, looking upon Canada as the place where Jesus Christ called her, and where she would be a victim for his holy love.”89 According to Mère Saint-Bonaventure, “The odour of her virtue was diffused all over this new world.”90 Even as a cloistered nun lodged in the most secure French settlement in the New World, Catherine suffered for the conversion and salvation of others, and specifically of Canada, and her contemporaries believed her sufferings had tangible effects and real meaning. These effects, however, could be short-lived and ephemeral. The flight to penance caused by the earthquake of February 1663 more or less abated within the space of a year. Toward the end of January 1664, Catherine had another vision in which she saw demons celebrating the great progress they had made in the colony since the previous year.91 At about the same time, she says, Jean de Brébeuf appeared to her and told her she needed to pray again for the country. God was very angry and was preparing to take action against it. Catherine agreed once again to give herself for the sins of others in order to save the colony.

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Despite the efforts of Catherine and others, changes in colonial life at the end of the century continued to threaten the Tridentine world for which these religious reformers were striving. As aggressive immigration schemes instituted by the crown after 1663 increased the number of settlers in the colony, Marie de l’Incarnation complained bitterly about the impact they were having on this religious / colonial project. “It is true that many people are now coming from France, and that the country is becoming more populated. But among the honest people come many scoundrels of both sexes, who cause much scandal. It would be of greater advantage to this new Church to have a few good Christians than such a great number of people who cause so much trouble.” She worried about new colonists who engaged in the liquor trade with Indigenous peoples, a practice Bishop Laval had been fighting against since his arrival in 1659. In a passage that blithely ignores the often destructive impact of missions on Indigenous societies, Marie expressed her fear that the disrespect and violence many settlers and traders exhibited toward native peoples would destroy all the work of the missionaries, and perhaps even lead to deaths and the overthrow of the colony by a force of offended natives.92 Here, again, the conflict between Canada as a paradise of religious suffering and the desire to transform the country into a mirror of French society is illustrated. At the end of the century, Marie Morin, the chronicler of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, added her voice to such concerns, complaining about the decline in the quality of religion in New France. She blamed the soldiers who had been sent to the colony by the king in the 1660s for putting an end to the piety that had characterized the early days of settlement in Montreal. They had, according to her, “ruined the Lord’s vine and established vice and sin which is almost as common now as it is in old France.”93 Even so, it had been Church figures, Jesuits particularly, who had been among the most vocal calling for military intervention. Performers of the traditions of holiness embraced asceticism and victimhood on the premise that the “new” world would come to them and not the other way around. Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s willingness to suffer for the sins of the country and the ability of her allies to disseminate her message made her a public figure who seemingly helped ameliorate the potentially devastating effects of God’s anger, the extreme alterity of the colonial world, and its greatest dangers.

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On 11 July 1666 Catherine finally made a public appearance outside the Hôtel-Dieu. After years of delay, the new cathedral church, located in the upper town of New France’s capital, was ready for consecration. She attended the ceremony and wrote about it in her journal. She described in great detail how the official celebrants in their regalia, including the bishop, circled the church three times, sprinkling holy water and chanting prayers before they came to the main door. After striking the door three times with a cross, “to signify the power of Jesus Christ, sovereign bishop of the Church,” they entered, and majestically processed toward the high altar. Upon the altar sat four candles, which signified “that Catholics [had] spread to the four corners of the world.” In the middle of these was a single cross “that of Our Lord,” which, Catherine noted, symbolically linked the entire Church throughout the world to Europe “at the centre of the world.”94 Following a number of minor rites, including lessons and responses, the bishop circled the altar seven times sprinkling its base with holy water. The relics of saints were interred within it, and the church was dedicated to the holy trinity – the new seat of a new bishop in a “New” World. Not only was the church blessed and dedicated that day; Catherine wrote in her journal that during the ceremony she felt she had “received the same blessings as the church.”95 Moreover, upon entering the new church, she felt three thousand “true ministers of impurity” leave her and “go straight to Hell” – just some of the demons she believed God had sent to her so that she might suffer temptations and mortifications in return for her own salvation and for that of Canada. In her journal, then, Catherine had directly linked herself to a liturgical ritual that symbolically consecrated all the lands claimed by France in North America, and claimed for herself a central place in the new colony and Canadian Church. Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s description of the pomp and ceremony of that day is detailed, symbolically rich, and both very public and very personal, illustrating the public role she occupied as a performer of colonial holiness. But she was not, in fact, actually present at the church that day. As a cloistered nun, she did not have ecclesiastical permission to attend. Rather, she says, she “found herself there in spirit by a special favour of heaven”; transported across the city in one of her many mystical visions.96 She had been praying in the community chapel when Jean de Brébeuf appeared to her and offered to guide her through the dedication ceremony. It was he who

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provided interpretations of the ritual’s symbolism, while Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary, Saint Augustine, Saint Catherine of Siena, and a host of others, led her forth “to be newly dedicated and consecrated to the Divine Majesty.”97 In this way, Catherine managed to be “present” at one of the most important public events in the life of the young colony, claiming a very public role as a spiritual defender in her ongoing quest to build the reformed religious culture she and others dreamed of in seventeenth-century New France. Despite her physical absence, she participated directly in the shared experience of the sacred generated through the dedication of this singularly important building, all the while strictly maintaining the cloister and humility that conservative orthodoxy expected of the pious, early modern ascetic and mystic.

C o n c l u s ion Catherine’s asceticism embodied the ideal Catholic community she and others hoped to build in New France. In the broadest terms, asceticism, or the control of desire, allows people to live together in societies, and shapes the parameters of acceptable social behaviour. More specifically, determined or focused individual asceticism performs a resistance to dominant culture and sets out the terms of initiation into a new culture. By removing herself physically and spiritually from the taint of decadent civilization, and offering herself as victim for the sins of others and the collective sins of the colony, Catherine presented a critique of French culture and society while remaining firmly within the traditions of the Church. She sought answers to the challenges posed by colonialism in the wellestablished lexicon of Catholic sanctity, cleaving to conservative and traditional models in a rhetoric of obedience and femininity. Gradually her performance, though officially secret, became publicly known. Just as she had managed to make herself “present” at the dedication of the Quebec Cathedral in 1666, she also managed to carve out a wider presence for herself within the colony through the slowly growing public audience of her ascetic actions. With the help of new solidarities constructed among the holy and their allies such as the Jesuits, word of her devotions, visions, and voluntary sufferings slowly spread throughout the colonial community and even to France. Through symbolic and physical removal from the world she rejected, Catherine offered colonial audiences an

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alternative vision of the good life rooted in strict adherence to reformed Christianity. In times of crisis, the colonial population responded with penitential acts of their own. And when Catherine died, it was with a reputation for holiness that would flourish in the years that followed.

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6 Miracles: Social Dramas and Community Bonds

Mère Saint-Bonaventure announced the news of Catherine de SaintAugustin’s death to the Hôtel-Dieu community just as the choir was finishing up the office of None on 8 May 1668. To the devastated community the mother superior’s grief was visible and palpable. “They easily saw in her bearing what had happened: she prostrated herself before the holy sacrament, expressing by sign how overcome she was,” the annaliste of the Hôtel-Dieu later wrote. The choir ceased singing and joined the mother superior in mourning. “Only sighs were heard, each gave way to her tears, and there was general heartache.”1 The community, however, had only a brief chance to mourn its loss privately before news of the holy woman’s death escaped from the cloister to the city beyond, and the process of creating Catherine’s legacy began. Colonists soon began to gather at the convent gates praising Catherine “as a soul who had brought great graces upon this poor country.” As preparations were made for her funeral, the sisters displayed Catherine’s body in their community chapel to appease the crowds that gathered to view it. There they “rendered to her all the obligations of piety and affection.” No doubt the mourners hoped for more than just a glimpse of the woman whose spiritual exploits had been the stuff of rumour in the town for years. They brought rosaries and pieces of cloth, which they touched to her body, sleeve, or coffin to make relics in anticipation of the miracles sure to follow.2 Above all, however, the Augustinians claimed Catherine as their own special protector. In the mid-1680s the Hôtel-Dieu found itself hard-pressed to recruit new postulants and in danger of closing. The sisters were overworked and the hospital struggled to fulfill all the

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duties required of it by the local community.3 In a population as dependent upon its hospital as Quebec was at the end of the seventeenth century, such a crisis might affect the entire population. Consequently, in 1686 the mother superior engaged a young Jesuit priest, François de Crépieul (1638–1702), to pray to Catherine and ask her to intervene with God on their behalf. Crépieul was a wellknown devotee of Catherine who several years earlier had received a vision of her in a dream. Thereafter, he had made a point of returning each year from his mission at Tadoussac to say mass in the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu, to thank Catherine and God for the graces he had received. He was, therefore, ideally suited to act as intervener between the Hôtel-Dieu and its heavenly protector. As a priest Crépieul carried the authority of the Church. As a member of Catherine’s faith community, he had already experienced the holy woman’s divine aid. When returning to Tadoussac after one of his visits to the Hôtel-Dieu, Crépieul lost his chapelle (portable altar) and other belongings when the canoe he had left them in floated away in a sudden gust of wind. He blamed his Montagnais guides for leaving his things carelessly on the riverbank. On the spot, he made a vow to render a gift to Catherine if he should recover his things. The next day all his lost belongings were found downstream, resting in perfect order on the side of the river. In recognition of what seemed to him a miracle, he gave “two little works of art by the sauvages” to the Hôtel-Dieu.4 It would be, of course, a fairly simple matter to explain this event without recourse to the miraculous; it is, after all, not so much the event itself that was a miracle, but belief and context that made it so.5 It is impossible and, indeed, unnecessary, however, to try to determine the “true” event from what Crépeuil and others believed had occurred. From a historiographical perspective, understanding the significance of reported miracles requires recognizing not just the result but, more important, the entire process that led people at the time to believe a miracle had occurred. To Crépieul, Catherine had proved her holiness by rescuing his things after he had made his vow, and he owed her a particular devotion in return. As a consecrated liturgical tool of Catholic missions, a chapelle would have held a particular symbolic importance for the faithful, and certainly for a priest, who likely already associated Catherine with divine suffering for the salvation of the colony. Crépieul was now a miraculé – one who had experienced, and, therefore, presumably merited heavenly

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assistance. Miracles could serve social functions and bring about changes in social status. They could also helped to build community bonds linking Crépieul to the Hôtel-Dieu and its hard-pressed sisters. Crépieul responded favourably, then, when Mère Saint­ Bonaventure requested his aid in intervening with Catherine to obtain divine help for her hospital. Crépieul prayed to Catherine for assistance and soon reported to the superior that he had received divine assurances that the HôtelDieu would recover from its present crisis. “We soon saw the accomplishment of that prophecy and, since that time, our novice ranks have always been full,” reported the annaliste in the early eighteenth century.6 The outcome was positive. In 1687 five new postulants joined the community and over the course of the next two years only four members died. The crisis that had precipitated recourse to the supernatural had been averted. Moreover, the Hôtel-Dieu’s position in the colonial community had been secured, the defence of the Jesuits procured, and Catherine’s holiness proven – all of which reflected brilliantly on her successors on earth. There should be little wonder, then, that the nuns regarded these events as miraculous and Catherine as their heavenly protector. Like asceticism, miracles and devotions need to be understood as much more than the exteriorization of an individual’s inner sentiment. In many different ways they were public events that served social purposes such as securing the integrity of the Christian community by converting heretics and curing the ill. Given their ubiquity and seeming importance for the religious, cultural, and social life of the colony, miracles have received surprisingly little attention in the historiography of New France and Canada. Devotional practices, considered more generally, have provoked a somewhat greater interest among historians, but analysis has generally focused on issues of popular versus elite religion.7 But, as the above example makes clear, members of the Church and clergy were as likely as anyone to participate in the sorts of devotions and belief systems that made miracles seem possible, and to consider recourse to the divine as a practical option in challenging times. As Robert Orsi argues, religion can be seen as a network of relationships “between heaven and earth involving humans of all ages and many different sacred figures together.”8 Furthermore, in the view of Peter Brown, miracles must be regarded as any event that was believed to be such at the time – part of and frequently the outcome of carefully

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cultivated relationships – rather than as superstitions that one class of society sought to impose upon another.9 They were social and cultural practices that took place over time, within specific historical contexts and human relationships, and they performed important functions both for those who experienced them – the miraculé(e)s – and the community that witnessed and attested to their efficacy. Miracles that involved local holy persons help to reveal the roles these individuals occupied in society, and show how local audiences responded to the holy performances they had witnessed.

D e vo t io n s a n d Mi racles By 1689 evidence of Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s holy life combined with reports of numerous miraculous interventions and cures collected since her death had so convinced the nuns of the HôtelDieu of her sanctity that they requested permission from the Bishop of Quebec, Mgr de Saint-Vallier, to translate (move) her mortal remains from her burial plot in the monastery’s grounds to a more honoured place inside the community chapel.10 As a liturgical ritual, the translation of the mortal remains of someone considered holy dates from the very early Church when the graves of exemplary Christians became focal points of the new religion, and the tradition of interring the remains of martyrs and saints beneath altars began. The nuns obtained permission from the bishop for their plan and on the appointed day they opened her grave and gathered up all her bones, placed them in a small coffin, covered it, and reburied it at the foot of a cross dedicated to the Calvary, “judging that this illustrious woman who had so loved the Cross and who had suffered in so many ways, would be thrilled to rest below a piece of the True Cross.”11 Though doctrinal restrictions prevented unofficial saints from interment within altars, the translation of Catherine’s remains to this honoured place nevertheless marked the importance of the community’s ongoing and developing relationship with her, and acknowledged the many favours she was believed to have obtained for those left behind, while no doubt expressing a hope for more to come. It also marked a new step in the formal acceptance of her cult into the public life of the Church and colony. Mgr de Saint-Vallier’s decision to grant the nuns permission to translate Catherine’s remains brought her memory into the embrace – and also the control of – the

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official Church.12 Although the translation was ostensibly a private affair, once again the secret travelled widely. When the nuns of the motherhouse at Bayeux learned of it, they wrote to Quebec asking for some of Catherine’s bones so that they too might venerate them and her.13 Through the act of translation the fact was made known that holiness had been nurtured within the walls of the cloister. Several years later, the event would provide a pretext for the ­compilers of the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu to record a number of miracles attributed to Catherine’s intervention, which likewise suggest the spread of Catherine’s cult and illustrate her relationship with the larger belief community. In one instance a Visitation nun named Marie-Suzanne des Maires from the French city of Caën obtained a cure when she was, “inspired to offer a novena to Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, whom she had heard much about.”14 In another, a young man walking by the Seine in Paris discovered among the wares of a bookseller a copy of Ragueneau’s Vie de Mère Catherine and, after reading it, decided to join the Jesuits and become a missionary in Canada.15 A third instance was provided by a habitant called Nicholas Matte from the parish of Dombour (on the eastern tip of Montreal island), who believed that Catherine had cured his young son of an infirmity. Having heard others speak of her and her holy life, he decided to pray to Catherine for the cure the doctors were unable to provide. In Catherine’s honour, he performed a novena on the final day of which he discovered that his son had recovered completely. He informed the local priest of what had happened, and offered to sign a formal attestation in his own blood.16 From Caën to Dombour people were talking about Catherine. She inspired others to persevere and in turn they wanted to publicly ­honour the saint responsible. These miracles linked France and New France, and all levels of society – religious and lay – together. The surviving description of the cure of Matte’s son, in particular, includes all the basic elements of a typical miracle anecdote from the time; an incurable illness, fruitless medical intervention, a recommendation to pray to a holy person for help, a prayer or devotion of some sort, followed by a complete and enduring cure to which the miraculé(e) and witnesses offered official testimony, usually to a member of the religious hierarchy. Matte had heard people speaking about Catherine; her reputation circulated in the colony by word of mouth. In life, her mysticism and asceticism had constituted a difficult and challenging model of holiness that invoked an alternative

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way of ordering society, but in death led to a reputation for holiness that made her accessible to the wider community through devotions and a belief in miracles. Seemingly divine interventions in everyday life were not uncommon in the religious culture of colonial Canada. Indeed, a reputation for holiness rarely succeeded for long without them. Theologically, miracles were considered proof that someone who had lived a holy life was indeed a saint in heaven capable of interceding with God on behalf of the faithful left behind. As illustrated in the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu: Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin helped so many people who recommended themselves to her, and obtained for them graces so great in their present needs, that we would not doubt at all her happiness even if she had not since her death given any other proof of her blessedness and of her power before God; but the divine bounty wished to further manifest the sanctity of his spouse through miraculous cures in France and in Canada.17 Most often, miracles took place after the death of the saint. Doctrinally, it was God who performed all miracles. The saint was merely the vehicle through whom the faithful on earth gained access to (and leverage with) the divine. It is not always easy to predict who might appeal to the faithful and become a successful miracle worker. For the most part, as we have seen, colonists were inclined to call upon the established and proven saints of the Church in their needs. But they also turned to local holy persons, and a positive response could result in an enthusiastic cult of veneration. Still, it is unlikely that the vast majority of miracles people in New France believed they experienced were ever recorded, making any effort to determine the relative popularity of local and universal figures all but impossible.18 Surviving miracle accounts, however, allow us to examine the social and cultural appeal of local saints and trace how relationships developed between holy persons and their immediate communities. The creation and exchange of relics, for example, provide evidence of developing cults of belief and clues about how people engaged with the holy. Both first-order relics (body parts of the deceased holy person) and second-order relics (pieces of material touched to the body, or bits of clothing, books, and so on owned by the holy

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person) were highly sought after and carefully rationed by authorities. They could help to advance a reputation and a cult of devotion, and served as a medium through which miracles were sought and obtained. On 15 November 1649, Jérôme Lalemant wrote to his niece, Mère Anne du Saint-Sacrement, a Carmelite nun in France, in response to her request for a relic of her brother, Gabriel Lalemant. Miracles must burst forth within the Church. For this reason I did not comply with the many requests from a great number of persons for these relics. I cannot, however, refuse the devotion of your heart a portion of the hair from [Lalemant’s] head pulled out by his executioners. I am sending it to you with the obligation to keep it to yourself.19 Lalemant here expresses a concern to limit the proliferation of both relics and miracles, in order to keep them within the control of the Church. Yet, at the same time, his decision nevertheless to send a lock of Lalemant’s hair to Mère Saint-Sacrement reveals a poorly disguised excitement about the graces he believed the new Canadian Church had received and another way the reputations of local holy persons were made known at the time. Whether he agreed to send this relic because the recipient was a family member or because she was a member of the Church and, therefore, perhaps more trustworthy than other “personnes dévotes,” is not clear. What does seem clear, however, is that his request that she not advertise the gift was likely merely rhetorical, for it was through such means that relations were built between heaven and earth, cults became public, and miracles resulted. So important were relics that their absence could become a matter for concern. This was apparently the case with several of the Jesuit martyrs.20 In 1648, when an apparition of the recently martyred Antoine Daniel appeared to another (living) Canadian Jesuit, one of the first questions that the recipient of the vision asked the apparition concerned the lack of relics left behind by the holy dead. “The thought which most readily occurred to the person to whom he appeared,” reported Paul Ragueneau in the Relation, “was, to ask him how the divine goodness had permitted the body of his servant to be so unworthily treated after his death, and so reduced to powder that we even had not had the happiness of being able to gather up its ashes.”21 Antoine Daniel was the third Jesuit killed in

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New France (the fourth if Anne de Nouë or Jean de Lalande is counted), and still the living had no relics to venerate. Why would God not allow such a grace to the faithful? “Magnus Dominus et laudabilis nimis” (Truly God is great and praiseworthy always),” responded the apparition. Daniel assured the Jesuit that God had made amends for the indignities done to his body by rewarding him with a number of souls from purgatory who accompanied him into glory in heaven. In the Relations, Ragueneau declines to reveal the name of the Father who received this vision, and appears reluctant to indulge in talk of miracles.22 It was only in the more private venue of a letter addressed to the Jesuit Superior in Rome that he identified the recipient as Father Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot.23 Further details of what happened appear in the unpublished “Manuscript of 1652,” which Ragueneau prepared in advance of an anticipated canonization process. Here Joseph Poncet, Ragueneau’s assistant, claims Daniel appeared to Chaumonot twice, the second time bringing a warning to the Jesuits about their conduct in Canada. While Ragueneau had presented this vision in the Relations in very positive terms (Daniel appeared before a Jesuit council “strengthening us in his courage, and filling us with his light, and with the spirit of God with which he was completely invested24), Poncet’s version of the martyr’s message was much darker. “Sasandionehenx nonouarikouanderai,” which is the fifth commandment of the Lord’s Prayer “forgive us our trespasses,” and he embraced the father leaving upon his neck a coldness so great that it raised him from his bed, and he found himself so filled with a feeling of guilt and fear of the justice of God, especially upon this poor Church, that it remained with him for many months up to the destruction of this village and his mission.25 Poncet, of course, was one of the Jesuits who feared the Canadian mission was going to ruin under Ragueneau’s leaderdship, while Ragueneau himself generally painted a much rosier picture of the mission. In this version of the vision, the coldness of Daniel’s embrace jolts Chaumonot awake and fills him with apprehension and dread. Beginning in the Huron language, Daniel warned that the new Church had to suffer affliction and punishment, and the sins of the land and its people had to be extirpated before it could grow.

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This is not the sort of message the Jesuits might have wanted circulating in France to advertise their martyrs and their mission to the reading public, especially as the Huron mission was failing. Among the ecclesiastical hierarchy, however, where such messages might receive careful attention and interpretation, relics and holy reputations traversed the Atlantic in both directions, creating an extended faith community linked by a common recognition of the significance of extraordinary devotional and sacrificial acts. Europe may well have been the centre of Christianity, and Rome the metropolis of Catholicism, but North America was the place of action, and it was the saints of North America who, at the end of the seventeenth century, edified France.26 Ragueneau’s reluctance to talk about Daniel’s apparition in the Relation likely had more to do with a desire to control the message before the French public than any genuine discomfort with miracles attributable to a divide between popular and elite religion – credulity and rationalism. Certainly Ragueneau illustrated no discomfort with visions, extraordinary devotions, and miracles in the biography he later wrote of Catherine de SaintAugustin, in which it is clear that he regarded Catherine as an emblem of the sacrality of the colony.27 In Canada, news of local holy persons spread primarily by word of mouth. Relics, such as those created by the faithful who showed up at the Hôtel-Dieu with pieces of cloth to touch to Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s body, would have provided a generally illiterate colonial laity with an immediate connection to the holy in a way that hagiographies or Relations published in France could not. The best-documented example of such a local miracle worker is the Récollet lay brother Frère Didace Pelletier.

T h e A c t s o f F r è r e D i dace Pelleti er Frère Didace Pelletier was the first Canadian-born man to join the Récollet Order (an observant branch of the Franciscans) and, according to an early twentieth-century biographer, “the first of his nationality [Canadian-born] who left behind a reputation for being a saint.”28 Born Claude Pelletier to Georges and Catherine (Vanier) in the village of Château-Richer near Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on 28 June 1657, he joined the Récollets in Quebec at the age of twentyone in 1678 and took the name Didace when he made his vows two years later. Trained as a carpenter, he had a hand in almost every

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6.1  Fr. Didace Pelletier, Jean-Baptiste Scotin (1678–17??). Musée de la civilisation, collection du Séminaire de Québec, 1993.16782

major construction effort the Récollets undertook in New France at the end of the seventeenth century, from their missions at Percé on the Gaspé peninsula and the French port at Plaisance (Placentia) in Newfoundland, to Montreal and finally Trois-Rivières, were he died in the hospice of the Ursuline monastery on 21 February 1699 at the age of forty-two.29 He remained a frère converse (lay brother and not a priest) throughout his life. In 1718, when Didace’s friend, confessor, and fellow Canadian Récollet, Joseph Denis, wrote a brief account of his life in Canada, he highlighted the poverty, humility, and obedience of someone he, Joseph, regarded as a true servant of God. Denis says that he was an  earnest religious, who, as a lay brother, only ever showed the

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greatest respect to priests and to his superiors. Didace took his religious commitments seriously, fasting on Sundays and Feast Days so that he might “obtain the grace of dying on those days under the very worthy protection of the Holy Virgin.” Above all, however, Joseph Denis believed it was work that sanctified Didace and also ultimately killed him. He says Frère Didace contracted pleurisy while at work on the Récollet Church in Trois-Rivières. Though the doctor who cared for him believed he would recover, Didace insisted on taking last rites, “certain that it would be his last day.”30 Shortly after Didace died, a reputation for holiness began to circulate, first among the Ursuline nuns in Trois-Rivières and then also in Quebec. Within months miracles were reported at Didace’s gravesite, prompting the bishop of Quebec to order an official inquiry into their authenticity. In the course of the next two decades, a total of five inquiries conducted by episcopal delegates were held at Quebec and Trois-Rivières. Around 1718 Joseph Denis assembled the testimonials offered on these occasions into a single document titled, “Actes du très dévot frère Didace, Récollet, mort en odeur de sainteté en 1699.” This extraordinary collection grants access to first-hand accounts of miracles as attested to, and narrated by, the miraculé(e)s themselves, witnesses, and those who investigated them on behalf of the diocese. Denis intended that this collection would lay the groundwork for formal canonization proceedings. In 1719, twenty years after Didace died, Denis took the “Actes” to Paris, where they were copied and sent to various influential churchmen, including Donacien Larcenau, the Récollet Procurator in Rome. The surviving copy of the “Actes” was made from this version at the Récollet monastery in Quebec likely between 1742 and 1744.31 In total, the collection contains accounts of twenty-two miracles, eighteen of which were subject to official investigation. The remaining four were reported to ecclesiastical authorities through letters and informal testimonials from the faithful. The first inquiry took place at the Ursuline monastery in Quebec just eight months after Didace died. Bishop Saint-Vallier, a strong supporter of the Récollets in Canada, sent Charles de Glandelet, canon of the cathedral and vicar general of Quebec, to investigate reports that two  members of the community had received cures after invoking Didace’s aid.32 The inquiry took place before the leading members of the Ursuline community and the colonial Church, and in the ­presence of the two miraculées, Mère Rose de Lanaudière de

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Table 6.1 Official Diocesan inquiries into the miracles of Frère Didace1 Place

1

Ursulines de Québec

Date

1699–1700

# of Miracles

2

2

Trois-Rivières

1703

6

3

Trois-Rivières

August 1704

2

4

Ursulines de Québec

20 January 1709

1

5

Trois-Rivières

25 May 1717

7

1 Separate original versions of two of the investigation reports – one that took place in 1699 at the Ursuline monastery in Quebec, and another held at Trois-Rivières on 18 July 1717 – survive in the Archives du Séminaire de Québec. Musée de la civilisation, fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec, Polygraphie 3, no. 30; and Musée de la civilisation, fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec, sme 12.2.1/1/67.

Sainte-Catherine, a professed choir nun, age twenty-five, and the pensionnaire Marie-Anne-Geneviève-Angélique Robineau of Bécancourt, age fourteen.33 Mère Sainte-Catherine told the commission that when she was eight years old she had fallen on some ice and broken her arm. The arm had healed badly and a year later she had broken it again, and although it had healed a second time, it continued to cause her pain and discomfort as she grew older. Eventually she had joined the Ursulines, but her arm continued to deteriorate despite access to medical care in the convent. The winter of 1698 was a particularly difficult one, and Mère Sainte-Catherine found herself incapacitated by pain. Michel Sarrazin, the king’s doctor at Quebec, was consulted, but he determined there was very little to be done. Unable to serve in the convent or fulfil her vows as a choir nun, Mère Sainte-Catherine found herself relegated to the sidelines of the social and religious life of the community. Another year passed before, sometime in the late winter or early spring of 1699, a lay sister, Soeur Saint-Paul, suggested that Mère Sainte-Catherine pray to Frère Didace Pelletier for help. She assured Mère Sainte-Catherine that the Récollet brother had already achieved several cures at his gravesite in Trois-Rivières where he was considered “a great Servant of God.” Rose de Sainte-Catherine greeted this advice with derision and mockery. She preferred to place her confidence in saints who were actually canonized, she told Soeur Saint-Paul. But she soon found that her arm was much worse and began to wonder if God was punishing her for her incredulity. Now, not only did Mère ­

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Sainte-Catherine find herself outside of the communal life of the convent and the day-to-day world of work and devotions that had shaped her life since her commitment to religion, but she also began to worry she was excluded from the Christian belief community itself and from God’s favour. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she soon found herself “inspired” to take Soeur Saint-Paul’s advice. She invoked Frère Didace “with confidence” and sought out the aid of her uncle, none other than Joseph Denis, who chastised her for her earlier disbelief. He commanded her to say the Obsecro daily – a prayer that honoured the Virgin, which Frère Didace had been accustomed to recite.34 After a period of fifteen days she felt the pain in her arm slowly start to recede. Her uncle then brought her a rosary that had belonged to Frère Didace, which she applied to her arm. After another two weeks Rose de Sainte-Catherine found herself completely cured.35 She soon returned to work in the Ursuline convent, taking on even the heaviest and most menial of chores, “such as washing the laundry and other similar things which she has continued since the time of her sudden cure until the present without finding herself at all inconvenienced.”36 The ability to return to the normal life of the community was as vital a part of the miracle ritual as the cure itself. Laundry and menial labour in the convent, however, was work normally reserved for sœurs converses like Soeur Saint-Paul and not choristes like Mère Sainte-Catherine. The tasks Rose de Sainte-Catherine took on following her cure were an act of penance and humility that demonstrated her contrition and gratitude, but they also revealed to everyone the grace she believed she had received. Her status within the community had changed. As the humble recipient of God’s favour, Mère Sainte-Catherine held a place in the hierarchy of the convent that no longer depended on the type of work she did, her family, socio-economic background, or her title. The gift of divine grace brought her back from the fringes of the faith community to its very centre. She could profitably undertake menial work as a symbolic expression of the blessings she believed she had received from God without any threat to her social status. Through chastisement and penance the disbelieving sinner had been redeemed, and the resulting cure allowed her to rejoin the faith community from which she had been excluded, but under a new and special status. During the same inquiry, Angélique Robineau, a student with the Ursulines, also testified to a cure she had received through the

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intercession of Frère Didace. She told the inquiry how she had suffered from an enflamed knee, which had caused her a great deal of pain, preventing her even from walking and removing her to the margins of the community. For eight days surgeons tried various remedies but to no avail before she too was counselled by Soeur Saint-Paul to seek the intervention of Frère Didace. Angélique performed a novena consisting of the recitation of three Pater Nosters and three Ave Marias each day for nine days in his honour. But the hoped-for cure did not materialize. After the nine days were up, Angélique noticed Soeur Saint-Paul holding a copy of a book that had once belonged to Frère Didace – The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. She asked that the book be placed on her knee, and immediately she felt herself completely cured. Within just two hours “she was walking and fulfilling her duties as usual.”37 Illness in seventeenth-century French culture was a gravely serious matter that, even beyond the risk of incapacitation and death, threatened social marginalization. When all else failed, the supernatural offered the hope of a cure and also the possibility of reintegration into the prevailing social and faith communities. The cures of Rose de Saint-Catherine and Angélique Robineau enabled them to rejoin the social and religious community from which illness had temporarily barred them, and to resume their accustomed place in the social order. Anthropologist Victor Turner argues that miracles are comprehensive rituals whereby a breach “of regular, norm­ governed social relations” is corrected through redressive action undertaken by the faith community collectively. The failure of doctors to achieve cures precipitates a crisis of hope and creates feelings of fragility and danger within the community. An alternative course of action is demanded, and a miraculous option settled upon, suggested by someone, in this case Soeur Saint-Paul, who claims a special religious knowledge. When a cure results, the previously marginalized person reintegrates into the social group through another set of rituals – immersion into the regimented world of work and devotions within the community. However, the recipients of divine favour re-enter society with a new status. They are now miraculé(e)s – those who have been blessed by God and favoured by the saints. Generally an increased religious commitment follows such events among the community, or, as in these examples, devotion to the local holy man credited with procuring the cure spreads to others.38

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Turner’s notion of the social drama applied to miracles draws attention to the often-overlooked performative element of the miraculous and allows for the temporal dimensions of the cure to come into view. In the two cases above, the passage of time is marked by physical degeneration, the futility of medical intervention, the decreased ability of the penitent to participate in meaningful social life and fulfill accustomed social roles, and the slow decision to seek the intervention of an unproved local saint. The ritual performance of devotions, which resulted ultimately in miraculous cures, negotiated the public bestowal of supernatural grace upon the penitent over time and before the very community from which she had been excluded. Everyone had their role to play in the ritual: Mère SainteCatherine, Angélique Robineau, Soeur Saint-Paul, Joseph Denis, and all the various observers and witnesses, including the officials who investigated the matter for the Church and granted it the stamp of legitimacy. Finally cured of the illnesses that had threatened their marginalization, Rose de Saint-Catherine and Angélique Robineau reclaimed their rightful places in the community, and re-established their relationships with the superior and their sisters in religion, with Joseph Denis and the Church, and also with the wider community upon whose acceptance the fate of Frère Didace’s sanctity depended. Negotiations over the bestowal of grace defined social, cultural, and religious relationships and helped to maintain and strengthen threatened, but vital, social bonds between the miraculées and the community, and between the community, Frère Didace, and God. Ultimately they helped to define what role Frère Didace would play in the socio-religious world of the colony. Would he be a patron for the community? Would he support the faith community that supported him? Would he behave in ways the faith community expected? The decision to invoke Frère Didace was as much a test of his qualifications as a patron and a holy man as it was a test of the faith of the penitent and her place in the community.

F rè r e D idac e a n d t h e Fai th Communi ty Recourse to miraculous interventions arose from a lack of alternative effective options and a cultural milieu accepting of the power of the supernatural and the immanence of God in human affairs.39 People at all levels of colonial society and from all walks of life had their role to play in the unfolding ritual of the cure. Frère Didace

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himself was a lay brother and a Canadian from a habitant background. Five of the twenty-two miraculé(e)s who appear in the “Actes” were members of the religious establishment of New France, either nuns or priests, including the Bishop of Quebec himself, Mgr de Saint-Vallier. Four others are referred to as habitants while a fifth, Pierre Le Maistre, is described as a bourgeois of Trois-Rivières, likely a petty merchant. Another four were members of the notable classes – seigneurs or relatives of seigneurs – while a further two came from the ranks of the professionals. Religious and secular persons stood as witnesses and also served on the inquiry commissions. Louis Geoffroy, a Sulpician priest from Montreal acting on behalf of Charles de Glandelet and Bishop de Saint-Vallier, presided over the early inquiries at Trois-Rivières, whose boards included Church and secular leaders: Joseph Denis, Commissaire Général of the Récollets in Canada, Luc Filiastre, Superior of the Récollets in Trois-Rivières, Paul Vachon, curé of Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Jean le Chasseur, king’s counsellor in Trois-Rivières, and Sieur Claude Pauperet, a merchant from Quebec and a director of the Company of New France. At Quebec it was the lay sister, Soeur Saint-Paul, who filled the critical role of facilitator and initiator of devotions to Frère Didace. It was she who recommended that the ill have recourse to him and gave the two women information about the holy man, and, in the case of Angélique Robineau, the relic from which the final cure resulted. People from across colonial society, men and women, adults and young people, lay and secular, participated in the miracles of Frère Didace. It seems, however, that Soeur Saint-Paul offers the key to unlocking the mystery of Didace’s early popularity among the Ursulines of Quebec, and she may also help us to understand how and why this particular local saint’s cult developed so suddenly in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Who was Soeur SaintPaul? Why was she such an advocate for Frère Didace? And how did she come to possess his book? Soeur Saint-Paul was born Marie-Madeleine Gravel dit Brindelierre in the parish of Château-Richer east of Quebec City near SainteAnne-de-Beaupré in 1662. She was the seventh of twelve children born to Joseph-Massé Gravel dit Brindelierre and Marguerite Tavernier, successful habitant farmers. She grew up, then, in the same small town as Claude (Didace) Pelletier, and only five years separated the younger Marie-Madeleine from her older neighbour.40 It is at least possible, and perhaps likely, that Soeur Saint-Paul or one

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of her siblings and the future holy man had known each other as young children. If so, perhaps they had been friends, played together, or met at the parish church on Sundays, the faith they held in common drawing them together. Perhaps as they grew older, however, they grew apart as each embarked on religious and life paths of their own. When Marie-Madeleine was six, Claude Pelletier left town and enrolled at the newly established school of arts and crafts in the nearby village of Saint-Joachim, which Bishop Laval and the intendant, Jean Talon, had established to train young artisans for service in the colony.41 Just a year later Marie-Madeleine also departed, entering the Ursuline convent at Quebec as a pensionnaire. Five years later, in 1674, she joined the noviciate as a lay sister. Placing children in religious orders could be a mark of social advancement for colonial families. It was very expensive to become a choir nun, but the ranks of the sœurs converses were open to Canadian families of intermediate status.42 As Soeur Saint-Paul entered the Ursuline noviciate, Claude Pelletier, now a trained carpenter, was about to commence work on the reconstruction of the church of Saint-Annede-Beaupré. This church was already a famous shrine and pilgrimage site by the mid–1670s, and working there may well have encouraged the young man to follow his own religious inclinations. He joined the Récollets, who were generally more open to Canadianborn novices than other male communities in the colony. After taking his final vows as a lay brother in 1680, Frère Didace spent the next twenty years working in various missions from Montreal to Newfoundland. Soeur Saint-Paul remained a member of the Ursuline community at Quebec until her death on 17 March 1721 or 1722.43 Toward the end of his life in 1699, however, Frère Didace may have rekindled his acquaintance with Marie-Madeleine’s family through a younger Brindelierre sister, Françoise. Françoise, like her sister, had also joined the Ursulines (Soeur Sainte-Anne). Furthermore, she was one of three sisters sent from the Quebec house to establish a sister house in Trois-Rivières in 1697.44 At roughly the same time, Frère Didace was assigned to the Récollet house in the same town where he had worked on the construction of a new church and monastery. It was in the one-room, six-bed hospice of the Ursuline convent that he died in February of 1699. Not even a month later, on 9  March, Françoise herself passed away in the same hospice. The Ursulines of Trois-Rivières developed an early reverence for Frère

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Didace, whom they believed had died “en odeur de sainteté,” and they were among the first to promote his cult.45 It seems, then, that Françoise had at the very least heard of Frère Didace, likely knew him, and may even have shared a hospital room with him. Perhaps she even prayed to him for comfort in her final days. It is not difficult to imagine that Soeur Saint-Paul and her sister Françoise recognized a kindred spirit in Frère Didace, who was a fellow habitant and a Canadian in religious orders at a time when notables and French-born men and women dominated the Church in New France. Although the Pelletiers were considerably less landwealthy than the Gravels, childhood memories may have enhanced the sisters’ affinity with someone of their own social milieu reputed to be a “servant of God.” In the absence of other possible causes for Soeur Saint-Paul’s great interest in and knowledge of Frère Didace, it can be assumed that she learned of his reputation from the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières, perhaps directly from her sister Françoise, and developed her own special reverence for someone she had once known. Didace’s copy of the Imitation of Christ must have fallen into her hands through the Ursuline network, perhaps directly from her sister. These links, although only hinted at in the historical record, suggest the vital importance of personal contacts, family ­networks, and word-of-mouth transmission in the dissemination of holy reputations locally in the St Lawrence valley. Those in TroisRivières who had known Didace at the end of his life, cared for him on his deathbed, and had the means and opportunity to visit his gravesite and ask for favours advocated first for his holiness and effectiveness as an intercessor.46 Through familial and religious networks, and perhaps memories of a shared childhood, Soeur SaintPaul cultivated a religious intimacy with Frère Didace and she encouraged others in the Ursuline network to do the same. Other miracle accounts recorded in the “Actes” support these conclusions. Similar familial and affinity networks can be traced among many of the miraculé(e)s and witnesses who appeared before the diocesan inquiries into Frère Didace’s reported miracles held between 1699 and 1717. The boards of inquiry that began work in TroisRivières in the summer of 1703 featured members of the prominent Godefroy family: Monsieur Michel Godefroy Sieur de Linctot, “Major et Commandant” of Trois-Rivières, and his nephew René, who was the king’s procurator in the town.47 The Godefroys were a local noble family with considerable influence. They had arrived in

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New France with Champlain in 1626 and were one of the founding families of Trois-Rivières when they moved to the area around 1633. The patriarch of the family, Jean Godefroy de Linctot, and his wife, Marie Leneuf, had eleven children between 1637 and 1658. The eldest, Michel, was the first French child to be born in the region of Trois-Rivières. He grew up to be seigneur and a captain in the colonial troops. Although the family was ennobled in 1668, like many leading colonial families the Godefroys were chronically short of money. Nevertheless, the family was extensive and influential, as  is  illustrated by the prominent role they took on the inquiry commissions.48 Not only were they represented officially on the boards of inquiry, but they also figured prominently among those who appeared to testify to cures and act as witnesses before those boards.49 In 1703 Michel Godefroy de Linctot’s own daughter testified that she believed she had received a cure through the aid of Frère Didace. Michelle Godefroy, aged twenty-four years, told the inquiry that prior to 1699 she had suffered four years of continual illness “during which she had not been able to sleep in her bed or take food without great pain.”50 She testified that shortly after Frère Didace had died she began a novena in his honour, at the end of which she found herself perfectly cured of her affliction. The following year, Michel de Godefroy again participated in the commission’s work, and this time his wife, Perriné Picotte de Belestre, the mother of the miraculée Michelle, testified that she too had been cured of a dangerous malady through recourse to Frère Didace. Although initially skeptical of his virtues, she told the investigators, she was nevertheless convinced to invoke his aid by the experience of her daughter.51 Successful interventions encouraged others to seek Didace’s aid, and word of his accomplishments spread among family members. In 1717 Marguerite Hameau appeared before the fourth inquiry, which was presided over this time directly by Charles de Glandelet. She testified that her son Charles Antoine (b. 1698) had been miraculously cured through the intervention of Frère Didace. Marguerite Hameau’s husband and Charles Antoine’s father was René Godefroy de Tonnancour, the king’s procurator at Trois-Rivières, nephew of Michel Godefroy de Linctot and Perriné Picotte, and member of the 1703 and 1704 boards of inquiry. Moreover, René Godefroy had served as the Récollets’ legal representative (syndic) in charge of their temporal affairs in Trois-Rivières from 1698 to 1703. It is likely

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that he had known Frère Didace personally during the time he oversaw the construction of their monastery and church – the very buildings Didace had been working on when he died. Canada at the end of the eighteenth century was a sprawling territory with a very small French and Catholic population concentrated along the north and south shores of the St Lawrence River, from the region of Montreal in the south to Tadoussac in the north. It was mainly a rural society. Major towns such as Quebec and Montreal had small permanent populations, and at the end of the seventeenth century Trois-Rivières likely counted few more than five hundred residents.52 There was no printing press; travel was slow in the summer and difficult in winter. In such a setting, the miracles of Frère Didace, diligently recorded by consecutive diocesan boards of inquiry, testify to the importance of personal and family connections plus regional affiliations and interests in the dissemination of news. In such an environment, bearing public witness to a miracle was almost as important as the miracle itself. Doing so allowed others to participate in the blessings that had been received. Miraculé(e)s felt compelled to offer testimony in order to ensure the legitimacy of the miracle (and their own religious experience), but also to honour the person who had procured it – often someone whom the miraculé(e)s had known either personally or indirectly. In September of 1704, Marie Boubert of Trois-Rivières had her husband, Jean-Baptiste Pottier, a court clerk in the town, write a letter to the commission of inquiry in order to lift the anxiety that she felt for not appearing before the official inquiry held the previous month to testify to a cure she believed she had received. Marie Boubert said Frère Didace had favoured her as a result of a vow she had made to him and, as her husband explained, she feared punishment from God if she failed to bear public witness to what had happened.53 Approximately ten months prior, Marie Boubert had given birth. The birth had been a difficult one that had confined her to bed with paralysis in her leg and terrible pain in her kidneys. Alone at home at the time, her moans had attracted the attention of her neighbour, Madeleine Baudoin, who came to assist. Madeleine Baudoin was so struck by the scene of misery and despair that greeted her when she entered the residence that she was moved to cry out that she was “suffering interiorly with [Boubert] to see her in such a state.”54 Overcome with empathy, Madeleine entered into what Victor Turner

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calls a state of communitas with the sick and suffering, whereby the marginalized identify with others in similar positions.55 Indeed Madeleine Baudoin had herself experienced crippling illness and miraculous cures. She had testified before the 1703 inquiry to a cure that she credited to a novena she had performed in honour of Frère Didace.56 Thanks to the empathy of her neighbour, Marie Boubert was no longer socially isolated, but rather joined an alternative community.57 Madeleine Baudoin recommended the aid of Frère Didace, and Marie resolved “to go for nine consecutive days to your [Récollet] church where his body rests to present to him [my] vows and to say a mass in his honour.”58 In the moment she made this promise, she said she felt herself greatly relieved of pain and within three days she was back on her feet. Ill and in pain, Marie Boubert had with her cries attracted the attention of her neighbour who, having suffered herself, offered a solution that was both proven and symbolically rich. Madeleine Baudoin was the wife of Pottier’s colleague, M. Hameau, “the first notary of this town.” She too, had connections with the muchfavoured Godefroys. Madeleine Baudoin’s daughter Marguerite had married René Godefroy de Tonnancour, which made her the grandmother of Charles-Antoine, whose miraculous cure would be presented to the commission of inquiry in 1717. Through her recourse to the holy man and the cure she believed she received as a result, Marie Boubert had managed to associate herself with the most powerful family in the community, and with the community’s most powerful holy protector. Jean-Baptiste Pottier explained to Joseph Denis in the letter he wrote on behalf of his wife that it was the common sentiment of the people that Frère Didace was good (bon) and holy (saint), and that Marie felt it her duty to “to enhance the glory of her liberator” by reporting what she had experienced to the religious authorities.59 Miracles and cures were not a private matter between God and penitent. They were public. They recognized the efficacy of the holy man and his patronage and place in the community, they promoted his reputation for others, and they bore witness to the grace that God had bestowed upon the penitent. Furthermore, the common experience of receiving the divine aid of a local holy figure promoted the development of stronger community bonds and must have reassured French colonists living on the margins of the European Atlantic world that they were blessed and favoured by God. In the closely

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knit rural society of New France religion helped to forge and maintain effective social bonds among families, neighbours, friends, and clergy who participated in the same belief systems and shared experiences of the sacred. Miracles, especially cures, were expected of most any would-be saint, and some holy persons became known as much for what they accomplished after death as for what they had achieved in life. The sources that record miraculous events show how religious faith and community were intimately connected. Since those who benefited directly from the favours of the holy re-entered society in a changed position, it was their duty to give public witness to what they had experienced for the benefit of others. As one might expect, then, this was not the last time that Marie Boubert experienced the intervention of Frère Didace. In 1717, now a widow, she finally succeeded in appearing in person before Glandelet and his inquiry where she testified to her own cure many years before as well as to the miraculous cure of one of her daughters.60 Like Madeleine Baudoin before her, Marie Boubert thanked Frère Didace by continuing to advance his reputation through her own familial and social networks. Once the saint had favoured a family, he had a tendency to repeat the service. A successful intervention might lead people to adopt him as their patron of choice. To the faith community of Trois-Rivières, Frère Didace was accessible both physically and spiritually. He was one of their own, who had lived among them and whom they had known. Access to the holy person and to sites of devotion such as relics and the grave played a role in promoting veneration and preserving memories within close-knit communities like Trois-Rivières. Not only were miracles indispensable for advancing the reputations of local saints among the population but they were also part of collective experiences that strengthened social bonds among family and neighbours in the colony, while joining the Christian community of New France with the holy in heaven. Nor is it coincidental, I would suggest, that religious orders that recruited members from among the Canadian population and the intermediate classes were also those that tended to nurture some of the most successful colonial holy persons. In his biography of Frère Didace, Joseph Denis emphasized Frère Didace’s and his own connections to Canada. “He was the first Canadian lay brother just as I was the first Canadian novice priest, that is to say both of us come from French families established in this country.”61 The Récollets were the only order of priests open to Canadian-born men in New

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France.62 Of those that kept their ranks closed to Canadians, the Jesuits produced no widely venerated holy figures after 1650, and the Sulpicians produced none whatsoever. Likewise, female orders in Canada were generally receptive to local recruitment, and the number of women among the ranks of the holy testifies to the importance of local connections in the promotion of cults.63 While figures like Catherine de Saint-Augustin or Marguerite Bourgeoys may not have been Canadian-born, they were certainly venerated inside the convent by women who were, and who may well have spoken about them with their families and friends. French-born priests belonging to male orders did not generally have such local connections. This evidence is circumstantial, but nevertheless helps to explain why the Jesuit martyrs, for example, tend not to appear in colonial records as the objects of significant local cults or as popular miracle workers, while figures like Frère Didace rose to prominence.64 To what extent did veneration of Frère Didace extend beyond these networks and regional boundaries? It seems that the faithful from regions outside of Quebec and Trois-Rivières did experience his intervention, but not in significant enough numbers to warrant sending commissions of inquiry. Rather, news reached Church officials via letters from parish priests. Letters included in the “Actes” came from villages that lay generally close to either Quebec or TroisRivières, and from individuals who found some means of making contact with the holy man. For example, François Chése, a Sulpician priest from Montreal, Antoine Bruslé, a habitant of Becancour, near Trois-Rivières, and Julien Constantinau, the young son of habitants from Neuville near Quebec, all reported cures received through the application of relics, pieces of Frère Didace’s robe, to afflicted bodily regions.65 It is possible, however, that miracles were experienced in more far-flung regions that simply were not reported to the authorities. Joseph Denis admitted as much when he wrote, “Yet there are many others in the country and in places where [the vicars of the Church in Canada] cannot go without expense, but which give rise to all the people in Canada to venerate him like a saint.”66 It is impossible to say how much of this is hyperbole meant to promote a cause and how much reflects actual devotions. What is certain is that no less a colonial personage than the bishop of Quebec, Mgr de Saint-Vallier, actively supported Frère Didace’s cult and worked to promote it. The bishop’s support for the Récollet holy man was born of personal experience. Sometime in the winter

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or spring of 1716 he travelled to Trois-Rivières to visit the tomb of Frère Didace. For several months he had suffered from a persistent fever “which no remedy could lift.”67 Before Didace’s tomb and the altar of the Récollet church, he knelt and prayed each day for eight days in a row, and on the ninth he found himself completely cured. A circular letter of 9 June 1716 announced the miracle to all the priests and parishes of New France. The letter marked out in a public and official way open only to the bishop and perhaps the governor of New France, what many in Trois-Rivières already believed: Frère Didace had lived a holy life and was capable of working miracles. Perhaps the letter was read aloud from the pulpits of colonial churches that summer. If so, it would have encouraged colonists to have recourse to Didace in their needs and to imitate the holy man in their virtues.68 “We owe our cure only to the perseverance with which we asked God for it through the merits of his servant. We owe witness to the truth and render it voluntarily in order to show him our thanks and to raise in all hearts the confidence that we have in the holy Récollet brother whose virtues we ought to imitate.”69 New France, even in the eighteenth century, was officially a place where miracles might occur, a place that produced holy men and women who might procure them for the faithful. It is likely, then, that Frère Didace, or his reputation as a miracle worker at least, gradually spread beyond Quebec and Trois-Rivières. He was likely well known in the region of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré and Château-Richer, where his father continued to live after Didace died. He was also known in Dieppe, in France, where his father had been born. In 1721 the former Commissaire Provincial of the Récollets in Canada, Louis Hyacinthe de la Place, wrote to Didace’s relatives there urging them to always keep “the holy man before them.”70 What, if any, impact this letter had is unknown. But it is clear that over the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Didace’s reputation as a successful miracle worker steadily widened, especially in places where family and affinity networks spread news of him and where relics accompanied tales of his accomplishments.

T owa r d C a n o n iz in g Frère Di dace Shortly after Joseph Denis had compiled the “Actes” and departed for France, however, it all suddenly stopped. Miracles attributed to  Frère Didace ceased, or more precisely, the diocese stopped

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investigating and reporting them, and seemingly lost interest in his case. The reason remains a matter of some speculation. Every holy performance contains within it ambitions toward the universal. Local holy persons perform the traditions of sanctity and hope to be recognized as saints within the doctrine and theology of the Catholic Church. Local audiences likewise hope “their saint” might one day be recognized and venerated by the entire Church. Denis compiled his collection of Didace’s miracles with just such an ambition. On the surface, the case for Frère Didace was a good one. Denis could boast on his behalf a vibrant faith community, and miracles backed up by the authority of ecclesiastical investigation and approbation. He had the support of the bishop of New France, the Récollets, and other Church leaders in the colony. He could also boast supporters in France. M. du Belloy, a doctor of the Sorbonne who received an early copy the “Actes” from Denis, was a devotee.71 In a letter from 1719 included in the “Actes,” du Belloy praised not only the holy man, but also the land that could produce such sanctity. “All that we have learned as well as what we see can only inspire in us a holy jealousy; happy is the land in which your order has enjoyed such precious beginnings; happy the eyes which have seen it, and the hands, my Reverend Father, which have been worthy to cultivate it.”72 The “Actes” brought together almost two decades’ worth of evidence in favour of Frère Didace. Denis mentions in his introduction that Mgr de Saint-Vallier had even spoken directly to the pope about the case.73 There were good reasons, then, to hope the cause would find a receptive audience in Rome.74 It is not easy, therefore, to determine what happened to jeopardize this promising case. It requires careful sifting through the evidence Denis assembled in order to contextualize it within the political climate in France and the religious climate in Rome of the early eighteenth century. Du Belloy’s letter of support provides a preliminary clue as to the possible fate of Didace’s cause. Du Belloy was not an uncomplicated supporter. Denis identifies him as a doctor of the Sorbonne, but also as an appellant – one of those who had rejected the papal Bull Unigenitus issued by the pope in 1713. Unigenitus had condemned the Jansenist party in France, and specifically the writings of the leading Jansenist intellectual of the day, Pasquier Quesnel.75 Jansenism was a deeply contentious political and religious matter at the time. Jansenists were strict adherents to the theology of Saint Augustine in the matter of divine grace, which

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held that salvation could only be achieved through a free gift of grace from God and not through an act of human will or good works.76 From its origins in the 1640s through to the first decades of the eighteenth century, theological Jansenism developed a moral dimension marked by extreme austerity, a distrust of human nature, a great consciousness of sin, and rigour in the practice of penance.77 It also acquired a political dimension as the kings of France came to see it as a threat to religious unity, and therefore, to the political well-being of the state.78 The Bull Unigenitus had been drawn up in Rome with the participation of French government officials at the beginning of the 1710s in an effort to put an end to Jansenist factionalism once and for all. But Louis XIV died before it could be fully implemented, and his successor, the regent Duc Philippe d’Orléans, initially opposed it. Theologians at the Sorbonne seized the opportunity to rescind their initial support for Unigenitus and reassert the primacy of the Gallican Church over Rome. Pope Clement XI was furious. He could not tolerate such a protest; to do so would undermine his spiritual authority. So the controversy developed into a test of the pope’s will against the traditional independence of France’s bishops under the aegis of Gallicanism. Early in 1716 Clement excommunicated all those who refused to acknowledge the Bull. Together they were known as appellants. Among them was M. du Belloy. The matter was temporarily resolved in 1720 through a compromise initiated by the French government, but not before the Bull had become a serious issue between France and Rome, and between factions within the French Church. Joseph Denis arrived in Paris in 1719 in the midst of this bitter dispute. Because of a general Jansenist skepticism towards the miraculous, an appellant such as Du Belloy would have been an unlikely supporter of Frère Didace, whose claim to holiness rested so much on miraculous interventions in daily life. Indeed, it seems that when this doctor of the Sorbonne first caught wind of Denis’s mission in Paris he had mocked Frère Didace’s purported miracles. In response to this derision Denis sent him a copy of the “Actes.” The text had such an impact on him that Du Belloy revised his opinion and came to see the Canadian holy man as a symbolic antidote to all that was wrong with the French Church. “Hasten, my Reverend Father,” he wrote to Denis in the letter that was ultimately included with the “Actes,” “to bring to our hemisphere the graces of which it has for

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so long been rendered unworthy and with which God thus waters the piety of yours; here we reason and discuss in blindness the ­mysteries of grace while you delight in its secrets.”79 Even Jansenists were prepared to acknowledged the possibility of miracles, especially when they favoured sympathizers to their cause.80 The accounts of Frère Didace’s holiness must have played into the favourable perception this leading Jansenist had developed both of the Canadian Church and its French parent, and appealed to the Jansenist prioritizing of faith over reason. As we have seen previously, Canada had long held a reputation in France as a fine place to sanctify oneself, and so it may not have taken too much effort for a committed Jansenist to endorse Frère Didace, and to see in the simplicity of his life evidence of the workings of divine grace. Indeed, the fact that Frère Didace was a Récollet may have helped endear him to Jansenists. The Récollets in Canada had deep historical connections with the Jansenist party.81 Chrestien Le Clercq, a Récollet missionary who served in Acadia from 1675 to 1686, had offered a sympathetic view of Jansenist theology and was highly critical of the Jesuits, the chief theological adversaries of  Jansenism, in a history he wrote of the Récollets’ New France ­missions, published in 1691.82 Subsequently, Le Clercq’s work was quoted extensively by the leading Jansenist advocate of the time, Antoine Arnauld, in his polemical attacks on the Jesuits and their mission practices in Canada.83 Like the Récollets, Arnauld regarded the Jesuits as lax and compromising, particularly in their mission strategies. He preferred a policy of francisation, which he termed “humanization,” over the Jesuit approach of “finding God in all things.” He regarded wholesale cultural change, not just religious change, as essential to converting Indigenous peoples if conversion was to be anything more than a simple outward expression of adherence to Christianity.84 Because Jesuits did not insist on a radical change of life, according to Arnauld, the conversions they claimed in their Relations were nothing but “fables and fictions.” They had only tricked France into thinking “that this barbary, by a sudden infusion of grace, was made so civilized and well-ordered in such a short time.”85 Récollets, whose Canadian mission the Jesuits had interrupted and then taken over between 1625 and 1671, tended to agree. Pope Clement XI, however, was apparently not among those who were seduced by stories of religious marvels from the new world. If he did see the collection of materials about Frère Didace or speak

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with Mgr de Saint-Vallier, the bishop of Quebec, about Didace’s case, his reaction was almost certainly negative. It is unlikely Clement would have looked kindly upon a Récollet candidate for holiness amid the ongoing protests over Unigenitus. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to think the pope might have discouraged Saint-Vallier and others from pursuing the matter, thereby accounting for the sudden end to official promotion of a cult of devotion to Frère Didace within the diocese of Quebec and in France. There were no more investigations of miracles attributed to Didace after 1717, no more committees of inquiry, witness statements or carefully catalogued letters. It seems the politics of saint making had turned against Frère Didace in the wider Catholic world, and in Canada devotion to him seemingly all but disappeared. Without the support of the official hierarchy, Joseph Denis’s ambitious plan to achieve canonization for his friend stalled. It was one thing to collect evidence of a local cult and compose hagiographies about a local holy man, and quite another to obtain canonization or even a lesser form of official sanction. Causes were expensive and political. The Récollets had neither money nor influence. The hagiographic document that Denis had carefully and lovingly assembled failed to counter the disadvantageous contexts that greeted its arrival in France. When Mgr de Saint-Vallier died in 1727, Frère Didace lost a powerful supporter, and thirteen years of absentee bishops thereafter condemned his public cause.86 Yet, official silence does not mean that local memories and devotions disappeared as well. Indeed, the copy of the “Actes” that has come down to us, made in the early 1740s in Quebec, testifies to a continued interest in Frère Didace in Canada despite the change in official attitudes. The document was copied shortly after 1742 by Frère Didace Cliche, a grand-nephew of Frère Didace, who had taken the name of his honoured relative when he too joined the Canadian Récollets in 1735. Cliche copied out with care, and likely on his own initiative, the record of sanctity of Didace Pelletier and sent it to his father, Claude Cliche, a carpenter in the king’s navy then living in Charlesbourg.87 The work offers a hint that, despite a sudden official silence, devotion continued at least within Frère Didace’s family. Here and there suggestions of a continued veneration of Frère Didace in the wider population also persist, which remind us that the terms of local sanctity were defined by living communities of

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people and not in dusty ecclesiastical offices or before formal boards of inquiry. While reorganizing the parish register in 1770, the curé of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Pierre-René Hubert, inserted a note at the bottom of one entry that recorded a baptism for which Frère Didace had served as godfather many years before. The note reads: “Claude Pelletier, who is spoken of above, is Frère Didace, Récollet, dead in the odour of sanctity at the Récollet convent in Quebec around 1700.”88 Although the note is mistaken in the place and time of Didace’s death, it nevertheless records an enduring memory. Claude Pelletier is the Frère Didace, the one everyone already knows. The one who died a saint.

C o n c l u s ion Following the death of a local saint, the holy person remained before the public through the enactment of miracles that involved people of every social class, lay and ecclesiastical, in the colony. Cures were important not just as spiritual and medical marvels experienced by individuals, but as markers of the integrity and sacrality of the entire community. The performance of symbol-rich ceremonies steeped in tradition offered the chance to resolve personal crises and the accompanying social dislocations that threatened to exclude individuals from the life of the community. For lay believers, local holy persons offered an accessible way into the faith, and people in the colony believed in the power of local holy persons to act as patrons and advocates. As friends told other friends what they had heard, seen, or even experienced themselves, holy reputations spread through local channels. Family members urged each other to pray to an intercessor whom they had found to be effective. In such ways, cults of belief in local holy persons spread through the colony, and religion reinforced vital relationships among the faithful, and between them and heaven. Miraculé(e)s saw it as their duty to proclaim publicly the graces they had received by reporting them to religious officials who might grant them legitimacy, and also by standing before their friends, family, and neighbours to show how they and their community had been blessed. People at all levels of society had roles to play in the social drama of the miracle. If we free up analysis from an elite / popular dichotomy of belief and practice, we open up the possibility of understanding the processes that led to the diffusion and reception of cults

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throughout society in real time. As a consequence, we allow more room for a better understanding of the social and cultural roles that miracles and the local holy persons who procured them played in early Canadian cultural and religious life. Frère Didace Pelletier and others like him offered their faith communities the incomparably important possibility of procuring God’s favour within the bounds of established traditions, relationships, and well-known ritual performances. In so doing, they reinforced public cohesion by solidifying bonds among family, friends, neighbours, and communities. Even in the face of failed ambitions to join the ranks of the universal saints of the Church, local holy men and women could continue to edify and serve their communities, aiding and maintaining relations between the faithful and the divine.

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7 Hagiography: Writing Memory

On Saint Valentine’s Day, 1672, the new superior of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal, François Dollier de Casson, strapped on a pair of snowshoes and went for a walk. The former soldier, well known for his adventurous streak, wandered onto the ice of what he thought was the frozen St Lawrence River. Either the ice that year was not as thick as usual or he stumbled upon a fissure, for he was soon sinking fast into the cold water below. Trapped and partially submerged, Dollier somehow managed to survive for hours before being rescued. The accident, however, almost killed him. He would spend months recuperating in the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Montreal, eventually regaining enough strength to return to France in 1674 where lingering ill-health would nevertheless force him to remain for four years. As he lay convalescing in Montreal, Dollier seemingly passed the time in conversation with Jeanne Mance, the aging foundress of the hospital and co-founder, along with Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, of the settlement of Ville-Marie on Montreal island. She had been among the first settlers to arrive in 1642 on the island in the western St Lawrence River, with a project of establishing a mission on behalf of a group of wealthy and devout French backers under the name Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle-France. She would have had endless stories of adventure and religious enlightenment with which to entertain and edify the Sulpician superior. An eager student, Dollier soon began to write a history of Montreal in which Mance figured prominently.1 He included all he had learned from the foundress in a manuscript he sent to his community in Paris in 1673.2

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At about the same time, a young Canadian-born nun belonging to the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, the nursing order that staffed and ran the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, also sought out the aging matriarch to learn about the pioneering days of Ville-Marie. Marie Morin was busily collecting information for a history that would tell the story of her community to those sisters who remained behind in France in the order’s motherhouse at Laflèche.3 Jérôme Le Royer de la Dauversière, who was the original force behind the Montreal project and the Société de Notre-Dame, had founded the community there in 1636. It was he and Jeanne Mance who arranged for the Sisters to take over the Montreal hospital beginning in 1659, while Mance continued to serve as administratrice for life, as she was doing when Dollier and Morin came calling. Mance enjoyed telling stories about the founding of Montreal, its early days, and her life there,4 and Morin carefully recorded the matriarch’s memories for inclusion in the chronicles of her own community. Like her contemporaries who received recognition as holy women in New France, Jeanne Mance was a foundress who had cultivated a religious vocation in France, come to Canada to establish a religious house, and lived what by most standards must be considered an extraordinary life of piety and commitment. In the final years of her life she apparently took care to ensure that her story was recorded by two chroniclers: one the influential superior of the Sulpician seminary and seigneur of the island of Montreal, the other the memorykeeper of the Hôtel-Dieu. Yet, she did not come to share the status that local holy women of the likes of Marie de l’Incarnation or Catherine de Saint-Augustin enjoyed. Neither of the works her chosen chroniclers composed was published until long after her death in 1673, and neither of the works conformed to the hagiographic narrative.5 Marie Morin did not even begin writing until 1697. When she finally completed her work in 1725, it consisted of an ongoing collection of memories and first-hand accounts typical of institutional chronicles. In it, Jeanne Mance appears as a respected and able administrator, but only as the forerunner to the true establishment of the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1659. The work circulated internally, but remained unpublished until the twentieth century.6 Dollier de Casson, in contrast, wrote his “Histoire de Montréal” very quickly. Indeed, too quickly from the perspective of holy biography, completing it before Jeanne Mance died, thus ensuring that the all-important account of the pious and edifying death of the

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would-be saint remained untold. On the whole, his work focuses on Montreal, not on Mance, and eschews the hagiographic structure in favour of an annual historical chronicle. While Dollier suggests that it was God who sent Mance to Canada, moving her by a secret and powerful grace, he had other purposes for writing than to support a reputation for sanctity.7 Furthermore, while Dollier may well have intended that the Sulpicians publish his “Histoire” in France, an untimely papal prohibition against the publication of mission accounts in 1673 meant that the work remained in manuscript form.8 It circulated only among the Sulpicians, and languished in their archives until the French Revolution. From there it found its way into the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris, where it lay undiscovered until 1844.9 It was published for the first time only in 1868. By telling her story to these two chroniclers, Jeanne Mance may have intended to build the kind of relationship with the faith community that might ensure after-death support for her lived performance of holiness. Dollier must have seemed to her the best possibility and Morin a convenient spare. The Sulpicians and the Hôtel-Dieu enjoyed a close and mutually supportive relationship.10 In the event that the formal, ecclesiastical biography was delayed, however, Morin might provide the kind of impetus internal to one’s own community that could sustain a cause and propel it forward. Yet, for some reason her chosen writers failed to provide the needed biography. Why did such a seemingly promising performance of the traditions of holiness not elicit an equal response from her community? What can the apparent failure of Jeanne Mance’s cause tell us about the role of hagiographic texts in processes of become holy in New France? In this final chapter, I draw on this case, and for comparison, those of Mance’s contemporaries and successors in Montreal, Marguerite Bourgeoys and Marguerite d’Youville, to explore the role hagiography played in bridging the gap between local and universal sanctity and establishing the kinds of local relationships essential to successful performances of holiness. In considering how ideals of sanctity changed over time and how hagiographic discourse both responded to and shaped impressions, ideas, and memories, I look particularly at changes in the gendered language of holiness in these texts, from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth.

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P r e s e rv in g Memori es Jeanne Mance was born in the provincial French city of Langres, Champagne, the daughter of a minor noble family. From youth she showed a precocious religiosity. She remained unmarried living in her father’s house until the age of twenty-nine. When her father died, she moved to Paris to pursue the religious vocation that would ultimately bring her to Canada. Along the way she met some of the most influential and wealthy members of the dévot party from whom she secured support and funding to found a hospital in New France. For the next thirty years, Mance ran the Hôtel-Dieu and was the de facto co-founder of Montreal and spiritual mother to the colonists. When the colony faced destruction from relentless Iroquois attacks in the early 1650s, she ensured its survival by arranging a timely and generous gift of money from the Hôtel-Dieu’s foundation.11 Her life, therefore, exhibits remarkable biographical similarities to those of other holy women of New France. Indeed, the Annales de l’HôtelDieu de Québec provide a tantalizing, though perhaps not unexpected, hint that when she died she enjoyed a local reputation for  holiness. The death of Mademoiselle Mance. Mademoiselle Mance, of whom we have previously spoken, remained in this community at Montreal until her death with the title of foundress, edifying with her great virtues all religious and secular residents. She died there with a reputation for sanctity, in the year 1674, and was buried honourably in [the Sisters of Saint Joseph’s] church.12 Although mistaken about the year of Mance’s death, this chronicler nevertheless linked her to several key biographical features associated with early modern female holiness – she was a foundress, she edified the local community, and she died well. The passage, however, was written many years later, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, and in Quebec rather than Montreal.13 Both in the mistaken date and in the suggestion of an enduring, though hazy, reputation, this passage suggests both the importance and the difficulty of using memory to sustain a belief community following a  performance of holiness. Another passage from the Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec concerning Catherine de Saint-Augustin

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further emphasizes the role of memory and hagiographic discourse in advancing a cause. Considering the impact of Paul Ragueneau’s Vie de Catherine de Saint-Augustin on the Augustinians of the HôtelDieu, the annaliste wrote: “The Reverend Father Paul Ragueneau composed a history of her life, which we keep in our library, where one can see the extraordinary ways Our Lord led her, and the excessive sufferings that she endured. Her memory will be eternally blessed in our house where we consider her as one of our most precious protectors.”14 As long as living memories of Catherine endured, written histories were perhaps superfluous, but by the second decade of the eighteenth century when the Annales were compiled, the authoritative text had begun to take its place at the centre of Catherine’s faith community. Her memory would endure, the annaliste seems to suggest, because of the text. Here we have evidence of the creation of the kind of textual community that theorist Brian Stock describes – a micro-society built around a common understanding of a shared text. Ragueneau’s book transformed important ideas and symbols of the group’s consciousness and cohesion into a form of authoritative knowledge, and even into forms of behaviour – the ritual veneration of Catherine’s memory alluded to in the passage above.15 Over time, the holy biography came to replace the personal memories of those who had actually known Catherine in life.16 Consequently, it was of the utmost importance to those who shaped memory and action – those who held power within the group that formed the textual community – that the text impart the correct message and the orthodox interpretation. Hagiographic discourse was shaped by living memory, but it also came to shape the enduring memories of the community that valued the Life and invested it with meaning. Universal categories of sanctity and memories of a real life met in the hagiographic text to create a reputation that might endure over time. When Marie Morin and Dollier de Casson failed to produce texts that might fill such a role for Jeanne Mance, a vitally important part in the process of becoming holy was missing. Jeanne Mance’s career began promisingly enough. When she arrived in Paris in 1639 Canada was “en vogue,” according to Morin. Someone advancing an audacious religious vocation might find an enthusiastic audience in the capital. Morin says that the foundation of the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec a year later “caused a great commotion in Paris and exited notable people to imitate [the duchesse d’Aiguillon]

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in her charity and piety towards the poor of Canada whether French or sauvage.”17 With the help of some cousins, Mance soon met influential people associated with the colony such as the former Jesuit missionary, Charles Lalemant. She socialized with CharlotteMarguerite de Montmorency, Princesse de Condé, and even the duchesse d’Aiguillon herself. By the end of the summer of 1640 even the queen, Anne of Austria, had heard of her and arranged an interview at the Louvre Palace.18 But it was the extremely wealthy and recently widowed Angélique Faure, Madame du Bullion, who provided Mance with a way and a purpose to go to New France.19 After only four visits together, Madame du Bullion asked Mance to take charge of a hospital she wished to found anonymously in Canada. She agreed to pay Mance an annual pension of 1,000 livres for life out of a total initial grant of 60,000 livres for the new hospital. According to Morin, Mance enjoyed telling the story of how it had taken her several trips by night to Madame de Bullion’s house to cart away all the money, and how fear that she would be robbed or killed made her change the hour of her visit and the porters she hired on each occasion.20 With the foundation money secured, Mance made her way to La Rochelle in the spring of 1641 to find a ship for Canada. It was there that she first met Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière, and her association with the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal began. Mance was certainly aware of Dauversière’s project and it seems that he too had prior knowlege of her plans. At the entrance to the Jesuit house, the two met face to face for the first time; they exchanged views on their respective projects and agreed to unite their efforts.21 There was a problem, however, and it was here that Jeanne Mance exhibited for the first time the administrative talents and fundraising abilities that later came to define memories of her life and perhaps also perceptions of her character. Dauversière told Mance that the Société had only managed to muster eight associates and was dangerously short of funds. Mance suggested he write a short justification of the Société’s plans and address it to the wealthy and devout noble women who had played host to her in Paris over the previous summer. Dauversière agreed. “Les véritables motifs de messieurs et dames de la Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des sauvages de la Nouvelle-France” appeared that autumn and circulated widely among the Parisian elite.22 When the associates of the Société next met on 27 February 1642, thirty-nine members raised 200,000 livres to support the Montreal project.23

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In the space of just two years Mance had gone from living the life of a pious spinster in a provincial city to being a key member of a group that intended to establish a new French mission and colony in one of the most difficult and dangerous regions of New France. To Mance in 1641 the path ahead must finally have seemed clear, but the success of the project would not come easily. Indeed, the Montreal project was beset with problems from the start. When the party of settlers arrived in Quebec in the fall of 1641 they were greeted with a less than enthusiastic welcome. New France was gripped by a siege mentality as a result of war with the Iroquois, and colonial administrators including Governor Charles Hault de Montmagny considered the Montreal project the height of folly. The tiny French military force in the colony would have no way of defending a group of inexperienced colonists so far inland, and a settlement at Montreal only threatened to draw resources and people away from the capital. It made far more sense for the newcomers to remain at Quebec and  fortify the city. As representatives of the Société, however, de Maisonneuve and Mance were both determined to fulfil the goals they had been given, and in the spring of 1642 the small company set off westward. Ville-Marie struggled in its early years, especially when the collapse of Huronia in 1649 freed the Iroquois to concentrate their attacks on the St Lawrence valley.24 Montreal was exposed and isolated. Mance was in France at the time, trying to drum up more support from the Société with tales of the heroism and suffering of the colonists. When she returned and saw the increasingly desperate state of the colony, she devised a plan with de Maisonneuve to transfer to the Société 22,000 livres of Madame de Bullion’s money, set aside in Paris for the use of the hospital. The money would finance the recruitment of new settler-soldiers who would reinforce the settlement’s defences. In the fall of 1651, de Maisonneuve left Montreal for France, promising to return with at least one hundred new settlers or not at all. It took two years, but he succeeded. This Grande recrue, as it is known, has acquired mythic status in the history of Montreal; it is credited with saving the settlement and the city that would grow on the island.25 The new recruits had an immediate impact, joining its militia and helping to clear more land. A temporary peace between the French and the Iroquois in the middle of the decade allowed new construction to proceed under favourable conditions.26 Mance’s donation, it must have seemed, had saved the colony.27

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The money, however, was not given without conditions. In exchange for the donation, de Maisonneuve had promised the HôtelDieu one hundred arpents of land and half the buildings and livestock then in Montreal. Moreover, the Hôtel-Dieu was to receive an  annual rent of 1,100 livres from the Société de Notre-Dame.28 Although the value of these goods did not come close to equalling the 22,000 livres Mance had given, Dollier de Casson would later suggest that she had made the gift contingent upon the exchange.29 For her part, however, Mance claimed that she had not bought the land, “because I saw very clearly that it did not equal the sum I had given, but my only consideration was to save the whole with this part.”30 The money, she said, was a donation made out of a religious commitment to save the Montreal project and with it the HôtelDieu. In Paris, Madame du Bullion approved the terms of the deal, which were ratified on 3 March 1655.31 In the context of a holy life, such an altruistic donation might provide evidence of an inspired performance. Yet, despite Mance’s protestations, overt associations with money were ever suspect within the context of sanctity. Furthermore, Jeanne Mance did not shy away from appearing in public to rally support for Montreal. In 1658, she travelled to France to try once again to revive the flagging interest of the Société in the Montréal project. It was then that she arranged with Dauversière for the Sisters of Saint-Joseph to take over the Hôtel-Dieu, while she herself took up the position of administratrice for life in the contract of foundation while refusing to join the new order.32 Both Catherine de Saint-Augustin, who served as depositaire (treasurer) of her community, and Marie de l’Incarnation, who was superior of the Ursulines, engaged in extensive administrative activities, but in the spiritual journals they kept managed to masked this aspect of their lives behind religious discourse and a rhetoric of female humility and obedience. Mance, however, apparently kept no such journal; nor did she seem to cultivate a meaningful relationship with any specific confessor who might defend her actions after her death. Slowly her reputation as an administrator and accountant outstripped whatever reputation for holiness she might have developed. In 1662 Mance again travelled to France to rally the associates. This time the stakes were particularly high. Dauversière had died in  1659, leaving the Société rudderless. During a meeting on 24  February 1663 the remaining members decided to cede their

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rights to the seigneurie of Montreal to the Compagnie de SaintSulpice, whose priests had been in the colony since 1657. Soon afterward, Mance learned of a second devastating death, that of Madame de Bullion, on 25 May 1664. The following year her old friend and ally Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve left Canada for good, turning over the colony to the Sulpician fathers. By the mid-1660s, then, all the leading founders of Ville-Marie had passed on, leaving Mance essentially alone and without any institutional base other than her role as titular administratrice of the Hôtel-Dieu. Her one consolation in these years was a cure she finally found in France for a broken arm that had healed badly in 1657. While visiting the tomb of the recently deceased Jean-Jacques Olier, the founder of the Sulpicians, Mance believed she received a miraculous cure.33 Even here, however, the contrast with other colonial holy figures is striking. Jeanne Mance was the recipient of divine intervention, a miraculée, favoured, certainly, but not a holy patron herself. These setbacks in the final years of her life were perhaps what had caused her to reach out to new authority figures: Dollier de Casson and Marie Morin, who represented the new influential institutions in Montreal – the Sulpicians and the Sisters of Saint Joseph. Historian Jodi Bilinkoff argues that such relationships, and the spiritual writings they might produce, were vital for the public and posthumous reputations of would-be holy women in the Early Modern period.34 No holy performance is without its problematic elements, and one of the functions of hagiography is to smooth over potentially troublesome parts and adapt the life as a whole to prevailing social and doctrinal expectations and biographical patterns. Jeanne Mance’s role as an administrator and her associations with money constituted problematic, but not insurmountable, elements of her performance. In the absence of a spiritual journal that might have explained away any departures from the prevailing models of female religiosity and transformed them into virtues, however, these issues threatened to compound. The support of someone like Dollier de Casson, who granted Mance a prominent and favourable place in his “Histoire de Montréal,” would have been vitally important for adapting the live performance to the universal categories of holiness. Despite a somewhat problematic oeuvre, there was no reason to think in 1673 that Jeanne Mance would not join the ranks of the colonial holy that were then filling so quickly. However, in the final years of her life

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controversy developed over the very issue for which she has perhaps become best known – the donation she made to the Société that had financed the Grande recrue. In the 1660s the new vicar apostolic of Quebec, Mgr François de Laval, began asking difficult questions about the terms of this donation. On a visit to Montreal in the summer of 1665, he asked to see the Hôtel-Dieu accounts. In reviewing the revenues and expenditures, he noticed that only a portion of the annual rent of 1,100 livres promised by the Société and then the Sulpicians, who had taken over its contractual debts, had actually been spent. Asked why, Mance told him that she had never received the money. In a letter of October 1666 that refers to Mance as the “administratrice of revenue belonging to the poor of the Montreal hospital,” the bishop asked the new Intendant of New France, Jean Talon, to order the Sulpicians to give an account of the funds. He then brought a suit against them before the sovereign council to recover the missing money.35 Although Jeanne Mance distanced herself from this legal process, she could not avoid association with it. The charges that Laval brought prompted her to pen a defence of the loan, in which she claimed she gave the money only after considerable prayer and in a spirit of charity.36 She also offered an accounting of the total value of goods and services the Sulpicians had rendered the Hôtel-Dieu over the years, including lands, buildings, household goods, furniture, livestock, food, arms for defence, and even a large clock, all in an effort to put the matter to rest.37 Nevertheless, what she considered a donation looked to Laval a lot like a sale whose terms the Société and the Sulpicians had not fulfilled. The controversy served to reinforce Mance’s role as an administrator in the very years she may have been attempting to distance herself from such a problematic reputation. The issue of the 22,000 livres dragged on for more than two decades, straddling Mance’s death in 1673, and distracting the Sulpician clerics who, under different circumstances, may have been the greatest advocates for her holiness.38 Marie Morin and the Sisters of Saint Joseph, for their part, seemed to regard Mance as a respected elder, but not really a member of their community or their hospital.39 What writings Mance herself left behind consisted primarily of business letters and contracts concerned with the administration of the hospital and the affairs of the Société, not the religious reflections or meditations one might have expected of a holy woman.40

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As an example of an aborted cause, Mance’s case illustrates not only the essential need for a performance of holiness to resonate locally, but also the requirement for key supporters who could help bridge any gaps between the live performance and the universal categories and expectations of sanctity. Without confessors invested in her reputation, an institutional affiliation with the Sisters of SaintJoseph that might have sustained interest in her during the difficult times that followed her death, a journal to defend her spirituality in the rhetoric of female holiness, and hagiographies to support her cause, memories of Jeanne Mance’s holy performance first wavered and then waned. The process of becoming holy stalled and her caused languished until the early twentieth century, when it was rekindled within a new religious revival inside the Quebec Church.41

M a r g u e r it e B ourgeoys The case of Mance’s younger contemporary, fellow Montrealer, and sometime travel companion, Marguerite Bourgeoys, further reinforces the importance of institutional support and the need for the “correct” hagiographic discourse to sustain and advance a holy reputation. Like Mance, Bourgeoys travelled to New France as a laywoman with a religious mission. She wished to found a teaching community of nuns in Montreal, which, following the example of several communities of filles séculaires, or secular nuns, founded in France at the same time, would remain uncloistered and free of many of the doctrinal and institutional limits the post-Tridentine Church wished to place on religious women.42 In Canada, she established the Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Montréal in 1657, a teaching community under the aegis of a Marian model of itinerant female devotion and piety.43 Until 1698, Bourgeoys and those who joined her remained uncloistered and outside formal orders structured around vows.44 In 1671 Bourgeoys arranged for letters patent from the king, which recognized the legitimacy and legal standing of her project, and in 1676 she opened a boarding school for girls in Ville-Marie. Nevertheless, in 1698 the Congrégation eventually succumbed to pressure from the Bishop of Quebec to accept a modified constitution and monastic rule that required the sisters to take simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but avoided strict cloister. At the age of seventy-eight, Marguerite Bourgeoys, a secular all her life, became Soeur du Saint-Sacrement.45

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Bourgeoys lived just two more years. Following her death in 1700, the Congrégation sisters immediately began collecting her writings and documenting her life in preparation for the composition of a holy biography. Despite a performance that avoided or mitigated many of the problems that had plagued Jeanne Mance – Bourgeoys took holy vows and was a member of a recognized community, she wrote a spiritual defence of her institution and religious life, and generally avoided public displays of administrative power – the nuns realized that problems existed with her performance.46 Her long struggle against the bishop to remain uncloistered and her independent voyages across the Atlantic threatened expected models of obedient and humble holy women, particularly at the beginning of the eighteenth century when attitudes towards religious women were beginning to harden. Any ambition toward wider recognition or even canonization required an authoritative biography composed by a member of the clerical hierarchy which would advance the correct message about someone who had spent most of her life as a secular, teaching religion to girls in public. In 1715 they asked Charles de Glandelet, a prominent priest and influential Church official in Canada, to compose the work that would present their foundress to the Catholic world.47 Glandelet was already familiar with Bourgeoys and with the institution she had established. He had likely served as her confessor for a time, and just a year after her death he had compiled a short collection of her spiritual writings under the title “Le vray esprit de Marguerite Bourgeoys et de l’Institut.” Furthermore, he maintained a very close spiritual relationship with Marie Barbier, her successor as superior of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Montréal.48 He was a natural choice for the task. Glandelet agreed to the project, and within a very short time – only five days by his own reckoning – he had composed “La vie de la Soeur Bourgeoys.”49 Much of this work duplicates his 1701 collection of Bourgeoys’s writings and, perhaps not surprisingly, conveys an air of having been composed in considerable haste.50 The sisters, it seems, were not impressed. Soeur Marie-Marguerite de Saint-Joseph wrote to Glandelet in February of 1716 to notify him of quibbles the sisters had with certain aspects of the manuscript. They intended the book to be disseminated widely, they said, and so it needed to be accurate and clear. They asked that Glandelet not exaggerate, and that he change certain words and phrases to clarify meaning. They pointed out that the Le Ber family, although generous

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supporters of the Congrégation, had not paid for the construction of the motherhouse as Glandelet had claimed. Rather, the motherhouse “was not built except by the great economies, savings, work, and oversight of the sisters themselves.” They asked Glandelet to emphasize Marguerite Bourgeoys’s strictness in enforcing community rules (perhaps as a result of the controversy surrounding their cloister and vows), as well as her quickness to forgive transgressions. And they hoped he might add somewhere that she always had the sisters pray for the king and the royal family.51 Above all, however, the sisters expressed concern with the sort of  example Marguerite seemed to offer readers in the pages of Glandelet’s text. Specifically, they worried that he had not made it sufficiently clear that her voyage to Canada in 1653, which she had undertaken alone, was to be considered something extraordinary and admirable in a holy woman, and not behaviour appropriate to the average (female) believer. “While it seems evident that God wanted this voyage, yet, as the people of the world no longer have the simplicity that reigned before, so it is said, would it not be necessary to indicate that this conduct is more to be admired than imitated, or something equivalent?”52 The Congrégation’s response to Glandelet’s book offers interesting insight into how nuns tackled the delicate issue of reprimanding and correcting male religious authorities at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the language of politesse and female obedience of the time the issues the sisters raise appear minor, yet they were significant enough to put a pause on a project they held dear, and finally to derail it altogether. Bourgeoys’s solo voyage to New France called into question her comportment, humility, and obedience and, by association, those of her religious family. Crossing the sea without proper male supervision threatened her reputation and theirs as virtuous women, and challenged conventions of appropriate female piety. Glandelet’s text failed to address these concerns. It also was inadequate to interpret Marguerite Bourgeoys’s performance in a manner that reflected growing sensibilities in France about female holiness in a world the nuns themselves evidently regarded as increasingly cynical. The key for any Life of Margeurite Bourgeoys, it seems, would be to show the faith community, and especially the ecclesiastical hierarchy, that what the religiously heroic had accomplished was exceptional and not to be undertaken willy-nilly. Marguerite Bourgeoys

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was to be admired as evidence of the extraordinary work of God, but not imitated. To the nuns of the Congrégation, however, problems lay not in her performance, but rather in the hasty way their chosen biographer had composed a text they evidently hoped would advance her cause for sanctity. Where male-authored hagiography often imposes an identity on female subjects according to pre-­existing models of sanctity, here we have an example of female religious demanding that the Life of the holy woman be made to fit with prevailing social and doctrinal concerns.53 The purpose of hagiography, at least in part, was to make the holy performance broadly palatable. This reaction to Glandelet’s text did not mean the ideal biography would betray its subject, but rather that it had to interpret her holiness carefully and correctly in order to succeed in that purpose. It had to create as well as reflect correct memories. It is unclear whether Glandelet made the requested changes, as the only version of the book to have survived is the original thanks to a  fire that destroyed the Congrégation’s motherhouse in 1893.54 Certainly, the work was not published. Did the sisters remain unsatisfied? It seems likely they did. While the first effort to produce a worthy hagiography had failed, the sisters did not give up. They soon selected a second author to complete the project, a priest of the Séminaire des Missions Étrangères de Paris, Michel-François Ransonnet. Ransonnet had never set foot in Canada, but was recommended for the job by Pierre-Herman Dosquet (1691–1777), chaplain of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame from 1721–23, a member of the Séminaire des Missions Étrangères, and a future bishop of Quebec (1733–36).55 Once again, the sisters packed up their precious documents and memories and sent them off, this time with hopes of greater success. A generation removed and an ocean away from Marguerite Bourgeoys, and never having met or corresponded with her, Ransonnet was entirely dependent upon the sources sent to him, which included all of her papers and Glandelet’s two previous works. Although he claimed he found these sources incomplete and inadequate for the job at hand, he nevertheless managed to write a short work, which was published in France in 1728 under the title, La vie de la sœur Marguerite Bourgeois.56 Ransonnet followed Glandelet closely, but added supplementary material and, on the whole, produced a work that is much better organized and written. His book adapted the original performance of holiness to early eighteenth-century expectations by presenting

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Bourgeoys’s life as an act of highest charity that was exceptional and open to admiration but not to imitation, exactly as the sisters wished. “In reading this life,” he writes, “one cannot but admire what Sister Bourgeoys achieved.”57 He believed the final version of the book sufficient to give a very high idea of Bourgeoys’s perfections and to authorize a universal veneration of her memory.58 Finally, the appropriate book expressing the correct sentiments in the right contexts had been produced. The sisters of the Congrégation de Notre Dame played a significant role in pushing forward the project when it risked stalling, and in adapting Marguerite Bourgeoys’s performance to prevailing expectations of female sanctity. Their determination to see through the biography they wanted paid off. Marguerite Bourgeoys would go on to enjoy a stellar career and achieve canonization in 1990.

N e w M o t i fs Ransonnet’s challenge in writing this Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys was to make her acceptable both to the sisters of the Congrégation and to an eighteenth-century audience whose ideas and expectations of holiness were changing. The eighteenth century was a period of spiritual retrenchment in Catholic France and New France following the heady days of penitential asceticism and charity in the aftermath of the wars of Religion and the Fronde, and in Canada, settlement and the Iroquois wars.59 This was particularly the case in respect to female mysticism and asceticism. In France, nuns and convents came under increasing ecclesiastical and lay scrutiny. They were widely subjected to accusations of disorder by Church authorities and ­writers, and by increasingly skeptical secular critics espousing the new enlightenment philosophy.60 Perhaps to deflect such critics, Ransonnet adopted a masculine rhetoric of sanctity to explain and justify Bourgeoys’s very public and for the most part uncloistered life. Religious zeal, “even in the most perfect daughters” he writes, normally leads only to prayers offered in support of (male) evangelical workers. “But Sister Bourgeoys had, if one can express it thus, a  virile zeal, an interior and exterior zeal, a complete zeal.”61 To explain her holiness, Ransonnet had rhetorically made Marguerite into a man. A complete religious zeal of the sort he believed she possessed, he seems to say, is necessarily a male, virile quality, and somehow Bourgeoys had managed to overcome her sex to become holy.

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Such concepts of female holiness were certainly not new in the early eighteenth century, but they were begining to reassert themselves. Etymologically the word “virtue,” central to ideas of sanctity from the very early Church, descends from the Latin vir meaning “man.” In the paradigmatic third-century text of female holiness, The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas, Perpetua has a vision in which she becomes a man when faced with death in the arena. An influential late fourth-century commentary on this text by Saint Augustine of Hippo argued that holy zeal causes in female martyrs “the manliness of their soul [to] hide the sex of their flesh.”62 These works had an extraordinary influence on the female model of sanctity within the Catholic Church well into the modern period. Proponents of Teresa of Avila’s canonization in the early seventeenth century invoked similar language, calling her “a virile woman” in possession of a “manly soul” in documents related to her cause.63 In addition, the papacy in 1699 condemned Quietism, whose proponents argued for the complete passivity of the human soul before God. In so doing the Church cast doubt on mystical vocations most often, though not exclusively, associated with women. The theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, attacked female mystics in particular in his condemnation of Quietism, sparing only two seventeenth-century figures: Teresa of Avila and Marie de l’Incarnation.64 Perhaps also in response to the new skepticism surrounding female performances of holiness, François Vachon de Belmont described Jeanne Le Ber as “fortem virili pectore virginem” (“a strong virgin with a virile heart”) in the account of her life he wrote in 1722.65 Likewise, in a 1724 hagiography, the Jesuit historian P.F.X. Charlevoix described Marie de l’Incarnation as manly in both her appearance and character. “Her features were regular, but it was a male beauty, and one could see there all the grandeur of her courage.”66 Protestations of such frequency as this deflected charges of disorderliness that increasingly fell on female religious, particularly mystics, and on female religious institutions in eighteenth-century France, and also in Canada.67 By this time, Church tradition had long regarded the saintly soul as essentially a male soul regardless of the sex of the body. After a long period of female religious action in the early seventeenth century, which in New France saw the foundation of new communities, these ideas acquired renewed strength. Hagiographers who continued to write about holy women did so

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with a view toward defending the credibility of their works and their subjects, smoothing and adapting the holy performance to changing ideals, rather than advancing and supporting a performance in the way that Paul Ragueneau, for instance, had supported Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s mysticism in 1671 by accusing male observers of a lack of humility. In France lay writers also voiced suspicion of religious women and of convents. The idea that the moral woman was a “natural” woman, a wife and mother, and that convents went against nature and ­created irrational women who might challenge the ordered social hierarchy, took hold in mid-eighteenth-century politics. Jansenists associated with the Parlement de Paris, Mita Choudhury shows, used these arguments to accuse the monarchical government of weakness, disorderliness, and an overbearing and authoritarian manner they identified as effeminate. Meanwhile, enlightenment writers like Diderot drew on the troubled reputations of nuns and convents to likewise criticize the state; both, Diderot believed, undermined individual freedom and (manly) independence.68 Such arguments went a long way toward creating a rhetorical and political separation between the Old Regime, which reformers believed had collaborated with the Church to create an irrational, weak, and dependent state, and the new vigorous and virile nation they wished to construct.69

M a r g u e r it e d ’ Youvi lle The account of the life of the last great holy person of the French regime in Canada, Marguerite d’Youville, clearly illustrates the changes that had crept into the social and doctrinal expectations of holiness from the early colonial period to the mid-eighteenth century. Marguerite d’Youville was born in New France in 1701, and like Marie de l’Incarnation before her, married, had children, and was widowed all before the age of twenty-eight. Her husband was a successful, if somewhat ruthless, Montreal fur trader. When he died, he left Marguerite with two young sons and a considerable debt, which she was forced to renounce. From his estate, she managed to retain only the house she was living in where she successfully continued her husband’s business for some years. At the same time, she began actively nurturing her burgeoning piety. She joined several confraternities and began doing charity work with the city’s poor. On the last day of 1737, three other women joined her in her home

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and formed a lay association dedicated to serving the urban poor. The four women took informal vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In 1738 they moved into a house large enough to receive poor and indigent boarders. The tiny community grew slowly, and initially drew the derision of the local population. In a spirit that recalls the critiques of female houses in France at the time, Montrealers accused the sisters of carrying on M. d’Youville’s illicit liquor trade. Neighbours called the sisters the soeurs grises, not just because of the grey habits they wore, but on account of the rumours of their drunkenness (gris and griser being homonyms referring to the colour grey and intoxication respectively). With the passage of time, however, the community overcame its reputation, and by 1747 it was stable enough for the governor of New France to entrust it with the care of the HôpitalGénéral de Montréal, a hospice for the poor and indigent. Like Jeanne Mance almost a hundred years earlier, Marguerite d’Youville proved an able administrator, meeting the challenges of resurrecting an institution that had been run practically to ruin by its previous overseers, and a community that was beset with debt and suffered numerous setbacks as a result of war, fire, illness, and foreign conquest. By the time Marguerite d’Youville died in 1771, the house she had founded and the hospital were firmly established, both materially and spiritually. Charles-Marie-Magdeleine (Dufrost) d’Youville (1729–90) wrote the first Life of Marguerite, his mother, almost as soon as she died, if not before.70 In it he takes direct aim at her predecessors and draws a stark division between religion in the mid-eighteenth century and what had come before. Whereas Jeanne Mance’s role as an administrator likely damaged her holy reputation in the 1670s, by the 1770s the practical side of Marguerite d’Youville’s performance of holiness, in Dufrost’s view, had become perhaps her greatest virtue insofar as it refuted prevailing perceptions of religious women. In what is likely a criticism of Jeanne Le Ber’s vocation as a hermit, for example, Dufrost insists that his mother was not one of those holy women who shut herself off from the world; nor was she a recluse or an enemy of society. Rather, she knew only too well “the emptiness and vanity of the world” because she lived in it every day.71 Similarly, in what is likely a reference to Marie de l’Incarnation’s decision to abandon her son, join the Ursulines, and then to go to Canada, he says that Marguerite was not one of those religious women, “who

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neglected their household duties, the care of their children and their servants, to dedicate all their devotion to passing the best part of the day in church.” He continues: “Her love for the poor and her tenderness for her children allowed her to find the secret of dividing her time between the two.”72 Turning his attention to the contemplative brand of holiness practised, for instance, by Catherine de SaintAugustin, Dufrost insists that Marguerite d’Youville was not one of those religious, “who from morning to night pester their confessors, consulting with them on a heap of matters they had already discussed without any profit.” She was not someone who saw sin everywhere, who was never content, even after hours of spiritual preparation and confession, or never felt sufficiently examined or contrite. In short, she was not one of those “who serve God more out of fear than out of love.”73 The image Dufrost paints is one of an eminently practical, efficient, and effective servant of God, who more resembles the “natural woman” so praised by philosophes than the mystics and ascetics who populate hagiographic accounts from the early colony. Like Ransonnet, Dufrost adopted the language of female virility to describe this mother’s virtues. “[Marguerite d’Youville] had a male spirit,” he wrote, “a very solid judgement, speaking little, thinking a  lot: this is rare in persons of her sex.” She was wise enough to ­distrust “her own ideas,” he wrote, but humble enough to “consult with others, and easily defer to their opinions.”74 The characteristics he attributed to his mother are the very ones many at the time accused religious women of lacking – regularity, orderliness, rationality, and wisdom. The accusations Dufrost levelled against Marguerite d’Youville’s predecessors indicate just how much ideals of holiness had changed from the previous generation when, despite Tridentine efforts to cloister and carefully control female religious, many women found novel ways of advancing new vocations at the heart of the French Church.75 As Dufrost created a separation between Marguerite’s vocation and those of other colonial holy women, he also perhaps had in mind to generate distance from the Old Regime just as critics in France were also trying to do. Indeed, he wrote in the years following the British conquest of New France, when Catholicism in the new province of Quebec was vulnerable to restrictions imposed by British test laws. Dufrost, himself a priest, had close connections with a Church leadership in the new province of Quebec, specifically

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Bishop Briand, determined to renew the Church under British rule through cooperation rather than confrontation.76 In this context his critique of female models of holiness prevalent under the French regime seem in some ways to reflect British assumptions about Catholics, and about the French in general, as weak, oppressed, benighted, and effeminate.77 Many in Britain at the time assumed that their forces had liberated the Canadiens from bondage to an authoritarian French monarchy and the pope in 1760, and that Canadiens would as a matter of course abandon their culture for a “higher form” of life.78 Dufrost’s brief account of his mother’s life seems to suggest that such changes, in some form, were already underway – that the new brand of Catholicism was adaptable and amenable to the new cultural and political order. Within the political and religious contexts of the day, then, Dufrost’s stereotypical portrait of seventeenth-century holy women seems calculated to create distance between the post-conquest Church and its French colonial predecessor, as well as between the brand of female holiness rooted in service that he believed his mother had embraced and the contemplative model so denigrated by contemporary critics.79 The new ideal holy woman was not a contemplative who subsumed her will to God, her confessor, and her mother superior. Rather, she was a mother herself, a good manager and administrator; someone who provided charity to the poor rather than search for caritas for herself. The historian Michel de Certeau argues that hagiography reflects the relationship that a social group has with other groups. The martyr’s tale predominates in communities under threat while the virtue tale represents an established Church “as an epiphany of the social order in which it is inscribed.”80 According to the Jesuit historian of New France, P.F.X. Charlevoix, writing in 1744, “customs changed in the colony as people considered themselves more secure.”81 Marguerite d’Youville’s religious community was the first in New France that was not consciously apostolic. Rather, its mission was to take care of the poor in a growing urban, colonial city. By the mid-eighteenth century the Church in New France was firmly established and solid enough to survive conquest by the leading Protestant power of the day. Dufrost’s Life – short, direct, humble, and relentlessly factual – reflects the new position of Catholicism in society and that of Quebec in the British Empire. It is also the last significant account of a new holy performance from French Canada for more than a generation. Marguerite

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d’Youville was the last widely venerated local holy figure until the ultramontane revival of the Catholic Church in the second half of the nineteenth century. She, and the biography her son wrote about her, reflect a turning away from the kinds of colonial performances and the traditions of holiness that had characterized the early Church in New France as new paradigms and political realities took precedence.

C o n c l u s ion In 1673, when Jeanne Mance died, there were many competitors for  the attention of the colonial faith community. They included Catherine de Saint-Augustin, whose biography had appeared only two years earlier; Marie de l’Incarnation, who herself had just died the year before; and others such as Catherine / Tekakwitha, who was gaining attention for her piety at Kahnawake, and Marguerite Bourgeoys, whose community in Montreal was growing. A century later, however, the kinds of holy performances represented by these figures were disappearing and becoming increasingly suspect in both religious and political circles. In the seventeenth century, a community under threat had produced extraordinary performances of male martyrdom and female mystical and ascetic holiness. By the eighteenth century, ideas and ideals had changed, as had the local contexts within which new performances took place. Becoming holy in early Canada depended on an effective, local, and public performance of the traditions of sanctity; but a lasting cult also required an effective and timely hagiography that both reflected and created a lasting belief community.

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By the first half of the eighteenth century the popularity that holy biographies had previously enjoyed in Catholic Europe was waning. A survey of “collaborative” Lives published between 1500 and 1800 in France, Italy, and Spain (including New Spain; there was no printing press in New France, but the survey does include the Lives of Catherine de Saint-Augustin and Marie de l’Incarnation) found a total of seventy-three texts, of which only eight appeared after 1740, and only four after 1750.1 In New France, too, Saints’ Lives and, indeed, holy performances generally, were on the decline. The eighteenth-century Jesuit historian, P.F.X. Charlevoix, noted a change in public mood regarding religion in a history of the colony he published in 1744.2 Indeed, rather than indulge in religious glories himself, Charlevoix, who had spent time in New France first as an instructor in the Jesuit college at Quebec from 1705 to 1709, and then as a royal agent from 1719 to 1722 travelling through the Pays d’en haut to New Orleans, produced a history of the colony that spoke to a secular and bureaucratic elite about the importance of the colony to France.3 We speak so broadly among ourselves about the colonies we have established at different times in North America, that I believe I would please the public and render a great service to my country (patrie), if, to the observations I have made while traveling through those vast lands, where France possesses more territory than there is in the whole continent of Europe, I would add an exact and connected History of all the memorable things that have happened there over more than two centuries. But this is

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not my only motive in engaging in this work. Convinced as I am that I am obliged to the Republic as a citizen, my profession also obliges me to serve the Church, and to dedicate to it at least a part of my vigils.4 Here, Charlevoix seems to place his duty to the state before his obligations to the Church. His reference to himself as a citizen of the republic (he means the public life of France – he was no revolutionary), and to the priesthood as his profession, is striking. Earlier Jesuit missionaries would likely never have contemplated such a distinction. Historian David Bell argues that eighteenth-century France saw a transition from a public life rooted in religion, which had characterized the dévot culture of the previous century, to one defined by service to the state.5 The public role of religion in defining social life and social relations decreased and was displaced as a tool for linking people together and creating common sentiments by a developing sense of nationality and nationhood rooted in civil society and, increasingly, in a single perceived culture and ethnicity.6 The French philosopher Marcel Gauchet calls these changes not secularism, but rather disenchantment; the end of a truly Christian history in which God was believed to play a direct role on earth and in public life. Religious belief did not decrease, but rather moved away from “miracles and other manifestations of divine providence in the world” and became a matter of personal conviction and private devotion.7 Whereas New France had once provided an outlet for the spiritual elite, it was now assigned new roles within the “enlightened” French empire as a military bulwark against British expansion, and for its commercial potential in places like Louisbourg and New Orleans.8 Long before this process of disenchantment took hold, however, religion, holiness, sanctity, miracles, and mysticism all held a prominent place in the culture and public life of France and its colony. Religious figures, local and otherwise, facilitated the key relationships that settlers – and those in France who invested in and advanced the colonies – negotiated with place, empire, Indigenous peoples, and most particularly, the divine. As this book shows, holiness was a process not an object. Local saints had to be made in new performances of the traditions of sanctity and in new relationships with their audiences. To be successful, to spark the kinds of reputations and veneration that might one day lead to formal canonization, the holy had first to be perceived as holy in the eyes and hearts of the faithful. Allan

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Greer suggests in Mohawk Saint that the French in Canada had not lived together long enough to form any kind of strong local religious traditions by the late seventeenth century.9 In fact, however, the process of creating a local religious culture began early in New France, and involved not just Jesuits, who generally advocated a translocal Catholicism, but all members of the community, ecclesiastical and lay,  and even extended to some Indigenous people who embraced Christianity as their own religion. People visited the tomb of Frère Didace to ask for favours or went to the shrine of St Anne and quietly added Jean de Brébeuf to their requests for assistance. French habitants who lived near Kahnawake visited the resting place of Catherine / Tekakwitha to ask for her help in their needs.10 While some Jesuits certainly were deeply involved in the work of translating the deaths of their brethren into the universal language of the cult of the saints, others promoted the reputations of their colleagues less formally in letters to their friends and relatives, and by distributing relics. Meanwhile the children of colonists were sent to schools run by the Ursulines and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, where they learned of the achievements of Marie de l’Incarnation and Marguerite Bourgeoys and memorized a catechism that celebrated the achievements of the Virgin Mary in the colony alongside Tridentine doctrine. New performances of holiness, steeped as they were in established paradigms of universal sanctity – evangelism, heroic charity, asceticism, miracles – offered local people ways and opportunities of relating to heaven and the divine. The holy performance was at once local and universal. It appealed to known categories of sanctity present in the Church and society, but did so in ways that show great variety and adaptation to local circumstances. Successful performers of the traditions of holiness found ways of reconciling doctrine with local expediency, theology with practice. What endeared local saints to their immediate communities was their ability to alleviate personal and community anxieties, to act as patrons and draw down divine favour on the colony, and to do so within recognizable and expected norms of sanctity. Consequently, it is not a generic sanctity that appeared in the colony, but one that was dynamic and changing, adaptive and relevant; a sanctity that actively embraced the colony and its people even as performers kept one eye carefully on their legacies within the Church. Place, the colony itself, was an essential part of the performance. Trois-Rivières nurtured the reputation of its holy man, Frère Didace;

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particularly, the elite families of the community whose members both experienced his favour and ensured his reputation received the initial support of the colonial ecclesiastical hierarchy. Both Jeanne Le Ber and Catherine de Saint-Augustin dedicated their asceticism, physical and spiritual sufferings, and charity to the salvation of their communities, the colony and its population, as well as to their own salvation and sanctification. In both cases, the colony looms large behind their performances and the rhetoric they and their supporters deployed to explain and justify their accomplishments. They tailored their performances of the traditions of sanctity particularly to colonial causes, thereby making a powerful argument for the existence of a favoured Catholic faith community in New France – one separated from the perceived degeneracies of Europe but nevertheless rooted in a particular vision of post-Tridentine Catholicism that could edify a wayward metropole. No colonial performance was perhaps as linked to place, however, as that of Joseph / Onaharé. Onaharé lived between worlds but embraced both and saw clearly how his death as a war captive was also a Christian death, one that held multiple and potentially powerful meanings for both Algonquins and French. The ability to replicate and adapt European culture, community, and flora and fauna overseas is recognized by scholars as fundamental to explaining the success of migrant communities in the Americas generally.11 Imported crops and domestic animals, diseases, and ways of life quickly made the colonies inhabitable for Europeans at the same time as they slowly marginalized Indigenous peoples and cultures. The adaptability of Christianity to colonial spaces must be considered one of these essential transitional forces in creating habitable colonial spaces in the Americas for Europeans. In New France, the dynamic performances of holiness that colonists believed they witnessed, and in which they participated, facilitated essential relationships between the settlers and the divine, heaven and earth, ­community and place, and built up the necessary confidence and conviction in the early years of New France to allow vulnerable settlements to survive culturally and perhaps also physically. In local parishes, at Sunday services, in lessons learned through the catechism and stories swapped among neighbours, local saints quickly acquired a place in the colonial community and in the essential mediation between the human and the sacred. The miraculous interventions the faithful believed they experienced were not simply personal favours but reflected on the broad community, reintegrating people

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back into society who had been removed by misfortune, and strengthening bonds between family and friends who sought recourse in their needs to local holy persons who had lived similar colonial lives as they had. Local saints helped to foster and reinforce essential community bonds and allegiances. As a result the local saints who enjoyed the greatest success tended to be those with the richest connections to the community. Members of female religious orders especially were integrated into the daily lives of the colonists and were more likely than their male counterparts to enjoy sustained cults as a result. Even someone like Frère Didace, whose life is little known by historians today, could become famous in the eighteenth century because people who had known him in life – the Godefroy family in Trois-Rivières, Soeur Saint-Paul and her sister, and Joseph Denis – became prominent recipients of his favours and advocates for his cause. The process and performance of becoming holy was due as much to what the local saint undertook and achieved among those close and familiar as it was to the support and actions of the faith community that surrounded her. The holy persons of New France, however, did not exist in a colonial bubble. The composition of colonial holy Lives within genre conventions popular in Europe and elsewhere in the Catholic world, and the ways the reputations of colonial holy persons spread to France, Rome, and elsewhere show the extent to which New France was tied to a broader, multinational, multi-ethnic Atlantic world.12 Those who came from France saw the colony as a place to live out religious lives and vocations not available in France itself, and an opportunity to sanctify themselves. Yet, even seemingly radical performances such as the mysticism and asceticism of Catherine de Saint-Augustin did not severely push the boundaries of Early Modern Catholicism. Catherine bent her more extreme ascetic impulses to the rules and guidance of the Church, seeking permission from her confessors before engaging in the most extreme penances; responding to requests from the hierarchy to pray for this or that sinner, whether in the colony or in France; keeping a spiritual journal; and cultivating the necessary and vital relationships with her superiors that would protect her against accusations of heterodoxy and ensure the successful legacy of her reputation after death. Even Marie de l’Incarnation, whose rejection of mysticism in favour of an active vocation was arguably the more radical of the performances of the traditions of holiness, used her writing to claim obedience to the

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Becoming Holy in Early Canada

traditions of the Church, the dictates of Trent and ultimately, society in general, guarded by a vigilant male hierarchy. Together, the local saint and the Church advanced the joint cause of establishing in the colony an orthodox and dynamic post-Tridentine Catholicism. Where a performance wandered beyond acceptable boundaries without vigorous justification and without influential backers, as was the case with Jeanne Mance, no significant public cult emerged and a reputation withered. It was not only male authorities, however, who tried to control and reshape holy reputations. Marguerite Bourgeoys’s own community, the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, was so concerned about potential interpretations of her legacy after her death in 1700 that they apparently dropped their first chosen author of her holy biography, preferring to delay rather than produce a work that might hinder rather than help her chances at acceptance within the wider Church. In the eighteenth century, the male oversight that had ensured the orthodoxy of new forms of female holiness in the previous century returned to a more traditional definition of sanctity itself as a male virtue even when performed by women. Politics, of course, are never far from canonization causes. The controversy over Jansenism that played out in relations between the French state and the Vatican may well have derailed Frère Didace’s case for canonization after 1720, resulting in the termination of any officially supported cult of belief. A successful performance not only had to correspond to conservative traditions of holiness, but also had to reinforce the guiding political touchstones of the state and the Church. The hagiographic discourse surrounding Marguerite d’Youville may even have served to smooth the transition from French to British rule by offering a model of practical holiness that fit more comfortably with a Protestant political ethos than mysticism and extraordinary asceticism could have done. The colony of Canada had grown up within a particular religious ethos supportive of extraordinary religiosity, and had experienced the kind of liminality that made religious confidence an essential element in the colonization process. The first decades of settlement produced saints’ tales in abundance, whether those of Jesuit martyrs or of nuns who sacrificed themselves for charity, of Indigenous converts who embraced the new faith as their own even to death, or of local miracle workers who blessed their communities. In the eighteenth century, however, tales of virtue came to predominate over the heroic

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Conclusion

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tales of an earlier era as the needs of the community itself changed and different aspects of the traditions of holiness rose to prominence within society and the Church. Marguerite Bourgeoys became a ­virile soul more suited to the admiration than the imitation of the faithful. Marguerite d’Youville’s son credited her with a domesticated and non-threatening holiness, and presented her as a paragon of order and simplicity that reflects the challenges of preserving a Church under threat from Enlightenment politics and imperial conquest. As French colonial life became more settled and the missionary impulse and zeal for martyrdom that had marked the earlier period dissipated into the regular routines of Euro-Canadian life, the colony lost a good deal of the enchantment that had made it so appealing to an earlier generation of dévot(e)s and had placed holy persons in such number before the eyes and hearts of what was by any measure a small Christian population.13 The eighteenth-century colony was a less magical place, less susceptible to connections or ruptures with the divine, not necessarily less religious, but certainly less needful of the shared sacred experiences and redressive actions offered by rituals of holiness and performances of sanctity. When an account of the life and possible martyrdom of the Jesuit missionary Sébastien Rasle in 1724 appeared in the pages of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, an annual Jesuit publication of missionary reports from around the world that had replaced the Relations, specific reference to him as a martyr that had appeared in an earlier draft had been edited out.14 Catherine Desbarats writes about the Lettres: “with these texts we have moved beyond the epic narratives of missionary conquest common to the previous century, and the theatrics of the Canadian martyrs, beyond also a utopian identification with the primitive Christian Church.”15 The shared experiences of the divine, and relationships between heaven and earth facilitated by local saints that had provided reassurance to early colonists lost their urgency in a changing colonial and ecclesiastical world. While these lasted, however, local sanctity had formed an essential feature of New France cultural history that is best understood on its own terms and not only in terms of the generic hagiographic treatments and canonizations achieved many years later in Rome. The early saints of New France and the first settler communities grew up together. Holy persons and colonists reinforced each other’s vocations, praying and working for the community and achieving what they considered evidence of divine support for their project,

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Becoming Holy in Early Canada

which furnished vital evidence to settlers and many Indigenous converts of their favour in heaven. Local holy persons were common in this small colony not only because people like Catherine de SaintAugustin went there to become saints or because Jean de Brébeuf wanted to taste martyrdom, but also because the local community needed and wanted them. Local saints were vital characters whose performances of the traditions of holiness transmitted knowledge of how colonists could live in the Americas, adjusting to new cultural, social, and environmental realities, while remaining French and Catholic. The making of a holy person in Canada was a multi-­ faceted process that involved the broad theological and cultural traditions of Catholic Europe, the social, environmental, and cultural conditions of colonial Canada, the personalities of the individuals involved, local audiences (lay and religious), and the ways that all of these factors changed over time. A person became holy in processes that played out over time, in rituals, in performances before audiences, and eventually in text.

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Ap p e n d ix : H o ly P e rs o n s of New France Date of Death

First Account

Affiliation

Canonical Status

Ailleboust, Barbe de Boulogne d’

1685

c. 1717

lay person

none

Andehoua (Armand Jean)

1654

1654

none

none

Barbier, Marie

1739

1743

Congrégation de Notre-Dame

none

Bourgeoys, Marguerite

1700

1701

Congrégation de Notre-Dame

saint

Brébeuf, Jean de

1649

1649

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Chabonel, Noël

1649

1649

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Chaumonot, Pierre-Joseph-Marie

1693

c. 1700

Jesuit

servant of God

Chauvigny, MarieMadeleine de la Peltrie

1671

1671

Lay person

none

Chiouatenhoua (Joseph)

1640

1640

none

none

Daniel, Antoine

1648

1648

Dauversière, Jérôme Le Royer de la

1659

Name

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Lay person

servant of God

Denis, Joseph

1736

Récollet

none

Gannant (Marie-Thérèse)

169x

1722

none

none

Gannendaris (Cécile)

1668

1669

none

none

Garaconthié

1677

1677

none

none

Garnier, Charles

1649

1649

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Goupil, René

1642

1642

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation

1672

1677

Ursuline

saint*

Jogues, Isaac

1646

1646

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Lalande, Jean de

1646

1646

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Lalemant, Gabriel

1649

1649

Jesuit

saint, martyr

Lauberivière, FrançoisLouis Pourroy de

1740

1743

bishop

none

Laval, François Montmorency de

1708

1708

Bishop

saint*

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200 Appendix

Name

Date of Death

First Account

Affiliation

Canonical Status

Le Ber, Jeanne

1714

1722

lay person

servant of God

Mance, Jeanne

1673

lay person

servant of God

Marquette, Jacques

1675

1676

Jesuit

none

Negabamat (Noël)

1666

1666

none

none

Nenascoumat (François-Xavier)

1639

1640

none

none

Onaharé (Joseph)

1650

1650

none

none

Ouendraka (Marie)

1648

1648

none

none

Pelletier, Claude (Frère Didace)

1699

1717

Récollet

servant of God

Rasle, Sébastien

1724

1724

Jesuit

none

Savonnières de Troche, Marie de Saint-Joseph

1652

1652

Ursuline

none

Simon de Longpré, Catherine de Saint-Augustin

1668

1668

Augustinian

blessed

Tekakwitha (Catherine)

1680

1682

none

saint

Teotonharason (Madeleine)

1657

1657

none

none

Viel, Nicholas

1625

1634

Récollet

none

Youville, Marguerite d’

1771

1771

Sisters of Charity

saint

Note: In compiling this list, I have for the most part consulted full hagiographic texts (sacred biographies) but have also included works of hagiographic intent that remained unpublished from the French regime. Three basic criteria determined my designation of a given biography as hagiographic discourse and, therefore, my inclusion of its subject in my survey. First, and most important: Did the author clearly regard the subject as a saint? Are readers encouraged to venerate or perhaps imitate the individual? Second: Does the structure of the work display a recognizable hagiographic form relative to the period in which it was written? Does the author narrate any miracles attributed to the intercession of the subject? Does the Life conclude with an account of the “good death” expected of a saint? Third: Is there a tradition of holiness surrounding the individual? Has the subject

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Holy Persons of New France

201

been offered forth as a didactic model of religious, social, or cultural behaviour, or been the subject of formal canonization proceedings? Are there any traditions of veneration, pilgrimage sites, or relics that support the text? I have endeavoured not to place greater weight on any one of these criteria. Nor do I consider the absence of any one of them as a sine qua non for inclusion in the study. In the end, where the criteria are unclear, I have had to rely to a considerable extent on my own perception in reading. The result is that the above list is likely not complete, especially in regard to Indigenous individuals whom missionaries came to see as holy. I have not, for example, included three unnamed women in Montreal whom the Jesuits regarded as martyrs in the eighteenth century (Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, vol. 13). I therefore regard the survey as an ongoing project, but also believe that the  proposed list is broadly representative of the early Canadian cult of the saints. * On 3 April 2014, Pope Francis declared Marie de l’Incarnation and François de Laval Canada’s newest saints by special decree. “Equivalent canonization” allows for long-venerated christians, already beatified, to bypass the usual canonization processes.

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26203_Pearson.indd 202

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Abbreviations

a h d m  Morin,

Marie. Histoire simple et véritable: Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 1659–1725. Edited by Ghislaine Legendre. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1979.

a h d q  Juchereau,

Jeanne-Françoise (de St-Ignace), and Marie André (de Ste Hélène) Duplessis. Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 1636–1716. Edited by Albert Jamet. Montreal: Les Presses de Garden City, 1939.

asssm

Archive du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal.

dcb

Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

h c n d  S. Sainte-Henriette,

ed. Histoire de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. Montreal: Congrégation de Notre Dame, 1947–74.

jr

 hwaites, Reuben Gold, ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied T Documents. 73 vols. Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co., 1896–1901.

mi Corr.  M  arie de l’Incarnation, Correspondance. Edited by Dom. Guy-Marie Oury. Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971. m n f  Campeau,

Lucien, ed. Monumenta Novae Franciae, 8 vols. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. Quebec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval, 1967–.

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Notes

I nt roduct i o n   1 The biographies of Frère André in French and English are too numerous to list here. A couple of the more prominent will suffice. H.-P. Bergeron, Le frère André; A. Hatch, The Miracle of the Mountain.  2 Album officiel de la canonisation de frère André. N. Dumas, “The Cause for Canonization of Brother Andrè: A Well-Guarded Secret,” 7–9. B. Lafrenière (vice-postulator of the cause), “Brother André: Steps to Canonization,” 10–12.   3 See the extensive news coverage of this event cited in notes 2, 4, 5, and 6.   4 E. Reguly, “Brother André, the Rocket Richard of Miracles,” Globe and Mail, 14 October 2010. Reguly, “Brother André Becomes Canada’s First 21st-Century Saint,” Globe and Mail, 17 October 2010. Similar attention followed Brother André’s beatification in 1982.   5 Coverage was extensive. A few example are: J. Boileau, “Canonisation du frère André: perte de sens,” Le Devoir, 20 février 2010, accessed 1 June 2011, http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/actualites-en-­societe/283515/canonisation-du-frere-andre-perte-de-sens; A. Crevier, “Frère André, le premier saint Québécois?” Radio-Canada, 20 October 2009, accessed 1 June 2011, http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/carnets/2009/10/20/126194. shtml?auteur=2278; Y. Therrien, “L’arrivée d’un saint influencera-t-elle la spiritualité au Québec?” Le Soleil, 17 October 2010, accessed 1 June 2011. http://www.cyberpresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/societe/201010/16/ 01-4333284-larrivee-dun-saint-influencera-t-elle-la-spiritualite-au-quebec. php.   6 E. Reguly, “Brother André Becomes Canada’s First 21st-Century Saint.”

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206

Notes to pages 4–5

  7 For a detailed examination of Tekakwitha and her historical context see A. Greer, Mohawk Saint. Tekakwitha was her Mohawk name, while Jesuit priests gave her the name Catherine when she was baptized. Kateri was a name applied to her in the late nineteenth century by an American biographer, Ellen (Nelly) Walworth, in an effort to reinforce a native identity. See Greer, Mohawk Saint, 197. In this book I refer to her as Catherine /  Tekakwitha or just Tekakwitha.   8 “Mohawk Woman Ascends to Sainthood at Vatican,” c b c News, 21 October 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/ world/story/2012/10/21/kateri-tekakwitha-mohawk-canonized.html.   9 E. Reguly, “In an Act of Atonement, Vatican makes Kateri Tekakwitha the First Native Canadian Saint,” Globe and Mail, 21 October 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/kateritekakwitha-becomes-north-americas-first-native-saint/article4626652/. 10 On Tekakwitha’s legacy at Kahnawake and among North American Indigenous communities more generally, see A. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 200–5. For accounts of the canonization offering different perspectives see, for example, C. Hebblethwaite, “Kateri Tekakwitha: First Catholic Native American Saint,” b b c News, 21 October 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19996957; J. Jennings, “Saint Kateri Tekakwitha: Someone We Can Call Our Own,” Indian Country Today Media Network, 22 October 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/saint-kateri-tekakwitha %3A-someone-we-can-call-our-own-141316; Staff, “Turtle Island Catholics Witness Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha’s Elevation to Sainthood,” Indian Country Today Media Network, 21 October 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://indiancountryto daymedianetwork.com/article/­ turtle-island-catholics-witness-blessed-kateri-tekakwithas-elevation-tosainthood-141207; D. Trifunov, “Kateri Tekakwitha to Become First Native American Saint,” Globalpost: America’s World News Site, 18 February 2012, accessed 7 January 2013, http://www.globalpost.com/ dispatch/news/regions/americas/120218/kateri-tekakwitha-become-firstnative-american-saint; 11 P. Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church.” 12 See for example H. Delahaye, The Legends of the Saints, 4–5; J. Kitchen, Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender, 4; A.H. Olsen, “De Historiis Sanctorum: A Generic Study of Hagiography,” 408; J.M.H. Smith, “Early Medieval Hagiography in the Late Twentieth Century,” 69–76.

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Notes to pages 6–8

207

13 For a “lived-encounters” approach see A. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country. Lived religion refers to the effort to understand religious faith in the context of the total life of the community and its culture, not just Church or theology. It attempts to understand how people reconcile traditional religion (faith, doctrine, law, ritual) with experience of the world. Robert Orsi explains the approach in “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” 3–21. He explains how religion constructs a ­network of relationships between the faithful and the divine in R. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth. For an example of the application of a livedreligion approach see Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street. For an example from colonial history see A.S. Brown and D.D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice,” in Religion in America, 41–68. 14 See the appendix. 15 On the French population of New France see D. Gauvreau, “Vingt ans d’études sur la population pendant le Régime français,” 31–51; P. Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants from France in Canada Before 1760”; M. Trudel, La population du Canada en 1666: Recensement reconstitué. 16 On the changing religious culture of eighteenth-century France see M. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, and D.A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation. On changing attitudes toward religious figures see M. Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture; B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. 17 On the establishment of New Orleans as an experiment in Enlightenment bureaucratic order and its failure to live up to expectations developed in Paris see S.L. Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, 28–33. 18 On the communio sanctorum see T. Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 129–33. Note that throughout the book I refer to holy biographies and hagiographies as Lives, with a capital “L”. 19 For an examination of how local religion (faith, practices, traditions) developed within and in conversation with the institutional Church in the Early Modern period see W.A. Christian Jr, Local Religion in SixteenthCentury Spain, 8, 20–1, 147–8. 20 J. Bilinkoff and A. Greer, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. 21 A. Greer’s attention to the relationship between Catherine / Tekakwitha and the missionary Claude Chauchetière is particularly effective. See chapters 3 and 4 of Mohawk Saint, 59–110. Also, Greer, “Conversion and Identity”; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin”; Greer, “Colonial Saints”; Greer, “Savage / Saint: The Lives of Kateri Tekakwitha.”

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208

Notes to pages 8–13

22 On early modern martyrs and martyrdom see B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. 23 D. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire. Also, J. Bilinkoff, “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila”; Bilinkoff, Related Lives; D. Deslandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo”; D. Deslandres, “La mission chrétienne.” 24 F. Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre,” 97. On the hagiographic tradition in Quebec literature see S. Gagnon, Le Québec et ses historiens de 1840 à 1920, chapter 1; and L. Robert, “Quand la vie est l­ittérature,” 15–37. 25 D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 2–5; 53–4. On the relationship between performance, memory, and archives see Taylor, “Performance and / as History.” On narration, performance, and orality in archives see N.Z. Davis, Fiction in the Archives. On the making of colonial archives see, A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 26 On rituals of contact see J. Barr, “Rituals of First Contact in the “Land of the Tejas”; G. Sabo iii, “Rituals of Encounter”; P. Seed, Ceremonies of Possession; E.R. Seeman “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes”; R.J. Chacon and R.G. Mendoza, eds., North American Traditional Warfare and Ritual Violence. On rituals of trade see B.M. White, “Encounters with Spirits.” On rituals of diplomacy see the work of P. Cook, “‘Vivre comme frères,’” (2001), 55–65; “Symbolic and Material Exchange in Intercultural Diplomacy”; and “‘Vivre Comme Frères,’” (2008). 27 R.A. Rapapport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 24. On ritual and communication, Rappaport was influenced by V. Turner’s notion of ritual as social drama that goes beyond the communicative ability of language alone and Marc Bloch’s arguments that rituals as speech acts go beyond representation to the actual construction of the world. See M. Lambek, “Rappaport on Religion.” On speech acts see J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words; M. Bloch, Prey into Hunter. 28 Ibid., 24–7. R. Levy, “The Life and Death of Ritual,” 155–6. 29 Ibid., chapters 8, 9, 10. M. Lambek, “Rappaport on Religion,” 245–6. 30 V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 38–41. Also, Turner, The Ritual Process; and B.C. Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited, 13–20. 31 Ibid.; Alexander, Victor Turner Revisited, 17–19; 29–44. 32 O. Hubert, “Construire le rite comme un objet historique,” 90. Also, Hubert, “Ritual Performance and Parish Sociability”; and Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel. 33 P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 8–9. For a response to Buc on the challenge of ritual / performance in historical studies see G. Koziol, “The Dangers of

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Notes to pages 14–18

209

Polemic.” The difficulties of ritual and performance have not prevented historians either from studying them as historical objects or trying to use them as sources for history. See E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe. 34 In identifying these themes I have loosely followed D. Weinstein and R. Bell’s quantitative study of Western holiness modified to reflect my reading of the early colonial literature. Saints and Society, 141–65.

C ha p t e r O n e   1 The works on medieval sanctity are too numerous to list here. A sample of some of the more influential research I have drawn upon includes P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints; A. Vauchez, La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge; D. Weinstein, and R. Bell, Saints and Society; C. Walker-Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Aviad Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country; C.M. Mooney, Gendered Voices; S.J.E. Riches and S. Salih, eds. Gender and Holiness.   2 See for example J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives; É. Suire, La sainteté française de la Réforme catholique (x v i e –x v i i i e siècles); B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake; S. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy; J. Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire.   3 On Teresa of Avila and her age see A. Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity; and J. Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa. On ­religious change in the early modern period see: R. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal; B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity; K. Comerford and H.M. Pabel, eds., Early Modern Catholicism; M.D.W. Jones, The Counter Reformation; B. Diefendorf and C. Hesse, eds., Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe; B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris; C. Eire, The War Against Idols; B. Dompnier, Le venin de l’hérésie: image du protestisme et combat catholique au x v i i e siècle; W.A. Christian, Jr, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain; J. Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire; H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France. On the wars of religion in France see D. Crouzet, Les guerriers de dieu. On early modern martyrdom B Gregory, Salvation at Stake.   4 P. Burke, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” 48–53. Also, É. Suire, La sainteté française; and D. Weinstein and R. Bell, Saints and Society.   5 Burke, 48.   6 H. Delahaye, The Work of the Bollandists Through Three Centuries.   7 On Christian sanctity in the Roman Empire see, E. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory; E. Clark, Reading Renunciation; T. Head and F.X. Noble,

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210

Notes to pages 19–25

eds., Soldiers of Christ; R. Van Dam, Saints and their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul; P. Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity”; P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints; and P. Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity.”   8 A. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 33–58. Also D. Robertson, The Medieval Saints’ Lives; A. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country; T. Heffernan, Sacred Biography; M. Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century; P. Johnson and B. Cazelles, Le Vain Siècle Guerpir: A Literary Approach to Sainthood through Old French Hagiography of the 12th Century.   9 See B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. 10 P. Melanchthon, “Of the Worship of Saints in the Augsburg Confession of Faith, 1530,” Article xxi. 11 Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Council of Trent, Session 25, 3–4 December 1563, 774–7. 12 K.P. Luria, “‘Popular Catholicism’ and the Catholic Reformation,” 116–18. 13 Ibid., 113–20; and L. Lux-Sterrit, Redefining Female Religious Life, 103– 29. See also, D. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 356–89; D. Deslandres, “Femmes missionnaires en Nouvelle-France”; M.-A. Foley, “La vie voyagère for Women”; E. Rapley, “Women and the Religious Vocation in Seventeenth-Century France.” 14 E. Rapley, The Dévotes, 6–9. Also, B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 173–92. 15 K. von Greyerz, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500– 1800, 36–7. 16 R. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 61, 131. 17 Luigi Lippomano, Sanctorum Priscorum Patrum Vitae, quoted in B. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 125. 18 É. Suire, La sainteté française, 26. 19 Ibid., 27–9. 20 S. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History, 123. 21 Ibid., 124. 22 On the procedures and requirements of contemporary canonization see K. Woodward, Making Saints. 23 D. Weinstein and R. Bell, Saints and Society, 143. Though now dated in its approach, this book remains a valuable overview of Western sanctity and its tropes. 24 Ibid., 151–3. 25 Ibid., 142–4. 26 Ibid., 62.

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Notes to pages 25–32

211

27 R. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 132–3. 28 j r 51: 86–7 (1666–67). 29 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloges de quelques personnes mortes en odeur de sainteté à Montréal,” 162. 30 O.P. Dickason, “The Sixteenth-Century French Vision of Empire,” 96–103. 31 A. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France, 27. Also, A.Y. Haran, Le lys et le globe, 100–1. 32 On de Monts, Poutrincourt and Guercheville see G. Harvard and C. Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française 75–80; and H.G. Ryder, “Biencourt de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just, Jean de,” d c b , vol. 1. 33 É. Labrousse and R. Sauzet, “La lente mise en place de la Réforme Tridentin, 342–50. 34 Gallican liberties consisted of the right of the French Church to govern itself through its councils, to receive no papal briefs or bulls without the consent of the French episcopacy, and the king’s claim to be subject to none but God in temporal matters. D. Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 22. 35 É. Suire, La sainteté française, 27–9. 36 B. Diefendorf argues that the trauma of the civil wars of religion cannot be ignored as a significant factor in the rise of penitential asceticism and devout spirituality in the seventeenth century. From Penitence to Charity, 7–11. 37 C. Pestana, “Martyred by the Saints.” 38 S. Juster, “What’s ‘Sacred’ about Violence in Early America?” 39 See K. Myers, “‘Redeemer of America.’” Work on Spanish colonial holiness include: M. Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites: The Construction of Jesuit Martyrdom in Northwest New Spain”; E. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles; R. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Gender; K. Myers, ed., Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre María de San José. 40 S. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 28–32; 57–9; 70. 41 C. Martin, La vie de la vénérable mère Marie de l’Incarnation, preface. 42 J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 65. Also A. Burkardt, “Reconnaissance et dévotion.” 43 J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 98. 44 F. Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal. J.-F. (de St-Ignace) Juchereau, and M.-A. (de Ste Hélène) Duplessis, Les annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec (hereafter, a h d q ). 45 The biography of Madame de la Peltrie is found in mi Corr., (Lettre cclxix) 904–14; and in j r 56: 218–85 (1671); Marie de Saint-Joseph is

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in mi Corr., (Lettre cxl) 436–68 “à la Communauté des Ursulines de Tours,” (1652), and j r 38: 68–165 (1651–52); finally that of Anne Bataille is in mi Corr. (Lettre cclxix) 843–47, “La vie et les vertus de la Soeur Anne Bataille, dite de Saint-Laurent,” (1669). 46 The first formal canonization process begun for a colonial candidate was Marie de l’Incarnation, launched in 1867. Marie-Emmanuel Chabot, osu, “Guyart, Marie,” d c b , vol. 1.

C h a p t e r T wo  1 j r 31: 20–1 (1647). The story of René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, and their Huron companions must be pieced together from a number of different documents. Jogues narrated much of the story in letters he sent from his captivity in Iroquoia. These are found in m n f v (doc. 80); Isaac Jogues to Charles Huault de Montmagny, gouv. de Québec, 30 June 1643, m n f v (doc. 112), 590 and j r 24: 294–307 (1643); Isaac Jogues to Jean Filleau, Provincial Superior of France, 5 August 1643, in m n f v (doc. 115), 607 (translated in j r 39: 198 [1653]). This last letter Jogues wrote in Latin because he intended it to serve as his confession for his spiritual director. It is filled with Biblical references that illuminate his state of mind as he came to see himself and René Goupil as martyrs. The Jesuit superior, Jérôme Lalemant, drew heavily on this material when he composed the primary hagiographic account of Jogues’s death, which appeared in the Jesuit Relation of 1647. j r 31: 16–138.  2 j r 31: 22–3 (1647).   3 On the Spiritual Exercises see Paul Debuchy, “Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius,” The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 14; J. de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, 529–32; J. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 37–43.  4 j r 31: 19 (1647).  5 Odium fidei was the guiding theological requirement of martyrdom until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65, when emphasis switched to the witness of love for Christ rendered by the martyr. R. Hedde, “Martyre,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. 10, 226. Also, T. Gilby and L.S. Cunningham, “Martyrdom, Theology of,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9, 230; R. Latourelle, Jean de Brébeuf, 248–9.   6 René Goupil (1608–1642), Isaac Jogues (1608–1646), Jean de Lalande (160?–1646), Antoine Daniel (1600–1648), Jean de Brébeuf (1593–1549), Gabriel Lalemant (1610–1649), Charles Garnier (1606–1649), Noël Chabanel (1613–1649). In the mid-seventeenth century, Jesuits in Canada

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also considered Anne de Nouë (1587–1646) to be a martyr, but when the others were canonized in 1930 he was left out in favour of Jean de Lalande, likely because he had died when he became lost in the wilderness, and not as a captive or in battle as the others had.   7 C. Blackburn suggests such an approach, but does not pursue the analysis in Harvest of Souls, 65–7. E. Anderson, on the other hand, does take up this line of analysis, focusing primarily on possible Huron and Iroquois interpretations of the death of one Jesuit missionary, Jean de Brébeuf, in “Blood, Fire and ‘Baptism’: Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf.”   8 Claude Pijart, m n f v (doc. 104), 576.   9 Jean de Brébeuf to Mutius Vitelleschi, Trois-Rivières, 23 September 1643 in j r 23: 249. 10 Charles Garnier to Henri de Saint-Joseph, 23 May 1643, m n f v, doc. 105, 581. 11 j r 24: 280–1 (1643). 12 j r 31: 34–7 (1647). 13 Jogues to Filleau, m n f v doc. 115, 607. 14 j r 24: 280–1 (1643). 15 D.K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” 528–59. For a general description of captivity practices see D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 66–9; and D. Snow, The Iroquois, 127. M. Dennis (Cultivating a Landscape of Peace) argues that Iroquois diplomacy and warfare in the seventeenth century were parts of a larger strategy directed toward establishing peace through the extension of existing kinship networks and League politics to include the French and their allies through adoption and incorporation as “one people.” J. Parmenter (The Edge of the Woods) argues similarly, but highlights the Iroquois’ desire to extend their spatial mobility to include Huron and French territory. Also, J. Brandao, “Your Fire Shall Burn no More.” 16 See R.M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, the Remade, xxi; and W.N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse, 137–8. The first printed description of these rituals is in Horatio Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites, 121. On the use of the condolence ceremony in diplomacy, W.N. Fenton, “The Earliest Recorded Description: The Mohawk Treaty with New France at Three Rivers, 1645,” 127–53; and J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods, 62–70. 17 D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 32–8. Also, J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods, 45–51, 100–5. On the impact of disease on warfare see S. Johnston, “Epidemics: The Forgotten Factor in Seventeenth Century

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Notes to pages 39–42

Warfare in the St. Lawrence Region,” 14–15. A.F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death, 71–100; and W.A. Starna, “Biological Encounter: Disease and the Ideological Domain,” 511–19. 18 Isaac Jogues à Charles Huault de Montmagny, gouv. de Québec, 30 juin 1643, m n f v, doc. 112, 590. Also in j r 24: 296–7 (1643). 19 D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 65–6. 20 Ibid., 72–4. 21 The Jesuit Relations contain numerous accounts of ritual captivity and execution. For example, in 1636 Jesuits witnessed the torture and death of an Iroquois prisoner in the Huron town of Scanonaenrat, j r  8: 302–3; j r 13: 36–83; J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods, 46–7. Many French (other than missionaries) also participated in these rituals as captives. For example, Étienne Brûlé was taken captive by the Seneca in 1615 and released when he promised to smooth trading relations with the French. Olga Jurgens, “Brûlé, Étienne,” d c b , vol. 1. The Jesuit François-Joseph Bressani was captured and tortured by Mohawks in 1644 and later ransomed to the Dutch at Fort Orange. Albert Tessier, “Bressani, FrançoisJoseph,” d c b , vol. 1. Likewise, Pierre-Esprit de Radisson is well known as a trader and adventurer, who, taken captive by Mohawks in 1651, was adopted, escaped and was recaptured, whereupon he was tortured almost to death. Grace Lee Nute, “Radisson, Pierre-Esprit,” d c b , vol. 2. See also, G. Warkentin, “Discovering Radisson.” 22 E. Anderson, “Blood, Fire and ‘Baptism,’” 137; R. Carpenter, The Renewed, 22–7. G.E. Sioui, Huron / Wendat, 173–4; 23 R. Rapapport, Ritual and Religion, 52–8. 24 j r 22: 288–9 (1642). 25 D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 72. Also, R. Carpenter, The Renewed, 15–22. 26 R. Viau, Enfants du néant et mangeurs d’âmes, 149–51. Also, R. Carpenter, The Renewed, 17–23. 27 Jogues to Filleau, m n f v, doc. 115, 607. 28 j r 31: 52–3 (1647). 29 D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 69. 30 j r 17: 12–13 (1639). 31 On Jesuit mission ideology in France and Canada see D. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 301. Also, A.L. Martin, The Jesuit Mind. 32 It is likely that Le Jeune is referring to the European wars of religion here, and deaths suffered by Christians in missions in Asia and Japan. About Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus not a lot is known. He was born at Carthage probably around ad 160 and converted to Christianity in his middle age. He was a lawyer by profession, but made his name as an

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ecclesiastical writer around ad 200, when he became a priest. This phrase, often quoted by Canadian Jesuits, became a central tenet of Christian doctrines of martyrdom. It is taken from his Apolegeticum (c. 197), a defence of the Christians against their Roman persecutors. J. Chapman, “Tertullian,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14. 33 j r 17: 12–13 (1639). 34 B. Diefendorff argues that the legacy of the French wars of religion in the early seventeenth century had a profound impact on advancing a spirit of penitential asceticism in France among both men and women. From Penitence to Charity, 8–11. 35 F. Courel, ed., La vie et la doctrine spirituelle du Père Louis Lallemant de la Compagnie de Jésus, 252. 36 Ibid., 100–1. 37 D. Deslandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo,” 261. 38 J. de Guibert, The Jesuits, 355–9, 534–8. J. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 37–43. 39 Brébeuf, quoted by Paul Ragueneau in a letter to Vincent Carafa, dated 1 March 1649, m n f vii (doc. 104), 508. 40 j r 31: 38–41 (1647). 41 Anderson emphasizes the importance of choice in martyrdom in “Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism,’” 139. 42 A. Elliott, “The Power of Discourse,” 40. 43 j r 31: 42–3 (1647). 44 M. Morineau, “Les Jésuites parmi les hommes: La soif du martyre,” 51. For example, the Jesuit fathers awaiting the final Iroquois assault on the Huron mission village of La Conception in 1649 regarded themselves “as so many victims consecrated to our Lord, who must await from his hand the hour when they should be sacrificed for His glory, without attempting to delay or wishing to hasten it.” j r 34: 122–37 (1649). 45 Jogues, “Le martyre de René Goupil,” m n f v, doc. 80, 288. Also in j r 28: 126–7 (1646). 46 Isaac Jogues, “Le martyre de René Goupil par les Iroquois,” j r 28: 133 (1646). 47 Ibid., 133. J. Parmenter describes how these letters reached the French in The Edge of the Woods, 57–8, 60. 48 j r 28: 126–9. 49 On the impact of European diseases on Native peoples and the Jesuit missions see D. Delâge, Bitter Feast, 185–9. 50 Jogues, “Le martyre de René Goupil par les Iroquois,” j r 28: 134–5 (1646). 51 j r 22: 282–5 (1642).

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Notes to pages 47–51

52 j r 31: 84–91 (1647); Isaac Jogues to Filleau, j r 39: 214–23 (1653). 53 Ibid., 217. 54 j r 39: 234–5 (1653). More recent interpretations have taken a very different view. M. Dennis attributes to the Iroquois a genuine desire to extend Iroquois relational ethics and kinship to the French and blames Jogues’s behaviour on his trip through Iroquoia in the summer of 1646 for disrupting the treaty (Cultivating a Landscape of Peace, 225–9). J. Parmenter takes a similar approach, saying Jogues made several breaches of protocol in Iroquoian diplomacy that showed “open disregard for Iroquois spatial protocols” (The Edge of the Woods, 69). 55 Our primary source references for these deaths are several letters written by Marie de l’Incarnation in the summer of 1647. À la mère Thérèse de l’Incarnation, Tours, 12 septembre 1647, mi Corr. (lettre civ), 307. Also letters cvii, 312, and cx, 323–5. She describes Isaac Jogues and Jean de Lalande as “martyrisés,” whereas she says the Huron converts with them were merely put to death as they sang the praises of God. 56 j r 31: 136–7 (1647). 57 Ibid., 98–9 (1647). 58 Ibid., 124–5 (1647). 59 Quoted in E. Anderson, “Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism,’” 131. 60 j r 31: 113–15 (1647). 61 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, Claude Martin (1647) in mi Corr. (Lettre cx), 326. 62 E. Anderson, “Blood, Fire and Baptism,’” 139, 147–8. 63 Jacques Buteux au Jérôme Lalemant, 6 juin 1647, m n f vii (doc. 20). P. Jacques Buteux au P. Jérôme Lalemant, 29 juillet 1647, m n f vii, 48 (doc. 24). 64 Jacques Buteux à Jérôme Lalemant, 29 juillet 1647, m n f vii (doc. 24), 50. 65 Guilletmus Kieft to Mons. De Montmagny, 14 novembre 1646, in “Mémoires touchant la mort et les vertus des Pères Jésuites (1652),” Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec 1924–25, 40. 66 Jean Hamelin, “Bourdon, Jean,” d c b , vol. 1. 67 Jean Labatie to Sieur Bourdon in “Mémoires Touchant,” 39. 68 Jacques Buteux à Jérôme Lalemant, 29 July 1647, m n f vii (doc. 24), 50. 69 This conflict has received many explanations from historians of older views who see it simply as “typical Iroquois aggression,” or a struggle to control access to furs, to more recent interpretations that reject these views as hopelessly Eurocentric and focus instead on Iroquois practices and efforts toward diplomacy to create connections with the French, and French failure to understand and respond appropriately. J. Parmenter

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provides a good overview of this historiography in The Edge of the Woods, xxix–xxxv. 70 j r 31: 120–1 (1647). 71 Joseph Le Caron in Chestien Le Clercq, First Establishment of the Faith in New France, 1. 221. 72 P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 8. 73 C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 25–9. Bell argues that the triumph of the observer over the participant is the logical conclusion of Clifford Geertz’s argument that ritual is where belief and thought converge for the believer (the participant) and the best opportunity for the outsider to examine this interaction. In this formulation, the observer is assumed to be in the best position to understand the true meaning of ritual practices, and so the meanings of participants are superseded by those of observers. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 112–14. In contrast, anthropologist James Peacock suggests that while observers are able to read the outward signs of religious ritual, they run into problems when trying to access inward motivations. J. Peacock, “Belief Beheld,” 207–26. 74 Christophe Regnaut, “Récit veritable du martyre et de la bien heureuse mort, du Père Jean de Bréboeuf et du Père Gabriel L’Alemant en la Nouvelle France, dans le pays des hurons par les Iroquois, ennemis de la Foy,” j r 34: 24–37 (1649). 75 Ibid., 27–8. 76 Ibid., 26–9. 77 Richter, “War and Culture,” 570. 78 Mockery, however, was not unheard of in these rituals. See J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods, 47. 79 E. Anderson analyzes three possible perspectives on Brébeuf’s death: those of the Jesuit, the Iroquois, and Huron apostates. According to her interpretation, only in the latter view is there any hint of the odium fidei required for Christian martyrdom. Anderson, “Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism,’” 147–8. 80 P. Ragueneau, “De l’heureuse mort du P. Jean de Brebeuf, et du Pere Gabriel Lallement,” j r 34: 144–5 (1649). 81 R. Mills, “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?” 207. 82 j r 34: 30–1 (1649). In a similar way, D. Deslandres shows how missionaries believed the Devil could be God’s assistant. The Devil as well as the colonial Other were always divine agents that allowed the holy person to act out his or her God-given purposes and achieve redemption. “‘Le Diable a beau faire … ’” 23–41. Also, D. Deslandres, “Alterité, identité et rédemption,” 55–68.

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83 j r 43: 282–3 (1656–57). 84 This was a comparison not lost on people at the time. In a vision described by Ragueneau in 1671 Brébeuf and Polycarp appeared together to the nursing Sister Catherine de Saint-Augustin. According to Catherine, Polycarp spoke to her “in the same fashion as Brébeuf … with authority and a very great majesty which was mixed with a great sweetness.” P. Ragueneau, La vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 350. For the martyrdom of Polycarp see, “Life of Polycarp,” in Medieval Saints: A Reader, 3–9. 85 j r 34: 30–1. 86 j r 34: 32–5 (1649). 87 M. de Certeau, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals,’” 74. See also Luce Giard, “Michel de Certeau’s Heterology and the New World,” 214–15. 88 The idea of the unauthorized aboriginal spectator of European rituals is developed by D. Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire, 57. 89 j r : 35: 192–5 (1650). 90 M. Dennis highlights the importance of kinship networks in Iroquoian social and political thinking and the quest for peace. Cultivating a Landscape of Peace, 7–9. J. Parmenter also emphasizes the importance of mobility and clan networks for the Iroquois in creating new political organizations. The Edge of the Woods, xi, xxxv–xliii. H. Bohaker makes a similar argument for Anishnaabe strategies for dealing with colonial upheaval, discussing the importance of the continuity of kinship networks in this period for keeping communities together. “Nindoodemag,” 23–52. 91 Paul Le Jeune, Superieur à Barthelemi Jacquinot, Provincial, août 1634, m n f ii (doc. 143), 525. 92 Joseph Poncet à son Frère, 18 mai 1649, m n f vii (doc. 108), 522–3. 93 Charles Garnier à P. Henry de Saint Joseph, 25 avril 1649, m n f vii (doc. 101), 494. 94 Ibid., 494. 95 7 décembre 1649, m n f vii (doc. 125), 560. 96 Marie de l’Incarnation à la Mère Ursule de Saint-Catherine, Tours, 18 octobre 1648, m i Corr. (lettre cxvii), 352. 97 M. Ahern, “Visual and Verbal Sites,” 25. 98 Bressani’s breve relatione is found in volumes 38–40 of the Jesuit Relations. F. Du Creux, Historia Canadensis sev Novae Franciae. P.F.X. Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France. 99 Paul Ragueneau à François Piccolomini, 17 août 1650, m n f vii (doc. 146), 667.

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100 François Piccolomini à François Le Mercier, 27 mars 1651, m n f viii (doc. 11), 31. Also Piccolomini à Ragueneau, 27 mars 1651, m n f viii (doc. 9), 29; and Piccolomini à Vimont, 27 mars 1651, m n f viii (doc. 10), 31. All translations from the Latin are my own. 101 Joseph-Antoine Poncet to Goswin Nickel, 30 juillet 1655, m n f viii (doc. 149) 736–42. 102 Barthélemy Vimont to Goswin Nickel, 8 août 1655, m n f viii (doc. 150), 745. 103 The new General Superior at Rome, Goschwen (Goswin) Nickel, attributed these new opportunities to “the precious blood of your companions” the martyrs. Goswin Nickel to François Le Mercier, 7 janvier 1655, m n f viii (doc. 142), 729. 104 A. Martin, The Jesuit Mind, 223–6. 105 Jean De Quen to Goswin Nickel, 1656, m n f viii (doc. 183), 809. 106 Ibid, 809.

C h a p t e r T h re e   1 The Jesuit account is found in the 1650 Relation, written entirely by Paul Ragueneau. j r 35: 216–35 (1650).   2 In his Histoire de Montréal, the superior of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, François Dollier de Casson, describes the dangers of ambush, kidnapping, and murder that Montreal colonists faced when they ventured into the fields around the tiny settlement. Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal: nouvelle édition.   3 All Indigenous converts received a Christian name when they were baptized. Onaharé was this man’s Algonquin name and Joseph was his baptismal name. Allan Greer describes this naming system as “a badge of layered identity” (Mohawk Saint, 102).   4 Joseph Chiouatenhoua, j r 19: 137–65; 20: 77–83, 21: 147–67. Garconthié, death and virtues, j r 61: 21–33, 223. Negabamat: piety j r 16: 93–9, 109; 18: 161; 25: 135–53, 171–3; death j r 50: 121; 52: 223–7. Gannendaris, j r 52: 245–57. For the sources of Catherine / Tekakwitha’s life see A. Greer, “Savage / Saint.” On the three Montreal martyrs see Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, vol. 13; and P.F.X. Charlevoix, History and Description of New France, vol. 4, 296–303. D. Lafrenière, “L’éloge de l’Indien dans les relations des Jésuites,” 25–36. The a h d q also record a number of pious lives and deaths of Indigenous persons who passed through the doors of the hospital.

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  5 The pious or precious Indigenous death was a particular interest of observant missionaries. For example : F. Crespieul, Pretiosa mors quorumdam Algonquiniorum et Montanensium; I. Lachance, “Les ‘morts précieuses’ dans les écrits des jésuites de la Nouvelle-France.” On deathbed narratives see E.R. Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes.”   6 In addition to the single chapter in the relation of 1650 that describes Onaharé’s Christian life and death, Onaharé is mentioned in contemporary sources only in two composite versions of the Relations: one published in Italy in 1653 and one in France in 1664. Neither adds anything significant to the original source. François-Joseph Bressani, “Breve Relatione,” in j r 39: 86–7; F. du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, vol. 2, 570–4. The Jesuit historian P.F.X. Charlevoix also discusses Onaharé in his Histoire et description générale du Canada, vol. 2, 34–7. The only other original material about him is found in passing references in a letter by Marie de l’Incarnation. Marie de l’Incarnation à Claude Martin, 30 août 1650, in m i Corr. (lettre cxxviii), 399.   7 It is not entirely clear when Onaharé arrived in Sillery. Marie de l’Incarnation writes that the Jesuit Paul Le Jeune raised him in the faith almost from childhood. Le Jeune spent the winter of 1645–46 in Montreal and returned to France in 1649, so it seems likely Onaharé arrived in ­Sillery in the summer of 1646. Marie de l’Incarnation à Claude Martin, 30 août 1650, m i Corr. (lettre cxxviii), 399; Léon Pouliot, “Le Jeune, Paul,” d c b , vol. 1.  8 Ibid., 399.   9 Today, however, “Algonquin” refers specifically to the Nation of the Ottawa valley and the region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue in Quebec, while Algonquian or Algonkian refers to the large linguistic and cultural family, which includes the Innu (Montagnais), Abenaki, and Mi’kmaq nations, among others. D. Clément, ed. The Algonquins, 1. 10 On French-Algonquin alliance and exchange see: J. Axtell, The Invasion Within; A.G. Bailey, The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures; O.P. Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginning of French Colonialism in the Americas; J.W. Grant, Moon of Wintertime; C. Jaenen, Friend and Foe; K. Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin; Richard White, The Middle Ground, 94–141. 11 Peter Cook, “Vivre comme frères: Le rôle du registre fraternel dans les premières alliances franco amérindiennes au Canada,” 55–65. Also Cook, “Vivre comme frères,” 397–408. On the evolution of metaphors of belonging from brotherhood to fatherhood see J. Steckley, “The Warrior and the Lineage,” 500–2.

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12 This colonial world is described in great detail by R. White, The Middle Ground, 94–141. E. Anderson argues that Montagnais-Algonquin behaviourial ethics anticipated a gradual integration of outsiders into the community, a process cut short by French reluctance to give up an independent identity. See The Betrayal of Faith, 43–62. 13 On the close relationship between economic and religious exchange see D. Murray, Indian Giving, 171–99; E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 43–62; K. DuVal, “‘A Good Relationship and Commerce’”; and B.M. White, “Encounters with Spirits.” On French gifting practices see N.Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France. 14 K. Morrison, “Montagnais Missionizing in Early New France: The Syncretic Imperative,” in The Solidarity of Kin, 117. 15 j r 6: 258–61 (1634). 16 P. Cook, “Vivre comme frères,” 452. 17 These epidemics likely began to the south of New France in New England and spread north and west, striking the Montagnais and Algonquins for the first time in 1635. See G. Gagne, “L’impact des maladies européennes sur la mortalité amérindienne à Sillery au dix-septième siècle”; and K.M. Lanphear and D.R. Snow, “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast.” 18 K. Morrison, “Montagnais Missionization in Early New France,” in The Solidarity of Kin, 120. Also, E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 3, 23–6. 19 K. Morrison, “Baptism and Alliance,” 418–19. 20 j r 11: 192–3 (1637). 21 K. Morrison, “The Solidarity of Kin: The Intersection of Eastern Algonkian and French-Catholic Cosmologies,” in The Solidarity of Kin, 160–1. Also, E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 36. On ritual redressive action see Morrison, “Baptism and Alliance,” 416–17. The concept is V. Turner’s. See Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 38–41. 22 K. Morrison, “Baptism and Alliance,” 416–37. 23 j r 8: 246–7 (1636). 24 j r 16: 36–7 (1639). 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 52–3 (1639). 27 j r 25: 112–13 (1643–44); j r 25: 106–9, 192–3 (1643–44); j r 28: 182–3; j r 29: 74–5 (1646). J.P. Ronda, “The Sillery Experiment,” 7–8. 28 j r 14: 216–17 (1638). 29 j r 12: 166–9 (1635); j r 23: 302–7 (1642). J.P. Ronda, “The Sillery Experiment,” 4; and Ronda, “We are well as we are,” 66–82. 30 Ibid., 10–11.

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31 M. Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes, 40–2. 32 E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 29–33. 33 j r 29: 74–5 (1646). Ronda, “The Sillery Experiment,” 13. 34 j r 16: 48–9 (1639). 35 M. Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes, 38. 36 j r 35: 226–7 (1650). 37 Ibid., 228–9. 38 mi Corr., 399. 39 j r 35: 228–9 (1650). On Indigenous “conversion” see A. Greer, “Conversion and Identity.” T.N. Leavelle also takes up the issue of conversion and the appropriateness of the term in the context of Indigenous missions in the Great Lakes region in The Catholic Calumet, 8–11. 40 j r 29: 72–3 (1646). 41 See K. Morrison, “Baptism and Alliance,” 432. 42 By the seventeenth century the Iroquois Condolence Ritual had been projected onto a wide range of peoples, including the French, who engaged in ritualized gift exchange to advance diplomatic relationships. M. Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace, 77–81. 43 j r 22: 50–3 (1642). 44 On Montagnais-Algonquin cultures of war see E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 34–5. 45 Ibid., 30–1. 46 j r 5: 158–9; E. Anderson, Betrayal of Faith, 31. 47 This event recalls Paul Le Jeune’s own encounter with a Montagnais Skaking-Tent ritual during his sojourn with a Montagnais hunting band over the winter of 1633–34, recounted in j r 7: 116–17. 48 j r 35: 228–31 (1650). 49 Ibid., 230–1. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 218–19. 52 Ibid., 218–23. 53 J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods, 80–6. 54 Its unclear if this Huron man rejected Christianity along with Sillery. He was later recaptured by an Algonquin war party and put to death, but before he was killed he converted or reconverted to Christianity, suggesting he may well have cast Christianity off. Possibly, however, his conversion was a restatement of faith after living among the Iroquois without access to Christian priests, or simply forced. Ibid., 220–3. 55 The Relation of 1650 says three days and three nights (35: 224–5). François-Joseph Bressani’s abridged version claims eight days. “Breve Relatione,” j r 39: 86–7.

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56 j r 35: 224–7 (1650). 57 On the religious dimensions of ritual torture and death in indigenous cultures see E. Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith, 49–51; R.M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade, 27; D.K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 32–8; D.K. Richter, “War and Culture,” 528. 58 R. Hedde, “Martyre,” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 10, 231. 59 j r 35: 222–3 (1650) 60 Ibid. 61 Isaac Jogues made a similar claim about René Goupil’s preparations in 1642. j r 28: 126–9. 62 j r 35: 234–5 (1650). 63 Ibid., 222–3. 64 I. Lachance judges that such a determination rested more on the degree to which a given convert proved useful to the missionaries and their enterprise rather than on a determination of sanctity per se. “Les ‘morts précieuses” dans les écrits des jésuites de la Nouvelle-France,” 97–9. 65 The Relations are filled with examples of the stories missionaries like to tell, including that of Onaharé. K. Morrison suggests that the seemingly extraordinary piety of Montagnais and Algonquin converts that Jesuits reported at Sillery may have been the result of pre-existing ethics of gifting and reciprocity that demanded repayment to the Christian God for the power and benefits Christianity offered. See “Baptism and Alliance,” 422–3. On Jesuit pessimism see, D. Deslandres, Croire et Faire Croire, 56. 66 j r 9: 90–1 (1636). 67 P. Cholenec, “La Vie de Catherine Tegakouita, première vierge Iroquoise.” The original is held in the Archives de l’Hôtel Dieu de Québec. A translation can be found in The Positio of the Historical Section of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on the Introduction of the Cause for Beatification and Canonization and the Virtues of the Servant of God, Katherine Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks (New York: Fordham University Press, 1940), 241–335. An edited version of this account was published as “Lettre du Père Cholenec, missionnaire de la Compagnie de Jésus, au Père Augustin le Blanc, de la même Compagnie,” 40–100. 68 P. Cholenec, “Lettre du Pere Cholenec,” 41. 69 On Catherine / Tekakwitha and her transformation into a Catholic holy woman see: A. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 3–24; Greer, “Savage / Saint: The Lives of Kateri Tekakwitha”; K.I. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin”; N. Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Torturous Path to Sainthood.” 70 Bressani, “Breve Relatione,” in j r 39: 87 (1653). 71 F. du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, vol. 2, 570–4.

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72 Ibid., 481. For a discussion of this image and Onaharé’s place in it see A. Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 331–6. 73 A. Greer suggests this possibility in “Colonial Saints,” 336. 74 G. Aubert, “’The Blood of France’”; S. Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy”; C. Jaenen, Friend and Foe, 173–7; J. Spear, “Colonial Intimacies”; M. Van Eyck, “‘We Shall Be One People.’” 75 In 1597 twenty-six Christians, including native converts and six Franciscan missionaries, were crucified at Nagasaki, Japan, as a part of an organized persecution against Christians. L. Delplace, “Japanese Martyrs,” The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. ix. See G. Elison, Deus Destroyed, 117–32, 185–9. 76 j r 35: 242–5 (1650). 77 P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual, 8–9.

C ha p t e r F o u r   1 On New France and the War of the Spanish Succession see chapter 8 of J. Pritchard, In Search of Empire: 358–401. On trade and the war see D. Miquelon, “Envisioning the French Empire: Utrecht, 1711–1713.” On the alliance system see: C. Desbarats, “The Cost of Early Canada’s Native Alliances”; J.G. Reid, “Imperialism, Diplomacies, and the Conquest of Acadia”; R. White, The Middle Ground, 142–85. On French and Iroquois neutrality see: J. Parmenter, “‘L’Arbre de Paix’”; and J. Parmenter and M.P. Robinson, “The Perils and Possibilities of Wartime Neutrality on the Edges of Empires.”   2 Quotation is from a h d m , 268.   3 On this expedition see: G.S. Graham, The Walker Expedition to Quebec, 1711; G.S. Graham, “Walker, Sir Hovenden,” d c b vol. 2; and B.T. McCully, “Nicholson, Francis,” dcb, vol. 2.  4 a h d m , 267–8.   5 Two hagiographic accounts of the life of Jeanne Le Ber survive: a 1722 letter written by the superior of the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal, François Vachon de Belmont (hereafter, “Vie”), and a eulogy delivered at her funeral in 1714, also by Belmont (hereafter, “Éloge”). Originals are in Archives de Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, Paris, ms 1216F. The printed edition consulted here is F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloges de quelques personnes mortes en odeur de sainteté à Montréal,” 144–62 and 162–6 respectively. Additional biographical information is found in the a h d m and the a h d q , as well as in the writings of Marguerite Bourgeoys. For details on sources, see C.J. Jaenen, “Le Ber, Jeanne,” d c b , vol. 2. A more recent

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Life of Jeanne Le Ber, which draws heavily on Vachon de Belmont’s work, is M.-E. Faillon, The Christian Heroine of Canada. For a good recent account of Jeanne Le Ber see F. Deroy-Pineau, Jeanne Le Ber.   6 Nowhere does Vachon de Belmont state directly that it was Anne Barroy who approached Le Ber seeking assistance against the English, but she alone had standing permission from the bishop to speak with the recluse. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 160. M.-É. Faillon identifies Anne Barroy at Jeanne’s attendant in The Christian Heroine of Canada, 124.   7 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 160.   8 The rule of her solitude, drawn up by the former Sulpician superior, François Dollier de Casson, stated that she could speak to no one except her father without the permissions of her confessor or the bishop. F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 153. D. Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister,” 142–4. F. Vachon de Belmont reports that two Englishmen visiting from New England, one a Protestant clergyman, requested to see the holy woman, and were so amazed by what they saw that they were often heard to speak about the wonders of Canada when they returned home. On New England perceptions of Canadian religious houses see A.M. Little, “Cloistered Bodies.”   9 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 160. 10 The Maison Saint-Gabriel in the Pointe Saint-Charles district of Montreal sits on the site of the former Congrégation farms. Now a museum, the Maison houses a collection of artifacts from Jeanne Le Ber’s life, including a picture of the Virgin painted by her brother, Pierre, which legend holds is the image that was hung above the Granary doors in 1711. However, Vachon de Belmont says that another image of the Virgin painted by Pierre Le Ber, upon which Jeanne also inscribed prayers, was given to the Baron de Longueil when he set off to prepare an ambush for the expected English attack. Therefore, we have references to at least three images, and there were likely more. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 161. On Pierre Le Ber see Jules Bazin, “Le Ber, Pierre,” d c b vol. 2. 11 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 160. 12 a h d m , 271. 13 a h d q ., 365. 14 Ibid., 410. 15 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 161. 16 The Council of Trent affirmed good works in its sixth session, ch. 10, (13 January 1547). See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 675. 17 M. Scaduto “Works of Charity,” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 400–20. D. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 363–4. 18 j r 19: 56–7 (1640).

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19 j r 14: 198–9 (1638). 20 j r 16: 48–9 (1639). 21 On disinterest or religious indifference see. E.A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers and Sex,” 628; E.A. Clark, Reading Renunciation, 14–27; M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 256–59; A. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 75. 22 E. Dublanchy, “Charité,” Dictionnaire de théologie Catholique, vol. 2, 2217–66. 23 P. Cholenec, “La vie de Catherine Tegakouita,” 290. 24 M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 256–9. On the spiritual context of Early Modern French female piety see B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 49–76, especially 69–71 on inversion, and 75–6 on female asceticism. K. Norberg, “The Counter-Reformation and Women Religious and Lay,” 133–46. 25 D. Weinstein and R. Bell, Saints and Society, 220–1. 26 Ibid., 221–5. 27 It was only toward the very end of the French regime that the Ursulines of Quebec considered opening a process for Marie de l’Incarnation. The conquest, however, put an end to the notion. M.-E. Chabot, o.s.u., “Guyart, Marie,” d c b , vol. 1. Marie, along with other prominent colonial holy women, would wait until the end of the nineteenth century for any form of official recognition. 28 This change mirrors a similar one underway in France itself from a penitential model of holiness that embraced extreme asceticism to a charitable model focused on service as the impact on spirituality of the Wars of Religion, the Fronde, and the radical Catholic League gradually faded through the mid-seventeenth century. See B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 11–13. 29 As early as 1634, Paul Le Jeune called for female religious to come and assist with evangelism in New France. He was inundated with responses from female orders in France. See j r 7: 256–61 (1635); j r 8: 234–43 (1636); j r 9: 100–3 (1636). 30 j r 19: 26–7 (1640). 31 M.-F. Bruneau, Women Mystics Confront the Modern World, 44. 32 C. Martin, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 548–51. Marie’s letters are found in a number of printed sources, the most significant being C. Martin, ed., Lettres de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation; and mi Corr. M.-E. Chabot, o.s.u., “Guyart, Marie,” d c b , vol. 1. 33 On Ursuline vocation and practice see See M. Dumont, Girls’ Schooling in Quebec, 1639–1960. Gourdeau paints a detailed portrait of daily life with

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the Ursulines. C. Gourdeau, Les délices de nos coeurs. On the Ursuline Order in France see B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 101–32. 34 Duchesse d’Aiguillon à la Révérende Mère Marie de Saint-Bonavemture, supérieure des Hospitalières de Québec en Canada, 29 mars 1664, cited in Dom Albert Jamet, “Introduction,” a h d q , xx. 35 C. Jones, The Charitable Imperative, 2. 36 Vincent de Paul quoted in Jones, The Charitable Imperative, 104. 37 Ibid., 34. 38 a h d q , 132. 39 For example, L. Choquette, “‘Ces amazons du Grand Dieu’”; D. Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 356–89; D. Deslandres, “Femmes missionnaires en Nouvelle-France,” 74–84; C. Théry, “La ‘vie de rêve’ de Marie de l’Incarnation, pleine d’audace.” The work of Françoise Deroy-Pineau takes a similar perspective in presenting the biographies of the most prominent of New France holy women within a narrative of accomplishment. See, for example, Marie de l’Incarnation, Marie Guyart, and Marie-Madeleine de la Peltrie. For a more comparative perspective, but similar conclusions, see J. Bilinkoff, “Navigating the Waves (of Devotion).” On Jesuit colonialism and the creation of a colonial rhetoric in the Relations see C. Blackburn, Harvest of Souls. On female religious and colonialism see T. Carr, “Writing the Convent in New France.” One exception to this pattern is N.Z. Davis’s work on Marie de l’Incarnation, in which Davis compares the experiences of French women and Iroquois women in the colonial context. See Women on the Margins, 63–139, and “Iroquois Women, European Women.” 40 Marie de l’Incarnation to one of her brothers, 1 septembre 1639, mi Corr. (lettre xl), 88. 41 Marie de l’Incarnation à Mère Angélique de la Conception (Tours), 19 août 1664, m i Corr. (lettre ccxiii), 734–5. L. Lierheimer, “Preaching or Teaching?” 42 Her “Relation of 1654” is published in Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits ­spirituels et historiques, vol. 2, 246, 258–9. 43 j r 8: 182–3 (1635). 44 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 256. 45 Accounts of this dream are found in a number of sources. Marie de l’Incarnation à Dom Raymond de S. Bernard, 3 mai 1635, mi Corr. (lettre xvii), 42–4; and m i à Dom Raymond de S. Bernard, 26 octobre 1637 (lettre xxviii), 64–5. Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, 228–30. j r  56: 246–63 (1671–72). 46 Marie de l’Incarnation to one of her brothers, 4 septembre 1640, mi Corr. (lettre xlvii), 112.

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47 Marie de I’Incarnation à Mère Marie-Gillette Roland (Tours), 4 septembre 1640, mi Corr. (lettre xlvi), 110. 48 On the desire of mystics to overturn the social hierarchy see M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 256–9. 49 On religious women in France reading the Relations see j r 7: 258–9 (1635) and j r 8: 234–5 (1636). On the general popularity of the “Relations” genre in France see S.E. Melzer, “The French Relation and its ‘Hidden’ Colonial History,” 220–4. 50 j r 7: 106–7 (1634); j r 11: 268–9 (1637); 21: 62–3 (1640); 23: 230–1 (1642); 27: 142–3 (1645); 29: 280–3 (1646). On the positive (European) attributes of the colony, as Paul Le Jeune saw things, see j r 9: 134–49 (1636). The Biblical description of the land given to Cain is in Genesis 1:4. 51 C. Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 44–5, 50. 52 j r 11: 268–9 (1637). 53 j r 8: 240–1 (1636). 54 j r 10: 8–9 (1636). 55 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 55. 56 Ibid., 57. 57 j r 52: 84–5 (1668). This passage comes from a circular letter sent shortly after Catherine’s death to all the houses belonging to her community. It was likely written by Paul Ragueneau and was included as an addendum to the Relation of 1668. 58 j r 7: 258–9 (1635). On Early Modern cloistered life see E. Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister; G. Reynes, Couvents de femmes. 59 M.A. Foley, “La vie voyagère for Women,” 27. 60 The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–1, 226, 228. The only legitimate excuses by which a woman might leave the cloister as sanctioned by the council were fire, leprosy, or contagious disease. On Trent’s influence on French religious women see: S.E. Dinan, “Spheres of Female Religious Expression in Early Modern France”; E. Rapley, The Dévotes. 61 Marguerite Bourgeoys is discussed in greater detail in chapter seven. In her struggles with the bishop of Quebec see M.A. Foley, “La vie voyagère,” 15–28 and C. Gray, The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 29–45. On the interpretation of Tridentine rules see F. Medioli, “An Unequal Law”; R. Liebowitz, “Virgins in the Service of Christ.” 62 The experiences of women in New France have been considerably debated by historians. Some studies of secular women, especially widows, suggest the colony may have offered women increased opportunities beyond traditional gender roles, while others argue that the place of women in the

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colony was more in line with typical pre-industrial European society. J. Brun, “Les femmes d’affaires en Nouvelle-France”; Brun, Vie et mort du couple en Nouvelle-France; M. Dumont, “Les femmes de la NouvelleFrance étaient-elles favorisées?” B. Grenier, “Réflexion sur le pouvoir féminin au Canada sous le régime français”; J. Noel, “New France: Les femmes favorisées”; J. Noel, “‘Nagging Wife’ Revisited”; F. Parent, Entre le juridique et le social. Even female religious orders, often regarded as the site par excellence of female authority, need to be understood within the larger context of a male-dominated ecclesiastical structure, argues C. Gray, The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 59–65, 106–8. 63 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 10. 64 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 9 août 1654, mi Corr. (lettre clv), 526. 65 H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux, vol. 2, 586, 603; G. Jantzen, Power and Gender in Christian Mysticism, 322–8. 66 A. Weber shows how the most prominent female mystic and saint of the age, Teresa of Avila, adopted just such rhetoric, adjusting her writing to appeal to an audience she knew well – the Spanish Church and Inquisition. Rhetorical self-deprecation was an essential condition of writing as a woman and for women in Catholic reformation Spain. Teresa of Avila was successful in a period that frowned upon female spirituality because she made some concessions to gender ideology and embraced female stereotypes, but turned them around to become religious virtues. Similar strategies are at work in the writing of Marie de l’Incarnation, Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and other colonial women. Teresa of Avila and the ­Rhetoric of Femininity, 11–37. 67 Jantzen, Power and Gender, 322–8. The agency of female religious is a matter of some debate. C. Walker-Bynum tends to valorize the female experience of the holy, while others such as M.-F. Bruneau argue that holy women possessed only as much power as the male hierarchy allowed them. See Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 73–186; Bruneau, Women Mystics, 12–13, and C. Gray, The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 128. 68 On the composition of spiritual journals and their relation to early modern hagiography see J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives. 69 C. Martin, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation; C. Martin, Lettres de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation. 70 C. Théry, “Les rapports mère-fils: Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation et dom Claude Martin” in De plume et d’audace, 197–212. 71 Recent interpreters have termed these biographies “collaborative lives” because the voices of both the confessor and the holy woman are discernible in them. J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 66–7; D. Donahue, “Writing

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Notes to pages 101–6

Lives,” 231; T. Mayer and D.R. Woolf, Rhetorics of Life Writing, 19. On the popularity of this form of spiritual biography in early modern Europe see Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 65. For an interpretation concerned with the representation of the female subject see C. Gray, “Imaging a Colonial Saint.” 72 B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 69–71. As Diefendorf points out, the relationship was more that of teacher and pupil than weak woman and powerful man. Indeed, women could serve as spiritual directors (if not confessors), capable of giving advice. The goal of all good directors was not to create dependency but rather to tame the will of the penitent to leave him or her completely submissive to the will of God. 73 J. Bilinkoff, “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila,” 95. 74 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 10–15. 75 E.C. Goldsmith, Publishing Women’s Life Stories in France, 36. 76 M.-R. Higonnet and P.-L.-R. Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” 31–50. 77 M.-F. Bruneau, Women Mystics, 21. 78 On biographical patterning in French hagiography see É. Suire, La sainteté française de la Réforme catholique, 131. 79 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 11. 80 E. Rapley, The Dévotes, 8–9. 81 For example, Mgr de Saint-Vallier, the bishop of Quebec, wrote a circular letter to his diocese in 1716 announcing the cure he received for a fever through the recently deceased local holy man, Frère Didace Pelletier. Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec vol. 1, 487. Later, Montreal priest Thomas Ruffin played a key role in advancing the holy reputation of Mgr François-Louis Pourroy Lauberivière, the fifth bishop of Quebec, after the latter died suddenly in 1740. “Relation d’une guérison obtenue pour un enfant de trois ans,” in Monseigneur de Lauberivière, 115–24. 82 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 80. 83 C. Martin, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 548–52. 84 Ibid., 549. 85 See N. Caciola, Discerning Spirits. 86 On the saint-making process see K. Woodward, Making Saints. 87 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloges,” 162 88 Ibid., 166. 89 Mère Sainte-Hélène to Mme Hecquet, 25 October 1729 in Nova Francia 3.1 (October 1927): 42. 90 On resource sharing, and government efforts to regulate the grain trade see L. Dechêne, Le Partage des subsistances, 24.

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 91 a h d q , 246–57.   92 “Instructions pour l’établissement de la fête de N-D da la Victoire,” 19 septembre 1694, in Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des Évêques de Québec, vol. 1, 342.   93 J,-B.-C. de Saint-Vallier, Catéchisme du diocèse de Québec, 442–3.   94 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloge,” 165.   95 Thomas Morel, “Récit des merueilles arrivées en l’Église de Sainte-Anne du Petit Cap, Coste de Beaupray, en la Nouvelle France,” in j r 51: 86–100 (1667–68). A manuscript version of this text, which records thirty-one marvels or miracles, is found in the Archives du Séminaire de Québec, dating to c. 1687. “Récit des merueilles arrivées en l’Église de Sainte Anne du Petit Cap, Coste de Beaupray, en la Nouvelle France,” Musée de la civilisation, fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec, sme 12.2.1/1/84.  96 Morel, s m e 12.2.1/1/84.  97 a h d q , 410.   98 Jeanne Le Ber, dernier testament, 1 octobre 1714, banqm, reel 3490, f. 16513–15.   99 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Vie,” 161–2. 100 Ibid., 144. 101 Ibid., 145. 102 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloge,” 163–4. 103 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 55. F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloge,” 163–4.

C ha p t e r F i ve   1 Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s spiritual journal survives only in lengthy quotations included in a 1671 holy biography composed by her confessor, the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau. Ragueneau, La vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 163–5.   2 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 238–9.   3 L. Berry, “‘Le ciel et la terre nous ont parlé,’” 19.   4 There are a number of contemporary accounts of the earthquake. Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 20 août 1663, in mi Corr. (lettre cciv), 686– 706, and 7 septembre 1668 (lettre ccxxxviii), 813. Jérôme Lalemant, j r 48: 40–73 (1663). Charles Simon, j r 48: 182–223; a h d q , 138–49; P. Boucher, Histoire véritable et naturelle, avant-­propos; and Catherine’s ­version found in P. Ragueneau, Vie, 236–40.   5 Berry, “‘Le ciel et la terre nous ont parlé,’” 19–21.  6 j r 48: 58–9 (1663).

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Notes to pages 112–15

  7 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 239–40.   8 On the mystical experience of God in seventeenth-century France see H. Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, vol. 2, 586, 603.   9 “Crowds” was a relative term in mid-seventeenth-century New France. Marcel Trudel calculates the total French population of the St Lawrence valley in 1666 at 3,173, a figure based on a census of the French population from that year. By reconstructing the population, he estimates that the census missed up to a quarter of the inhabitants so the total French population likely totalled just over four thousand. M. Trudel, La population du Canada en 1666, 49–54. 10 a h d q , 158. 11 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 7 septembre 1668, mi Corr. (lettre ccxxxviii), 813–15. 12 Marie de Saint-Bonaventure de Jésus to the Mother Superior of the Hospital Nuns of Dieppe, “Lettre Circulaire de la mort de la Révérende Mère Catherine de Saint-Augustin, Religieuse Hospitalière de Quebec, décédée le 8 mai 1668,” 4 octobre 1668, in j r 52: 56–81 (1668) (hereafter “Lettre Circulaire”). Le Mercier, j r 52: 80–97. 13 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 1. There are also a number of modern hagiographies dating to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. H.-R. Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec; L. Hudon, Une fleur mystique de la Nouvelle-France; A. Merlaud, L’Épopée fantastique d’une jeune Normande. For a more critical approach see G.-M. Oury, L’Itinéraire ­mystique de Catherine de Saint-Augustin. A wide variety of documents concerning her canonization procedure can be found in Beatificationis et canonizationis servae dei Mariae Catharinae a Sancto Augustino. 14 N.Z. Davis, Women on the Margins, 129–32. 15 For a discussion of female hagiography in the Christian tradition see Catherine Mooney, “Gender, Voice and the Portrayal of Sanctity,” in Gendered Voices, 6–15. For a meditation on the female voice in colonial hagiographic discourse see Colleen Gray, “Imaging a Colonial Saint.” 16 On Ragueneau and the structure of the collaborative life see J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 70–5. On the relationship of spiritual directors with penitents see B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 69–76. 17 a h d q , 237. As we saw in the previous chapter, Catherine’s vocation was not uncontroversial and Ragueneau felt the need to defend it against critics. Jansenists, in particular objected. The convent of Port-Royal censured the book, and it was also brought up for consideration before a council of the Sorbonne (a h d q , 236). It was only through the patronage of the

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Duchess d’Aiguillon, foundress of the Hôtel-Dieu, that publication of Ragueneau’s work was secured beyond the Augustinian audience for whom he claimed he wrote. G.M. Oury, l’Itinéraire mystique, 12. 18 “Lettre Circulaire,” j r 52: 58–9 (1668). 19 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 17–18. 20 Ibid., 28–30. 21 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, vol. 1, 151–3. 22 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloges,” 148–50. 23 “Lettre Circulaire,” j r 52: 56–7. 24 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 41. 25 The motif generally centres upon the desire of the father, often a pagan, to marry his pious daughter to another pagan. The daughter must resist such an abomination and in almost every case she triumphs over her father’s will through a dramatic act of her own will, such as flight or even martyrdom. For an example see, “St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” in M.A. Stouck, Medieval Saints. 26 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 41. 27 Ibid., 41. 28 On embodied scenarios see D. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 54–5. 29 The average age of entry into religious life at the time in France was 14–16. See J.-P. Asselin, “Regnard Duplessis, Marie-Andrée dite de SainteHélène,” d c b , vol. 3. The Annales de l’Hôtel Dieu make little fuss about Catherine’s age of profession. a d h q , 66–7. 30 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 40. 31 Marie de l’Incarnation: Écrits spirituels et historiques. 32 “Lettre Circulaire,” j r 52: 64–5. 33 On immigration to New France see P. Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles,” 463– 505. On religion and colonial development see P. Moogk, La NouvelleFrance, 235–64. On financial contributions of dévot(e)s to the colony see: J.F. Bosher, “The Counter-Reformation in France, 1620–1660,” 17–55; C. Desbarats, “France in North America,” 1. 34 For example, members of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement in Rouen marched through the streets of the city declaring that the “faith had departed from France” and that, as “les fous de Jésus Christ,” they would go to the New World to rebuild his kingdom. Original account is in Bibliothèque municipale de Rouen, Papiers Féron, ms. m 276; cited in C. Jaenen, “The Frenchification and Evangelization of the Amerindians,” 57–71. On the millennialism of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement see, A. Tallon, La compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, 107–17.

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Notes to pages 120–6

35 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 55 36 j r 32: 132–3 (1648). 37 Marie de Saint-Bonaventure, quoted in P. Ragueneau, Vie, 360. 38 G. Havard and C. Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, 179. 39 j r 16: 18–9 (1639). Despite Le Jeune’s optimism, living conditions for these first arrivals were unlikely to be mistaken for a European convent. The first Ursuline house consisted of “two little rooms that served as kitchen, dining hall, cell, classroom, parlor and choir.” Marie de l’Incarnation à une Dame de qualité, 3 septembre 1640, mi Corr. (lettre xlviii), 98. 40 j r 19: 10–11 (1640). 41 a h d q , 30. 42 Ibid., 31–2. 43 Ibid., 41–2. 44 Marie de Saint-Bonaventure à Monsieur N., 29 septembre 1650, in j r 36: 56–61. 45 a h d q , 86. 46 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 80. 47 Ibid., 86–8. 48 See W.O. Kaelber, “Asceticism,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 1, 441. 49 A.W. Ramsey, “Flagellation and the French Counter-Reformation,” 577. É. Suire, La Sainteté française, 25–9. 50 G. Boucher, Dieu et Satan dans la vie de Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 17. After Ragueneau left Canada in 1662, Catherine believed Brébeuf began to appear to her repeatedly in visions to serve as her spiritual advisor (Ragueneau, Vie, 179–89). Although Brébeuf played a significant role in Catherine de Saint-Augustin’s spiritual life, the two never met in person. 51 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 182. 52 M. de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, 157–64; G. Flood, The Ascetic Self, 15–16. 53 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 193. 54 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 18. Also, E.A. Clark, “Foucault, the Fathers and Sex,” 628. For a good overview of recent work in this area see E.A. Clark, Reading Renunciation, 14–27. 55 G. Flood, The Ascetic Self, 3–4. 56 In his studies of the late-antique eastern holy man, Peter Brown revised his vision of the mystic from being a stranger to society to being someone who lived with and within the community from which he had arisen and to which he was bound. See “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” and “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity.” See also

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the special addition on Peter Brown’s holy man in the Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3 (1998). 57 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 237. 58 Ibid., 249. 59 Ibid., 163–5; m i Corr., 7 septembre, 1668 (lettre ccxxxviii), 814. This event took place in 1660–61. Another account, not mentioned by Ragueneau or Marie, suggests that Barbe Hallay was exorcized by a laywoman using a relic of Jean de Brébeuf. “Récit du soulagement d’une possédée par l’entremise des reliques du R.P. Jean de Brébeuf.” Archives de la Société de Jésus, Canada Français, cs m no. 247. See Julia Boss, “Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France.” 60 Ibid., 115–18; 119–25. 61 J. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 38–9. 62 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 117. 63 Ibid., 124. 64 A H D Q ., 148. On the use of relics in early Canada see D. Deslandres, “Signes de Dieu et légitimation de la présence française au Canada,” 146–7. 65 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 282. 66 Ibid., 284, 289. 67 For examples, see P. Ragueneau, Vie, 240, 247–8, 277–83 and 289–94. According to C. Martin, this desire to suffer for others was a central part of the missionary vocation. Martin, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 431, 435–43. 68 Ibid., Book 5, “Sa vie souffrante pour les âmes de Purgatoire.” 69 J. Bossy, “The Mass as Social Institution,” 42. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, 774 (Session 25, 3–4 December 1663). 70 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 165–8. 71 On conservatism and mysticism see S.T. Katz, “The Conservative Character of Mystical Experience,” 36. 72 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 7 septembre 1668, mi Corr. (lettre ccxxxviii) 813–15. M.-F. Bruneau, Women Mystics Confront the Modern World, 44. Claude Martin says that when his mother went to Canada, God took away her visions and revelations and told her to lead a common life. This was a mark of humility for her. Martin, La vie de la vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 404. 73 M.-F. Bruneau, Women Mystics, 24–5. 74 “Lettre Circulaire,” in j r 52: 66–7. 75 Ibid., 66–7. 76 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 335.

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Notes to pages 131–41

77 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 20 août 1663, mi Corr. (lettre cciv), 686–706. 78 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, 7 septembre 1668, mi Corr. (lettre ccxxxviii), 813–15. 79 j r 48: 50–3 (1663). 80 j r 48: 182–223 (1663). François Ragueneau was rector of the Jesuit College at Bourges. 81 Ibid., 221. 82 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, août-septembre 1663, mi Corr. (lettre cciv), 688. 83 R. Valentasis, “A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism,” 549. 84 Ibid., 547–8; also R. Valantasis, “Constructions of Power in Asceticism,” 807. 85 See, T. Pearson, “‘I willingly speak to you about her virtue.’” 86 C.W. Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast, 220. 87 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 338. 88 Ibid., 337. 89 Ibid., 45. 90 “Lettre Circulaire,” j r 52: 78–9. 91 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 251. 92 Marie de l’Incarnation à son fils, octobre 1669, mi Corr. (lettre ccliv), 863. 93 a h d m , 114–15. 94 Catherine’s account of the ceremony is found in Ragueneau, Vie, 145–52. Ragueneau dates the ceremony to 18 July 1666, but the Journal des Jésuites, a chronicle of daily events kept by the Jesuits at Quebec, dates it a week earlier. Journal des Jésuites, 346. 95 P. Ragueneau, Vie, 146. 96 Ibid., 145–6. 97 Ibid., 146.

C ha p t e r S i x  1 a h d q , 157–8.  2 Ibid.   3 Despite these fears, demographic studies show that membership in the Hôtel-Dieu grew continually from its foundation until the 1720s when a royally mandated increase in the dowry charged to novices put a brake on enrolment. L. Pelletier, Le clergé en Nouvelle-France, 39.  4 a h d q , 224.   5 See T. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France, 8.

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 6 a h d q , 223.   7 For instance, in examining devotional practices in the region of Quebec during the French regime, Marie-Aimée Cliche tests the hypothesis that the gap between popular and elite religion was narrower in New France than in France thanks to the small size of the colonial population and a more vigilant priesthood. Cliche, Les pratiques de dévotion en NouvelleFrance, 2. Other explorations of popular religion in French Canada include, P. Boglioni et B. Lacroix, eds. Les pèlerinages au Québec (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1981); J. du Berger calls for a review of the perceived relationship between popular and elite religion in “Les rites de passage: Pour une nouvelle lecture,” 317–38. In the introduction to the same collection, G. Laperrière calls for a study of religious culture rather than popular religion (19–51). More recently, scholars such as O. Hubert have advocated a more anthropological approach to religious history, arguing that rituals should be viewed as cultural texts that imparted meaning to audiences, solved problematic cultural situations, and resolved social tensions. Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel, troisième partie. In European historiography, scholars such as William Christian question the popular-religion approach and instead argue from one that emphasizes locality where sacred and secular were fused. W.A. Christian, Jr. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 8–21, 147–8, 158.   8 R. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 2.   9 P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 21. 10 a h d q , 243–4. 11 Ibid., 243. 12 O. Hubert observes that the post-Tridentine church placed great emphasis on the efficacy of its own rituals and the validations they carried. Hubert, Sur la terre comme au ciel, 52, 59. 13 a h d q , 244. 14 Ibid., 242. 15 Ibid., 237. 16 Ibid., 243. 17 Ibid., 242. 18 M.-A. Cliche made some efforts toward quantification, but in the end was forced to admit that surviving sources simply do not support such an analysis. Les pratiques de dévotion en Nouvelle-France, 29–31. 19 J. Lalemant à la Mère Anne du Saint-Sacrement, Québec, 15 novembre 1649, m n f vii (doc. 121), 543–4. 20 Relics tend to feature prominently in the few miraculous attributions to the martyrs that have survived in the record. F. du Creux tells the story of

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Notes to pages 146–9

a French nun who was cured after praying to Isaac Jogues using a pair of gloves that had belonged to the missionary as a relic. Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France vol. 2, 481. Catherine de Saint-Augustin reportedly used a relic of Jean de Brébeuf to convert a Protestant, as did a lay woman, Marie Regnouard of Beauport, to exorcize the possessed girl Barbe Halay. Respectively, a h d q , 148 and “Récit du soulagement d’une possédée par l’entremise des reliques du R.P. Jean de Brébeuf,” asj c f c sm no. 247. 21 j r 34: 96–7 (1649). 22 Ibid. 23 P. Ragueneau à Vincent Carafa, 1 mars 1649, m n f vii (doc. 87), 464. Chaumonot does not mention these visitations in the spiritual autobiography he wrote in 1688. This text is available in a late nineteenth-century edition. A. Carayon, ed. Le Père Pierre Chaumonot de la Compagnie de Jésus, 47–50. 24 j r 34: 96–7. 25 “Mémoires touchant la mort et les vertues,” 54. 26 J. Boss, “Writing a Relic,” 214. 27 Peter Goddard paints Ragueneau as a rationalist, but as I point out in chapter 1, rationalism and belief in miracles were not necessarily mutually exclusive in the seventeenth-century French Church. See Goddard, “The Devil in New France: Jesuit Demonology, 1611–1650.” 28 O.-M. Jouve, “Étude historique et critique sur les ‘Actes’ du Frère Didace Pelletier,” 54. See also, O. Jouve, Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Récollet. The Récollets began in Spain in the fifteenth century as a reformed branched of the Franciscans, and moved into France at the beginning of the post-­ Tridentine reforms at the end of the sixteenth century. Four of their company (three priests and a lay brother) were among the first French missionaries to reach Canada, invited by Samuel de Champlain to serve at Quebec. Father Joseph Le Caron was the first French missionary to establish a mission among the Huron. Always understaffed, the Récollets were unable to meet all the demands of the Canadian mission and consequently invited the Jesuits to come to New France to help in 1625. Following the capture of Quebec by the English in 1629 and its return to France in 1632, Cardinal Richelieu officially banned the Récollets from returning to ­Canada and the mission was turned over to the Jesuits. It was not until 1670 that the Récollets were granted permission to return. See Dictionnaire biographique des Récollets missionnaires en Nouvelle-France. 29 Jouve, “Étude historique,” 54.

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30 “Actes du très dévot frère Didace, Récollet, mort en odeur du sainteté en 1699,” Musée de la civilisation, fonds d’archives du Séminaire de Québec, fonds Viger-Verreau, p32 / o–73, ff. 3–11 (hereafter, “Actes”). 31 Ibid. This copy was again copied in the late 1880s by the educator and archivist Hospice-Anthelme-Jean-Baptiste Verreau (1828–1921). It is this copy I have consulted. A printed version is available in the Journal Canada Français iv (1891): 253–82. On the date of the Quebec copy see Odoric Jouve, “Étude historique et critique,” 119–27, 142–8. 32 N. Bélanger, “Charles de Glandelet,” d c b , vol. 2. 33 “Actes,” 18–28. 34 The obsecro te (I Beseech Thee) is a prayer of indulgence directed toward the Virgin begging her for aid. 35 “Actes,” 23. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 26. The Imitation of Christ (De Imitatione Christi) by Thomas à Kempis was published first in 1418. Although intended for monastics and ascetics, it met with extraordinary popularity among both Catholics and Protestants and is now thought to be the most widely read Christian text other than the Bible. V. Scully, ”Thomas à Kempis,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14. 38 V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 38–41. Also, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process, 94–130. For a wide-ranging application of Turner’s theories to the performance of miracles see T. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies; and R. Harris, Lourdes, 293–319. For an examination of miracles as dramas see J. Duffin, Medical Miracles, especially chapter 5, “The Cure as Drama,” 183–190. For an application of these ideas to the case of the shrine at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré during the French regime see M.C. Dunn, “The Miracles at Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap.” 39 Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 37. 40 While the two families were not neighbours, they did live close to one another. See A. Lafontaine, Recensements annotés de la Nouvelle-France, 259. 41 On the Saint-Joachim School of Arts and Crafts see J. Trudel, “Leblond de Latour, Jacques,” d c b vol. 2. 42 L. Pelletier, Le clergé en Nouvelle-France, 77–8. 43 M. Trudel, Les écolières des Ursulines de Québec, 258. 44 T. Germain, Autrefois, Les Ursulines de Trois-Rivières, 24. 45 Les Ursulines des Trois-Rivières depuis leur établissement jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 1, 14–15. T. Germain, Autrefois, 78–9.

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Notes to pages 157–62

46 It is not entirely clear where Didace was initially buried, but with the completion of the Récollet church in 1703 his remains were exhumed and reburied there under an inscription that read, “Here lies the body of the venerable Frère Didace Pelletier, who died in the odour of sanctity.” During this translation, his head was apparently removed and taken as a relic to Quebec, where it was “encased in a pyramid in the sacristy of the church of the Récollet Fathers.” Louis-Hyacinthe de la Place, 21 April 1721 in O. Jouve, “Le Frère Didace: Documents dieppois,” 210. If this story is true, this relic was likely lost in a fire that destroyed the Récollet monastery in Quebec on 6 September 1796. O. Jouve, Le Père Didace Pelletier, Récollet, 188. 47 “Actes,” 30. 48 C.J. Russ, “Godefroy de Linctot, Michel,” d c b , vol. 2; A. Vachon, “Godefroy de Linctot, Jean,” d c b , vol. 1. 49 See P.-G. Roy, La Famille Godefroy de Tonnancour. 50 “Actes,” 31. 51 Ibid., 42. 52 Jean Talon’s census of 1663 counted 463 people in the region of TroisRivières. M. Trudel, La population du Canada en 1666, 49. 53 “Actes,” 60. The manuscript dates this letter to 1714, but this is likely an error. It probably dates to 1704, as it refers to Joseph Denis as “Commissaire Provincial,” a position he held in 1704, but not in 1714. Moreover, there was no procès-verbal held in August of 1714, but there was one in August of 1704. Finally, Pottier, the author of the letter, died in 1712. O. Jouve, “Étude historique et critique,” 91, n. 1. 54 Ibid., 60. 55 V. Turner, The Ritual Process, 94–130. 56 “Actes,” 33. 57 V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 38–41. R. Harris, Lourdes, 258–73. 58 “Actes,” 66. 59 Ibid., 62. 60 Ibid., 58. 61 Ibid., 12. 62 This does not include secular priests trained at the Seminary of Quebec, an institution that recruited extensively in Canada. 63 On the composition of the membership of religious orders see L. Pelletier, Le clergé en Nouvelle-France, 58–64. Canadian-born women formed a majority in female colonial holy orders by about 1690, whereas

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Canadian-born male clergy did not achieve majority status in male communities and orders until after the end of the French regime. 64 The exception to this general rule is the case of Mgr François-Louis de Pourroy de Lauberivière, the young bishop appointed to the See of Quebec in 1739, who died from a shipboard illness only twelve days after he arrived in the colony in the late summer of 1740. He soon became the object of a significant cult of veneration and widely known as a miracle worker, especially in the region of Montreal. See C. Tanguay, ed., Monseigneur de Lauberivière. 65 “Actes,” 68–71, 90–5. Furthermore, cures received by persons outside the region often involved pilgrimages to the tomb either to seek a cure or afterward as fulfillment of a vow. This was the case in the cures of Mgr de Saint-Vallier, François de Chèse, and Marguerite Aubuchon, all included in the “Actes.” 66 Ibid., 11. 67 Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec, vol. 1, 487. “Actes,” 87. 68 While there is no direct evidence that Saint-Vallier’s testimonial was read out in the churches of the diocese, it was common practice for parish priests to make ecclesiastical directives and news public in this fashion. 69 “Actes,” 87–8. 70 Louis Hyacinthe de la Place, 1721, in O. Jouve, “Document Dieppois,” 214. 71 Likely Vincent-Charles-Antoine du Belloy de Francières, priest and doctor of the Sorbonne, son of Antoine du Belloy and Elisabeth LeFèvre de Caumartin. R. de Belleval, Nobiliaire de Ponthieu et de Vimeu, 153–4. 72 M. du Belloy à Père Joseph Denis, 11 juin 1719, in “Actes,” 16. 73 It is not entirely clear when this conversation might have taken place. Saint-Vallier is known to have visited Pope Clement XI in Rome in 1704, long before he experienced his cure. He was then held captive by the British from 1704 to 1709 after his ship was attacked on the journey back to Canada. He did not return to his diocese until 1713. It is generally thought he remained there until his death in 1727. O. Jouve, “Étude historique et critique,” 58–9. 74 A chronicle of the city of Dieppe, dated 1723, says that Frère Didace’s case was submitted to Rome, “in the hope of working towards his canonization one day” (in O. Jouve, “Le Frère Didace: Documents dieppois,” 202). The original document is “Histoire abrégée et chronologique de la ville, château et citadelle de Dieppe et du fort du Pollet depuis leur origine,” Bibliothèque de Dieppe, manuscrits: Ar. 9.

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Notes to pages 164–6

75 M.T. Ott, “Unigenitus,” The Catholic Encyclopedia vol. 15. Pasquier Quesnel became the de facto leader of the Parti Janséniste after the death in 1694 of Antoine Arnauld, who had defended the doctrine against numerous papal and royal assaults from the 1640s on. Quesnel’s Moral Reflections defended Augustinianism and was considered by many at the time to be an excellent guide to the New Testament. See J. Forget, Pasquier Quesnel,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. On Quesnel’s influence on the Parti Janséniste see P.R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 198–200. 76 The key text elucidating the Jansenist position, and the one from which it took its name, is C. Jansenius, Augustinus, seu doctrina S. Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate, aegritudine, medicina, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses. On Jansenist theology and the controversy surrounding it see: N. Abercrombie, The Origins of Jansenism; J. Meil, Pascal and Theology; M. Moriarty, “Grace and Religious Belief in Pascal,” 149; A.C. Pegis, “Molina and Human Liberty,” 87; A. Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France. 77 J.D. Crichton, Saints or Sinners, 36. 78 See D.A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens; J. Egret, Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire; J. Rogister, Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris; D. Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France. On the importance of Catholic unity to national sentiment in early modern France see A. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France. 79 Du Belloy to Joseph Denis in “Actes,” 17–18. 80 For example, Blaise Pascal, a leading apologist for Jansenism, regarded the apparently miraculous cure of his niece at the Abbey of Port Royal in 1656 as evidence of God’s favour for the cause. For Pascal’s thoughts on miracles see Pensées, 289–304. See T. Worchester, “A Defensive Discourse,” 11. In 1728 reported miracles began to occur around the tomb of a recently dead Jansenist cleric in the cemetery of the Église de Saint-Médard, located near the Sorbonne in Paris. Crowds flocked to the cemetery despite denunciations from the Archbishop of Paris and the Pope. In 1732, Louis XV was forced to close the cemetery to put an end to the Jansenist fervour. See C. Maire, Les Convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard; and B.R. Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early EighteenthCentury Paris, 250–75. 81 Although historians of the early Canadian Church have tended to downplay the impact of Jansenism on the colony, it would be difficult to believe that the single most controversial theological and doctrinal debate to grip the post-Tridentine French Church bypassed the colony altogether. For an

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Notes to pages 166–7

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example of this downplaying see, L. Campeau, “Le jansénisme en NouvelleFrance,” 305–10; and G. Plante, Le rigorisme au x v i i e siècle, 153. Frère Didace’s aborted canonization cause offers evidence of one way the controversy may have affected the colonial Church. 82 C. le Clercq, Premier établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle France. 83 Antoine Arnauld, “La morale pratique des Jésuites,” in Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld, vol. 33–4. La morale pratique des Jésuites was begun by Sébastien-Joseph de Cambout de Pont-Château, a solitaire of the Jansenist abbey of Port Royal, who published the first two volumes in 1669 and 1683. After the Jesuit Michel le Tellier defended the work of his order in a reply published in 1687, Arnauld took up the cause, publishing five additional books between 1690 and 1693. He was working on a sixth at the time of his death. A. Fournet, “Arnauld, Antoine,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 1; S.M. Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas. 84 On francisation versus Jesuit strategies see S. Belmessous, “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy”; C. Jaenen, “The Frenchification and Evangelization of the Amerindians in Seventeenth-Century New France.” On Jesuit mission tactics see James Axtell, The Invasion Within, 43–130; and P.A. Dorsey. “Going to School with Savages.” For a differing interpretation of Jesuit tactics that emphasizes conquest over accommodation see C. Blackburn, Harvest of Souls. 85 A. Arnauld, “Du peu de sincérité des Relations que les Jésuites ont publiées dans leurs missions de Canada,” in Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld vol. 34, 706–7. 86 Saint-Vallier was succeeded by Mgr Louis-François Duplessis de Mornay (1728–33) and Mgr Pierre Herman Dosquet (1734–39). For the most part, both remained in France, choosing to leave the day-to-day administration of their diocese to the archdeacon of the Cathedral of Quebec, Eustache Chartier de Lotbinière. 87 The document was addressed to Claude Cliche via a M. Marin, who lived in Quebec’s lower town. On the basis of this information, Odoric Jouve used notarial records to trace Claude Cliche to the village of Charlesbourg, where he moved from Quebec in 1742. Jouve concludes that M. Marin must have been hired to take the document to Claude Cliche after 1742 when the latter moved from Quebec to Charlesbourg, and before he died in February of 1744. At any rate, the copy could not have been made prior to 1735–36 as it was in this year that Claude Cliche, Jr. took the name Didace as a member of the Récollets, or after 1744, when Claude Cliche Sr died. O. Jouve, Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Récollet, 119–27.

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Notes to pages 168–71

88 Quoted in O. Jouve, Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Récollet, 270–2. PierreRené Hubert was curé of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré between 1767 and 1777, during which time he reorganized the records of the parish, adding many notes about the history of the region. See Annales de la Bonne Ste. Anne de Beaupré vol. 34 (novembre, 1906), 233.

C h a p t e r Se ve n   1 See M. Trudel et M. Baboyant, eds., François Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, 30, 32–5. On the date of Dollier’s work see: R. Flenley, trans. History of Montreal, 1640–1672, 5; J. Marmier, “Le récit de M. de Courcelles au lac Ontario 1671 et de Dollier de Casson”; and O. Mauraut, Marges d’histoire, vol. 2, 41.   2 F. Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, 1640–1672. References here are to the critical edition by M. Trudel and M. Baboyant, François Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition.   3 On Morin’s compilation and writing see G. Legendre’s introduction to M. Morin, Histoire simple et véritable, xiv–xv. All references to a h d m are to this critical edition.  4 a h d m , 42–3.   5 Not until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would Jeanne Mance become the subject of a hagiographic tradition: É.-M. Faillon, Vie de Mademoiselle Mance (1854); Rambouillet, Vie de Jeanne Mance (1877); A. Leblond de Brumath, Vie de Mademoiselle Mance (1883); J.K. Foran, Jeanne Mance or “The Angel of the Colony”; (1931) P. Benoit, La vie inspirée de Jeanne Mance (1935); P. Desjardins, La vie toute de grâce de Jeanne Mance (1945); R. Boullenger, Jeanne Mance (1947); L. Groulx, Jeanne Mance (1954). A collection of primary sources concerning Jeanne Mance in the archives of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal is found in M. Mondoux, l’Hôtel-Dieu: Premier hôpital de Montréal. Mondoux, the archivist of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, and historian Marie-Clarie Daveluy worked with the Archdiocese of Quebec to prepare evidence for a canonization procedure. The result is the most detailed biography of Jeanne Mance based on primary source research. M.-C. Daveluy, Jeanne Mance.   6 M. Morin, “Histoire simple et véritable de l’établissement des Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph en l’Île de Montréal, dite à présent VilleMarie, en Canada, de l’année 1659,” published under the title Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 1921. See also, H. Bernier, “Morin, Marie” d c b , vol. 2.

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Notes to pages 172–6

245

  7 Most notably, he wished to make the Sulpicians’ new mission better known in France. Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 56.   8 In an effort to put an end to the Chinese Rites controversy, this Bull forbade all publication of missionary accounts without special permission from the Propaganda fidei. It finally put an end to the long-running Jesuit Relations, and likely also scuttled Dollier’s plans for publication. See Trudel et Baboyant, François Dollier de Casson, 32–4. On the Chinese Rites controversy see G. Minamiki, The Chinese Rites Controversy.   9 M. Trudel et M. Baboyant, François Dollier de Casson, 32–4. 10 D. Deslandres, “Les Sulpiciens et les autres communautés religieuses de Montréal,” 307–10. 11 On elite women and charitable giving in early seventeenth-century France see B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: 13–17. 12 a h d q , 108 13 The Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec were compiled by JeanneFrançoise Juchereau (de St-Ignace) and written by Marie André Duplessis (de Ste Hélène) in the 1710s and consist of yearly entries concerning significant events of the institution and the colony. 14 a h d q , 158. 15 B. Stock, Listening for the Text, 23. 16 G. Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative, 13–15. 17 a h d m , 40. The Duchesse d’Aiguillon had provided the foundation grant for the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec that year. 18 Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 57–8. 19 Ibid., 58. 20 a h d m , 42–3. Dollier de Casson says only that Madame du Bullion gave Mance 1200 livres and promised the rest later. Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 59. 21 Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 60–1. To Casson, this meeting marked the culmination of a number of coincidences that indicated a work of divine providence. 22 The full text of Les véritables motifs is reproduced in M.-C. Daveluy, La Société de Notre-Dame. 23 Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 62; M.-C. Daveluy, Jeanne Mance, 23–5. 24 J. Parmenter suggests the point of this campaign was more likely the capture and adoption of Hurons who had sought refuge in the St Lawrence valley than the descruction of Montreal or New France per se. The Edge of the Woods, 80–6.

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Notes to pages 176–9

25 M. Mondoux, “Les hommes de Montréal.” F. Deroy-Pineau, Jeanne Mance, 112–13. 26 M. Trudel, in Dollier de Casson, Histore du Canada, 155, n. 42. This peace lasted roughly from 1653 to 1658 and was initiated by the Iroquois. M. Dennis calls it a genuine attempt to advance peace through the projection of Iroquois notions of kinship, while the French remained suspicious of Iroquois motives. See Cultivating a Landscape of Peace, 233. J. Parmenter offers a similar interpretation in The Edge of the Woods, 86–96. 27 In fact this recruitment illustrates how difficult it was to attract settlers to Canada. Despite generous terms, de Maissoneuve managed to recruit just 153 settlers. Of those, forty-nine fled before the ship sailed from France and eight more died en route. Twenty-four more would be killed defending Montreal. See P. Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles,” 469–70; M. Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: 197–8. 28 Transaction et Const[ituti]on les Directeurs de lisle de Montreal a lHospital dud. Lieu, 3 mars 1653; in M. Mondoux, L’Hôtel-Dieu, 351–5. 29 Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, nouvelle édition, 132–3. 30 Jeanne Mance, “Raisons pour lesquelles j’ai fait prendre 22,000 livres de la fondation de l’hospital de Montréal pour du secours pour l’habitation,” reprinted in Daveluy, Jeanne Mance, 130–3. The original has been lost, but a copy likely made between 1673 and 1676 survives in the Archives if the Seminary of Quebec. Daveluy dates the original to 1666–67 on the basis of internal evidence and a marginal note made by the Sulpician Pierre Rémy, the priest who took over administration of the hospital when Jeanne Mance died in 1673. 31 “Acte de donation de la moitié de la métairie de 200 arpents située près du fort de Ville-Marie, par Paul de Chomedy à demoiselle Jeanne Mance, pour l’hôpital Saint-Joseph du dit Ville-Marie, viii Aoust 1654 (Montréal), iiii mars 1655 (Paris),” Archive du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Montréal (asssm), p1:13.1–5. 32 “Contract de fondation des Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph de Montréal, 29 mars 1659,” asssm, p1:13.1–10. 33 “Déclaration de Jeanne Mance sur la guérison de son bras par JeanJacques Olier, 2 Fevrier 1660,” asssm,p:13.1–9. 34 J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 76–95. 35 “Requête de Mgr de Laval, évêque de Pétrée, au Conseil souverain de Québec pour obliger les Messieurs du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice à rendre compte à l’évêque du surplus des deniers qui n’ont pas été envoyés à Jeanne Mance par les Associés pour L’île de Montréal,” asssm, p1:

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Notes to pages 179–81

247

13.1–17. “Ordonnance de l’intendant Talon faisant droit à la requête,” 22 Oct. 1666. asssm, p1: 13.1–7. 36 Mance, “Raisons,” in M.-C. Daveluy, Jeanne Mance, 130–3. 37 Jeanne Mance, “Mémoire des choses que Messieurs les associés de Montréal ont données et fournies à l’hôpital Saint-Joseph du dit lieu et des dépenses qu’ils y ont faites depuis l’année 1654 jusqu’à 1660,” asssm, p1: 13.1–17. 38 The history of the affair can be traced through the letters of the Parisian superior of the Sulpicians, Louis Tronson, to members of the Montreal community. See Tronson à l’évêque de Québec, 4 juin 1677 (lettre no. 31), Bibliothéque et Archives nationales du Québec, Montréal (banqm), reel 3483, vol. i ff. 135–36; Louis Tronson à Pierre Rèmy, 17 avril 1678 (lettre no. 43) ff. 3279–81; Tronson à l’évêque de Québec, avril 1678 (lettre no. 56), ff. 175–7; Tronson à Remy, 16 avril 1682 (lettre no, 161), vol. iii, f. 124; Tronson à Dollier de Casson, 1684 (lettre no. 224), vol. iv, ff. 83–4; Tronson à Rémy, April 1684 (lettre no. 246), ff. 138–9; Tronson à Rémy 10 avril 1686 (lettre no. 311), vol. v, f. 105. Also, Decision de l’assemblée des consulteurs du Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Paris concernant la réclamation des 22,000 livres dues à l’Hôtel Dieu de Montréal, selon Mgr François de Montmorency-Laval, à la suite du prêt de cette somme par Jeanne Mance en 1652, asssm, p1: 13.1–23c. 39 G. Legendre in a h d m , xxi. 40 On the importance of these themes to successful early modern female life writing see A. Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, 36–7. 41 On ultramontanism in Quebec see : T. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics; R. Hardy, Contrôle social et mutation de la culture religieuse au Québec; R. Perin, Rome in Canada; L. Rousseau, “À propos du ‘réveil religieux’ dans le Québec du xixe siècle.” On hagiographic writing in ultramontane Quebec see, S. Gagnon, Québec et ses historiens de 1840 à 1920, “Les Hagiographies.” 42 For example, the Filles da la Charité, The Filles de la Croix and les Filles de la Providence. See B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 203–38. 43 M.A. Foley, “La vie voyagère for Women,” 22. Also, C. de Glandelet, Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys, 94. 44 H. Bernier, “Bourgeoys, Marguerite,” d c b , vol. 1. 45 M.A. Foley, “La vie voyagère,” 27. 46 For Marguerite Bourgeoys’s writings and thoughts on her vocation, particularly the Marian apostolic model see M. Bourgeoys, The True Spirit of the Institute of the Secular Sisters of the Congregation de Notre-Dame, 22; and C. de Glandelet, Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys. 47 N. Bélanger, “Glandelet, Charles de,” d c b , vol. 1.

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Notes to pages 181–5

48 Glandelet served as Marie Barbier’s spiritual advisor and composed her holy biography after her death in 1739. See C. Gray, The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 127–39. 49 Charles de Glandelet à Soeur Marie-Marguerite de St-Joseph, 7 septembre 1715, h c n d , vol. 3, 207. 50 Historian Patricia Simpson shows that Glandelet misrepresented many of the details of Bourgeoys’s early life, and was concerned above all with his own understanding of her spirituality. P. Simpson, Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 7. 51 Marie-Marguerite de St Joseph à Charles de Glandelet, 1 février 1716, in h c n d , vol. 3, 216–19. 52 Ibid., 217. 53 Gail Ashton argues that the male hagiographer never really knows his subject beyond the idealized feminine model of holiness she ostensibly practised. G. Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography, 73, 84. 54 A copy made for Marguerite Bourgeoys’s canonization process survived the fire. It seems unlikely Glandelet revised the work for, if he had, it’s likely this too would have been copied and saved. There are several editions available. 55 J.-G. Pelletier, “Dosquet, Pierre-Herman,” d c b , vol. 1. 56 M.-F. Ransonnet, La vie de la soeur Marguerite Bourgeois. Publication ­history is found in h c n d , vol. 3, 327–41. 57 M.-F. Ransonnet, La vie, 264. 58 Ibid., 118. 59 On the influence of the Wars of Religion (1562–98) and the Fronde (1648–53) on French dévot spirituality see B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 11–13. 60 M. Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture, 5–6, 10. 61 M.-F. Ransonnet, La vie, 94. 62 The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas,” in M.A. Stouck, ed. Medieval Saints, 26. “Augustine Preaches on the Feast of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas,” in Stouck, ed., Medieval Saints, 39. 63 A. Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity, 17. 64 On Quietism see A. Dégert, “François de Salignac de la Mothe de Fénelon,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6; and E.A. Pace, “Quietism,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 12. Bossuet’s condemnation of Quietism and praise of Marie de l’Incarnation is found in his “États d’oraison (1697).” See H. Brémond, Histoire littéraire de sentiment religieux en France, 9.

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Notes to pages 185–8

249

65 F. Vachon de Belmont, “Éloge,” 163. This paradigm of virility became even more common in nineteenth-century Lives. See S. Gagnon, “Histoire de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation de l’abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain,” 321. 66 P.F.X. Charlevoix, La vie de la Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, 387. 67 Religious houses also felt these pressures. H. Keller-Lapp shows how political controversies between Church and state representatives completely derailed an Ursuline attempt to establish a convent at the French Indian entrepot of Pondicherry in 1738, resulting in the premature return of six nuns to France between 1742 and 1744 – an outcome unthinkable for Marie de l’Incarnation in 1639. H. Keller-Lapp, “Who is the Real Sovereign of the Ursulines of Pondicherry?” E. Clarke likewise illustrates the challenges Ursulines in New Orleans faced after 1727 to convince state authorities and company officials of the utility of their mission. E. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 54–8. S.L Dawdy calls French New Orleans an experiment in Enlightenment order and bureaucracy in Building the Devil’s Empire, 31–3. 68 Choudhury, Nuns and Convents, 10–13. On Jansenism and religious politics in eighteenth-century France see J. Egret, Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire; and J. Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV. On connections between Jansenism and the philosophes see M. Cottret, Jansénismes et Lumières. 69 On religion, nationalism and the French state before the revolution see D.A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France; and D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. 70 The text, which remained unpublished at the time, consists of a detailed biographical account of Marguerite d’Youville’s life up to 1747, when Dufrost left Montreal to go to Quebec to train for the priesthood. His account is therefore that of an eyewitness. A supplement to the text, written in a different hand, sketches the final years of her life. C.-M.-M d’Youville, “La Vie de Madame Youville, fondatrice des Soeurs de la Charité à Montréal (1771).” 71 C.-M.-M. d’Youville, “La vie de Madame Youville,” 364. 72 Ibid., 365–6. 73 Ibid., 364–5. 74 Ibid., 362. 75 For example, J. Bilinkoff illustrates the conflicted, and often negative, reactions to Teresa of Avila’s reform of the Carmelite order in Spain at the height of sixteenth-century religious enthusiasm. The Avila of Saint Teresa: 137–51. M.-F. Bruneau rejects Michel de Certeau’s suggestions of a rupture in the epistemology of mysticism in the seventeenth century which he

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Notes to pages 189–91

says saw the redefinition of a way of religious experience that was considered normal, if rare, throughout the Middle Ages, into something regarded as abnormal and perhaps even a medical disorder. Such a change in social views appears overly linear. Women Mystics Confront the Modern World, 3–7; M. de Certeau, “Mysticism,” 11–25. 76 It is common to view the Quebec Church in this period as subservient to British rule. See, M. Trudel, L’Église catholique sous le régime militaire. H. Neatby argues, however, that it makes more sense to regard the actions of Bishop Briand and his supporters as a quest for renewal in a radically changed political context. Neatby, “Servitude de l’Église Catholique: A Reconsideration,” 23. 77 L. Colley argues that Protestantism became the major unifying factor of British identity after the Act of Union in 1707, reinforced by fear of, and war with, European Catholic powers, especially France. While tolerance for Catholics within Britain increased at the official level after the Jacobite defeat in 1746, a change reflected in the terms of the Quebec Act (1774), a “vast superstructure of prejudice” remained in place throughout the eighteenth century. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 18–36. 78 When this did not happen, elements of the public press began racial and anti-Catholic campaigns against them. P. Lawson, “The Irishman’s Prize,” 587–90. 79 For example, following the conquest British officials in Quebec frequently commented favourably upon the charity and generosity of the hospital nuns who nursed sick and injured British soldiers. See J. Noel, “Caste and Clientage in an Eighteenth-Century Quebec Convent.” 80 M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, 273. 81 P.F.X. Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, vol. 2, 162.

C onc l usio n   1 J. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 113. On the popularity of early modern Saints’ Lives see I. Poutrin, La voile et la plume, 352, 435–53; K. Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America.   2 P.F.X. Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, vol. 2, 38.   3 The king regent, the duc d’Orléans, asked Charlevoix to go west to search for a rumoured western sea and to disguise this objective under the cover of visiting interior missions. D.M. Hayne, “Charlevoix, Pierre-François Xavier de,” d c b , vol. 3.

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Notes to pages 192–7

251

  4   5   6   7   8

Ibid., vol. 1, 1–2. See D.A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation, 22–43. See D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. M. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 162. See: D. Miquelon, “Ambiguous Concessions”; Miquelon, “Envisioning the French Empire”; J. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 230–41, 358–401; W.J. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV, 247–9; Eccles, “The Fur Trade and Eighteenth Century Imperialism.”   9 A. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 109. M.-A. Cliche made a similar argument when she suggested that religious culture in New France was more homogeneous than in France because of closer ecclesiastical oversight, implying a binary between the clergy who wanted to impose acceptable practices and a potentially unruly laity. Les pratiques de dévotion en NouvelleFrance, 26. Also, G. Laperriere, “Religion populaire, religion de clercs?” 22 (“au Québec, la religion populaire n’existe que par le fait des clercs, alors qu’en Europe, elle serait l’expression des survivances païennes que n’a pu décraciner le clergé”). 10 By the late seventeenth-century Catherine / Tekakwitha had acquired a reputation for miraculous cures among the French settler populations of Lachine and La Prairie. See A. Greer, Mohawk Saint, 147–70. 11 A.W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange. 12 For example, a Spanish version of the Life of Catherine / Tekakwitha was published in Mexico City in 1724. See A. Greer, “Iroquois Virgin.” 13 L. Codignola argues that the year 1658, when the first vicar apostolic was named, marks the point when the Church in New France turned from its focus on missions to preserving the faith among European colonists. Codignola, “Competing Networks.” 14 The unedited version of this account by P. de la Chasse is held by the National Archives of Belgium, Brussels, and was published as, “Une relation inédite de la mort du P. Sébastien Racle, 1724.” The edited version appeared in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, vol. 6, 226–38. Pierre de la Chasse’s letter was dated 23 August 1724. The published version is dated 29 October 1724. There are considerable differences, but also enough similarities to suggest that the published letter is an edited version of the manuscript letter. 15 C. Desbarats, ed. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, 227. See also P. Berthiaume, L’Aventure américaine au x v i i i e siècle, 276–80.

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The Encyclopedia of Religion. 10 vols. Edited by Mircea Eliade. New York: MacMillan, 1987. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Théry, Chantal. “De plume et d’audace: Femmes de la Nouvelle-France, essai. Paris: Cerf, 2006. Thwaites, Rueben Gold, ed. Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. 73 vols. Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co., 1896–1901. Trudel, Marcel. La population du Canada en 1666: Recensement reconstitute. Sillery: Quebec: Septentrion, 1995. – L’Eglise catholique sous le régime militaire, 1759–1764. Quebec: Presses Université Laval, 1956. – Les écolières des Ursulines de Québec, 1639–1686. Montreal: Hurtubise, 1999. Trudel, Marcel and Marie Baboyant, eds., François Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal: Nouvelle édition critique. LaSalle, Quebec, Hurtubise, 1992. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1974. – The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1969. Vachon de Belmont, François. “Éloge.” In “Éloges de quelques personnes mortes en odeur de sainteté à Montréal, en Canada, divisés en trois parties.” Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1929–30): 162–6. – “Vie.” In “Éloges de quelques personnes mortes en odeur de sainteté à Montréal, en Canada, divisés en trois parties,” Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1929–30): 144–62. Valentasis, Richard. “A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism.” Asceticism. Edited by Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, 544–52. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. – “Constructions of Power in Asceticism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63.4 (1995): 775–821. Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993. Van Eyck, Masarah. “’We Shall be One People’: Early Modern French Perceptions of the Amerindian Body.” PhD diss., McGill University, 2001. Van Kley, Dale. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. – The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1590–1791. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1997.

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Vauchez, André. La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge d’après les procès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques. Paris; Rome: École française de Rome, 1981. – Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Translated by Jean Birrell. Cambridge, U K: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Viau, Roland. Enfants du néant et mangeurs d’âmes: Guerre, culture et société en Iroquoisie ancienne. Montreal: Boréal, 1997. Von Greyerz, Kaspar. Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Walker-Bynum, Caroline. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Warkentin, Germaine. “Discovering Radisson: A Renaissance Adventurer between Two Worlds.” In Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History. Edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, 43–70. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996. Weber, Alison. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Weinstein, Donald and Rudolph Bell. Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. White, Bruce M. “Encounters with Spirits: Ojibwa and Dakota Theories about the French and their Merchandise.“ In American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850,” 2nd edition. Edited by Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell, 216–45. London: Routledge, 2007. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Woodward, Kenneth. Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Worchester, Thomas. “A Defensive Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-Century New France.” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 1–15. Youville, Charles-Marie-Madeleine (Dufrost) d’. “La Vie de Madame Youville, fondatrice des Sœurs de la Charité à Montréal (1771).” In Rapport de l’archiviste de la province de Québec (1924–25), 360–76.

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Acadia, 7, 27, 84, 166 Acta Sanctorum, 23 adoption: and baptism, 40; and captivity, 37–41; and death of René Goupil, 44–6; and fictive kinship, 73, 213n6; and hagiographic discourse, 54, 61; of Hurons, 73–4, 245n24; rituals of, 36, 40, 52, 73, 80. See also captivity; Huron; Iroquois; Jesuits; mourning wars; ritual Aiguillon, Marie-Madeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’, foundress of Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 91, 92, 122, 245n17; and Jeanne Mance, 174–5; and publication of the Life of Catherine de SaintAugustin, 232–3n17. See also Augustinians; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Algonquin, 64, 220n9; as audience for Joseph / Onaharé’s death, 74, 80–3; cosmology of, 65–6, 68; and francisation, 66–7; and relations with the French, 63–5, 67; and rituals of captivity and adoption, 40, 61, 74, 80,

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221n12; and rituals of gifting, 70–1, 223n65; and Shaking-Tent ritual, 71–2; and warfare, 71, 75. See also Joseph / Onaharé; Montagnais alliances, French-Indigenous, 64–5 apatheia, 88, 125. See also asceticism; indifference Apostolic Church: ethos of, 34, 96; and martyrdom, 55, 75; as model for the colonial Church, 42 appellant, 164–5 Arnauld, Antoine, 166, 242n75; “La morale pratique des Jésuites,” 243n83 asceticism: as agent of social change, 134–5, 136; changing attitudes toward in eighteenth century, 184; Christian tradition, history, and practice of, 7, 18, 124–5, 129; in New England, 29; in New France, 112, 121; theories of, 125–6, 138; and the will, 116, 126, 135, 233n25 Atlantic World, 32, 78, 160, 195 audience: Algonquin and Joseph / Onaharé, 74, 80, 83; of

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hagiographic texts, 30, 32, 59, 93, 113, 124–5, 184; local, 6, 8, 33, 90, 106–8, 164; and miracles, 143; as part of holy performances, 13–14, 52, 105, 164, 192; public, 129–30, 138; role in martyrdom drama, 40, 44, 54. See also faith community; local holiness; performance; public life; ritual Augustine of Hippo, 164–5, 185 Augustinians: of Bayeux, 116, 118, 143; and devotion to Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 113; of Quebec, 31–2, 90; and reaction to death of Catherine de SaintAugustin, 140–1, 143; and service to the colony, 91, 103; and 121–2. See also Aiguillon, MarieMadeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’; Catherine de Saint-Augustin; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec Barbier, Marie, 181, 248n48. See also Bourgeoys, Marguerite; Congrégation de Notre-Dame; Glandelet, Charles Barroy, Anne, 85–6, 225n6. See also Le Ber, Jeanne; Vachon de Belmont, François Bassette, Frère André (Saint), canonization, 3–4, 205n1 Bataille, Anne, 32 Baudoin, Madeleine, 159–60. See also Boubert, Marie; Pelletier, Didace belief community. See faith community Belloy de Francière, VincentCharles Antoine du, 164–6,

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241n71. See also Denis, Joseph; Jansenism; Pelletier, Didace; Unigenitus Biencourt de Poutrincourt, Jean de, 27 biographical patterning: of female holy persons, 102, 173; and hagiography, 178, 230n78. See also hagiographic discourse; hagiography; female religious; female holiness; Lives of the saints Bollandists, 23 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 185 Boubert, Marie, 159–61. See also Baudoin, Madeleine; eyewitness; miracles; Pelletier, Didace; Pottier, Jean-Baptiste Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 85, 180; biographies of, 109, 181–4, 248n54; and Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 181–4, 196; and local audience, 162; performance of holiness, 181; and reading audiences, 184; and religious vows, 98–9; and rhetoric of virile holiness, 184–5, 197. See also Congrégation de Notre-Dame; Glandelet, Charles; hagiography; Ransonnet, Michel-François; virtue Brébeuf, Jean de, 37; and autopsy, 55–6; and Catherine de SaintAugustin, 125, 127, 135–6, 218n84, 234n50; death of, 52–5, 59; as intercessor, 108, 193, 235n59, 237–8n20; as martyr, 58, 76, 213n7, 217n79; as model, 81. See also Catherine de Saint-Augustin; Huron mission; Jesuits; martyrdom

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Bressani, Joseph, 48, 59, 77; as Iroquois captive, 214n21 Brûlé, Étienne, 214n21 Bullion, Angélique du. See Faure, Angélique Buteux, Jacques, and death of Isaac Jogues, 50 Canada: and Catholic Church, 10, 150; challenges of, 62, 134–5; French colony of, 7, 17, 38, 40, 159, 184; and hagiographic discourses, 55, 113–14; as liminal space, 12, 196; and local holiness, 94–5, 109–10, 116–17, 121, 148, 190, 192–3; and holy war, 75; and missions, 41–3, 57, 76, 81; as new society, 133–5; as object of spiritual sufferings, 97, 125, 130, 135–7; as a place of miracles, 144–5; religious colonization and, 27, 34, 93, 174–5, 196–7; as spiritual paradise, 59, 95–8, 120, 136, 166; as wilderness, 96–7. See also faith community; local holiness; local sanctity; public life Canadian Martyrs. See Jesuit Martyrs canon law, 24, 43 canonization, 17, 192, 197, 200–1; and authoritative biography, 181; challenges of, 150, 163-8; and Jesuit martyrs, 77; politics of, 196, 242–3n81; procedures of, 10, 17, 33, 212n46; requirements of, 24, 105; and rhetoric of virility, 185; women and, 89 captivity: changing rituals of, 53–4; and martyrdom narratives, 52,

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54, 61, 82; politics of, 46–7; rituals of, 36–7, 40, 44, 46, 74, 80, 214n21. See also adoption; Algonquin; Huron; Iroquois; Jesuits; Montagnais; mourning wars; ritual cardinal virtues, 24, 88 Catherine de Saint-Augustin: and asceticism, 112, 116, 123–30, 145; and Canada as paradise, 97–8, 119–23; childhood, 116– 18; critics of, 99, 188, 232–3n17; and critique of society, 138; death of, 140; and dedication of the Quebec Cathedral, 137–8, 236n94; Ragueneau’s defence of spiritual life, 102–3, 232–3n17; earthquake, 111–13, 132–3; holy biography of, 31; and Jean de Brébeuf, 125, 127, 135, 218n84, 234n50; and miracles, 140–2, 144–5; mysticism, 115, 123, 125–9, 145, 195; and personal mortifications, 124, 128, 129; and the public life of the colony, 133–6; and relationship with Paul Ragueneau, 100–3, 114–15; and secret vocation, 130–1; and spiritual journal, 100–2, 113, 114–15, 116, 132, 195, 231n1; and temptations against vocation, 123, 128; and translation of remains, 143; as victim of divine love for Canada and sinners, 104, 112–13, 116, 123, 125–9, 135; and the will, 135. See also asceticism; Hôtel-Dieu de Québec; female holiness; mysticism; performance; Ragueneau, Paul

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Catherine / Tekakwitha: canonization of, 4–6, 109; and charity, 88; and holy biography, 251n12; as Indigenous holy person, 62–3, 190, 193; and naming, 206n7; and virginity, 76–7, 251n10 Catholic Church: in Canada, 10; and canonization, 3, 4, 37; and colonization, 9; Congregation of the Propaganda Fidei, 245n8; and doctrine and theology of sanctity, 7, 10, 12, 16, 164, 185; and hagiography, 9; gender roles in, 102; traditions of holiness, 10; universal saints of, 6, 16, 103, 105; and ultramontanism, 190. See also Catholic Reform; cloister; conversion; Council of Trent; holiness; Holy See; Jansenism; missions; sanctity; Tridentine Church Catholic League, 27, 226n28 Catholic Reform, 6, 20, 22; and colonization, 28–9; and female religious institutions, 21–2; and holiness, 34; trans-atlantic context of, 29–30. See also Catholic Church; Council of Trent; Gallican Church; sanctity; Tridentine Church charity, 7; and asceticism, 112–13, 226n28; Canada as expression of, 95, 103, 194; and colonialism, 91–4, 110; and the colonial public, 103–5, 193; as feature of holiness, 7, 87, 110, 184; and female religious, 89–90, 91–3, 113, 196, 250n79; and the poor, 92–3, 186, 189; and sanctification, 94, 103; theological, 24,

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88–9. See also asceticism; faith community; female holiness; female religious; Marie de l’Incarnation; virtues Charlevoix, Pierre de, 59, 185, 191–2, 250n3 Chastellain, Pierre, 132 Chaumonot, Pierre-Joseph-Marie, 147, 199, 238n23 Chauvingy, Marie-Madeleine, Madame de la Peltrie, 32, 199 Chinese Rites controversy, 245n8 Cholenec, Pierre, 76, 88 Clement XI (Pope), 165, 166–7, 241n73 cloister: and Catherine de SaintAugustin, 115, 129; 135; 137–8; Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 180–2, 184; and evangelical work of women, 93; public life, 103–5, 140, 144; regulation of, 21, 98–9, 188; and religious women in Canada, 97, 129, 137– 8. See also Catholic Reform; Council of Trent; female religious; Tridentine Church collaborative lives, 101, 191, 229– 30n71; Life of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 113–14; and reliability as historical texts, 114– 15. See also hagiography; hagiographic discourse colonialism, 7, 11, 14, 56; and women, 93–4, 105, 110; and religion, 12, 26–9, 90, 136, 138, 196. See also Canada; disease; Jesuits; female; religious; missions colonial project. See colonialism

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colonization. See colonialism communio sanctorum, 7, 11, 103 communitas, 12, 160 Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, 233n34 Compagnie de Saint-Sulpice. See Sulpicians condolence ceremony, 38–9, 70, 222n42. See also Iroquois; Iroquois League Confession of Augsburg, 19 confessor: as author of hagiography, 31, 100, 113, 149, 180; and oversight of female religious, 85, 99, 102, 129–30; and relationships with spiritual women and mystics, 101–2, 105, 130–1, 230n72 Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Montréal: battle with the bishop over vows, 98; charitable vocation of, 103, 180; and Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys, 181–4, 196; service to the colony, 193. See also Bourgeoys, Marguerite; female holiness; female religious; Le Ber, Jeanne conquest: British attitudes toward Catholicism, 250n77, 250n78; and the Catholic Church in Quebec, 188–9, 250n76, 250n79. See also Youville, Charles-Marie-Madeleine (Dufrost) d’; Youville, Marguerite d’ conservatism, and holy performances, 115, 138, 196 conversion: and asceticism, 128, 135; and earthquake, 133; French relations with

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Indigenous communities, 64, 222n39; and Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 91, 93; and Jansenism, 166; and Huron warrior, 222n54; and Jesuit missions, 41–2, 58, 65, 81, 166. See also colonialism; missions Council of Trent, 16–17; and the cult of the saints, 20–3, 34; and doctrine of purgatory, 128; and French Church, 26, 28; and miracles, 23; and overseas expansion, 26; and pronouncements on theological charity, 87–8; and regulation of female religious, 98–9, 196; and the writing of hagiography, 25. See also Catholic Church; Catholic Reform; cloister; female religious; hagiography; Tridentine Church Counter-Reformation, 9, 16 Crépieul, François de, 141–2 cult of the saints, 5, 16, 193, 201; doctrine of, 12; Protestant critique of, 19–20; reform of, 16–17, 20–1, 23–4, 34. See also Catholic Church; Council of Trent Daniel, Antoine, 43, 77, 146–8, 199, 212n6 De Monts, Pierre du Gua, 27 Denis, Joseph, 199; and “Actes” of Frère Didace Pelletier, 164, 240n53; and Frère Didace Pelletier, 149–50, 152, 154–5, 161–2, 164–7, 195; and Unigenitus dispute, 165. See also Jansenism; Pelletier, Didace

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Dévot(e)s, 27–8, 96, 120; and Jeanne Mance, 173; waning influence of, 197 disease: and colonization, 194; and Indigenous population, 37, 39, 46, 65, 221n17; at Sillery, 67–8; and spirituality, 65–7 disenchantment, 192 Dollier de Casson, François: and the Grande recrue, 177; Histoire de Montréal, 31, 219n2, 245n7, 245n21; and Jeanne Le Ber, 225n8; and Jeanne Mance, 170– 2, 174, 178, 245n20; and Tronson letters, 247n38. See also Mance, Jeanne; Sulpicians Du Creux, François, 59, 77, 79, 237n20 Dufrost, Charles. See Youville, Charles-Marie-Madeleine d’ earthquake, 111–12, 231n4; effects on religious life, 132–5 Eat-All feast, 88 Edict of Nantes, 27 Edwards, Sarah, 29 Enlightenment, 184, 197; and female religious, 186 eyewitness: and Catherine /  ­Tekakwitha, 76–7; and hagiographic credibility, 22–3, 25, 30–1, 45, 55, 249n70; importance to colonialism, 56; Indigenous peoples as, 55–6, 75–6, 80; of holy performances, 9 faith community: and authoritative texts, 174; and canonization, 164; collective actions of, 153; and local sanctity, 8, 10, 17, 24,

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31, 148, 161, 190, 195; membership in, 152; saints as advocates for, 21, 108, 141, 154. See also miracles; patronage; performance; public life; ritual Faure, Angélique, Madame du Bullion, 175–8, 245n20, 245n21 Favre, Pierre, 22–3 female holiness: and male hagiographers, 248n53; patterns of, 173, 189, 196; rhetoric of, 100, 180 female religious: agency of, 229n67; and colonialism, 93–4; criticism of, 185–6; and hagiography, 183; and the local faith community, 195; as missionaries, 91, 93, 98, 102, 110; regulation of, 98–101, 188, 226n29 Fléché, Jessé, 27 France: and Catholic Reform, 21, 28; and colonial links, 144, 146, 148; and colonization, 28–9, 176–7; and disenchantment, 192; and empire, 33, 84, 137; and hagiography, 9, 22, 31, 125, 183, 191; immigration from, 136; and Indigenous allies, 51; and Jansenism, 165; perceptions of Canada, 59, 93, 118, 166, 195; religious revival in, 27, 120, 124–5, 184; and religious women, 185–8 francisation, 66–8, 166. See also mission; Sillery Gallican Church: clergy and, 28; and Jansenism, 165; liberties of, 211n34 Garnier, Charles, 77, 199, 212n6; and Isaac Jogues, 37, and

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martyrdom of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, 58, Gayart, Marie (de l’Incarnation). See Marie de l’Incarnation gender, 101–3; and holiness, 14, 16, 110; and local audiences of holy performances, 54; and ritual, 11; and religious vocations, 98, 101– 3, 135. See also female holiness; female religious; sanctity; virtues gifting, 70–1. See also Algonquin; Montagnais Glandelet, Charles: and Didace Pelletier inquiries, 150, 158; and Marguerite Bourgeoys and Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 181–3, 248n50 Godefroy, Michel, Sieur de Linctot, 157–8 Godefroy, Michelle, 158 Godefroy de Tonnancour, René, 157–8, 160 Golden Legend, 19 good death, 14, 74, 76, 108, 200 Goupil, René, 35, 212n1; as captive, 36, 37, 41, 45; and Christian martyrdom, 55, 77, 199, 212n6; death of, 45–7; torture of, 37–8; as victim, 51. See also Jogues, Isaac; Jesuits; martyrdom; performance grace: and Canada, 166, 172; and female spiritual writing, 100; and Jansenism, 164–5, 166; and martyrdom, 45, 58; and miracles, 145, 154, 160, 168; and relics, 146, 147; suffering for, 126, 128, 135, 140, 152; and virginity, 76 Grande recrue, 176; problems of, 179, 246n27. See also Laval

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François de; Mance, Jeanne; Maisonneuve, Paul Chomedey de Gravel, Françoise (Soeur SainteAnne), 156–7 Gravel, Marie-Madeleine (Soeur Saint-Paul), 151–2; 153; 155–7. See also miracles; Pelletier, Didace hagiographic discourse, 9, 29–34; criteria of, 200–1; female authors of, 32; and Isaac Jogues, 49; and local and universal narratives of holiness, 25; and memory, 174, 180; and narratives of sanctity, 49, 54, 55, 58–9, 117, 120; politics of, 196; and saint-making, 58–9. See also Catholic Church; Catholic Reform; Council of Trent; hagiography; Tridentine Church hagiography: colonial, 33; conventionality of, 5, 7, 115; Early Modern forms of, 9–10, 22–6, 30, 31, 32, 55, 100, 195, 233n25; and local holiness, 54, 172, 178, 181, 183, 190; tropes of, 44, 117; reform of, 22–6. See also hagiographic discourse Hallay, Barbe, 126–7, 132, 235n59 Hameau, Marguerite, 158–9, 160. See also Pelletier, Didace Henry IV (king of France), 22, 26–7 holiness: and asceticism, 124, 134– 6; audiences of, 105, 184; and Catholic Reform, 34; changing expectations for, 186, 188, 190, 196–7; and charity, 88, 90, 110, 226n28; colonial, 87, 89, 101, 137, 192; and hagiographic

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writing, 30–1; Indigenous, 63; lived, 12, 172; local, 8–10, 17, 87, 180; and miracles, 165; and orthodoxy, 115, 116, 178, 183, 195–6; performances of, 6, 10–14, 21, 25, 85, 103, 108, 120, 193–4, 198; place and, 94–8; public reputation for, 112, 139, 141–2, 144– 5, 150, 157, 166, 173, 177; trans-atlantic contexts of, 29 holy biography. See hagiography holy performance, 33; decline of, 191; failure of, 180, 196; female, 185–6, 190; and hagiography, 183, 186; Indigenous, 33, 76; local, 34, 190, 193; and place, 193–4; problems of, 178; secret of, 112; and universal categories of sanctity, 164 See also holiness; local holy persons; local saints; performance; ritual holy persons, 5–7, 13, 199–200; as advocates for the community, 24, 145, 168, 195, 198; autographic writings of, 31; and Council of Trent, 21; and hagiography, 10, 30; 34; and miracles, 143, 161, 169; and New France, 29, 89, 98, 146, 148, 197; and performance of the traditions of sanctity, 164; women as a percentage of, 90. See also local holiness; local saints / sanctity Holy See, 16, 18, 23, 25, 34, 105 Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 85, 86–7, 103, 136, 170–2; and the Grande recrue, 177, 179; and Jeanne Mance, 173, 178. See also Morin, Marie; Sisters of Saint-Joseph

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Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, 174–5; and charitable mission, 93; and defeat of the British, 87; foundation of, 92, 245n17; membership in, 236n3; and New France, 91 See also Aiguillon, MarieMadeleine Vignerot, duchesse d’; Augustinians; Catherine de Saint-Augustin Huguenots, 26–7 humility: and martyrdom, 45; and penance, 152; and secret holy performance, 112, 129–30, 133, 138; as religious virtue, 24, 99–100, 103, 104, 113, 130, 149, 152, 182, 235n72; rhetoric of, 177 Huron: apostate, 54–5, 56, 213n7; collapse and dispersal of confederacy, 57, 62, 73, 81, 122–3, 176; country, 35, 44, 64; as French allies, 40, 51; as Iroquois adoptees, 41, 73, 245n24; as potential martyrs, 216n55; at Quebec, 57; and torture rituals, 214n21; as war captives, 36, 38, 212n1, 216n55; warrior, 72–3, 81, 222n54; and war with Iroquois, 39, 57, 73, 77, 245n24; as witness of martyrdom, 50, 53, 55–6, 61, 75–6, 80, 213n7. See also Huron mission Huron mission, 36–7, 51, 61 54, 57, 238n28; failure of, 59–61, 148. See also Jesuits Hutchinson, Abigail, 29 Hutchinson, Anne, 29 Ignatius of Loyola, 22, 127 illness, 144, 153–4, 158, 160. See also disease

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indifference, 88, 125. See also apatheia Indigenous people: as allies of the French, 84; and Christian conversion, 31, 65, 81, 93, 96, 193, 196, 198, 219n3; and Christian missions, 27, 28, 91, 94, 136, 166; in hagiographic narratives, 54, 78-80, 90; languages, 42; as objects of Christian charity, 91, 93, 97, 104–5; relations with French, 64, 66; and religious violence, 29, 51; resistance to colonization, 26; ritual practices of, 36, 37, 40, 61, 74; as saints, 4, 6, 62, 76, 201; and terminology, 15; and warfare, 38 Innocent III (pope), 18 Iroquois: and anti-French party, 51; and captivity and adoption practices, 36–8, 40–1, 52, 62, 72–4, 80; diplomacy and peace negotiations, 48; as enemies of the French and Christians, 35, 75; Jesuit mission to, 61; policies toward the French, 50; relationships with French captives, 45–6; roles in Christian martyrdom narratives, 44, 51–2, 54–6, 59, 77–8, 81; war with Algonquins, Huron and French, 47, 53, 57, 64, 70-1, 122, 173, 176, 216n69, 245n24 Iroquois League: and condolence ritual, 38; diplomacy and kinship networks, 73, 213n6, 218n90, 246n26; diplomacy and ritual, 39, 46, 222n42; and Huron confederacy, 39; neutrality in intercolonial wars, 84, 216n69;

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politics toward missionaries, 46–7, 50–1, 61, 216n54 Jansenism, 164–6, 196; and Augustinus, 242n76; and Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 232n17; and female religious, 186; and miracles, 242n80; and New France, 242n81; and Pasquier Quesnel, 242n75 Japanese martyrs, 224n75 Jesuit martyrs, 196; as models, 82, 87; canonization process for, 89; devotions to, 106, 162; tableau, 79. See also Jesuits; martyrdom Jesuits: and desire for martyrdom, 37, 51; and failure of the Huron mission, 59–61, 101; and French Church, 28, 148; and holy war, 75; on Indigenous capacity of sanctity, 76–8, 80; as missionaries, 27, 41, 42, 57, 65, 121, 125, 144, 147, 238n28; and policy of francisation, 66–7; political activities of, 60–1, 136; Récollet critics of, 166; and Sillery, 63, 66–7, 81, 88, 223n65; Spiritual Exercises, 36, 43, 127; as victims, 55, 78 Jesuit Relations, 33, 245n8: and captivity rituals, 214n21; and Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 113, 117, 132-3; and descriptions of Canada, 96, 119–20; hagiographic discourse in, 31–2, 59, 62–3. See also Jesuits; Jogues, Isaac; Joseph / Onaharé Jogues, Isaac: as captive, 35–7, 37–41, 45, 46–7; and death of René Goupil, 45–6; and the

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drama of martyrdom, 44, 48–9; as martyr, 48–52, 58, 199; and narrative of martyrdom, 52, 55, 212n1; training, 43–4 Joseph / Onaharé: captivity, 73–4; death of, 62, 219n3; early life of, 64–5, 68–9; and inclusion as one of the Canadian Martyrs, 77–80, 200; Jesuit interpretations of, 82–3; as Indigenous saint, 62–3, 81, 223n65; and martyrdom narratives, 73, 75–6, 80; performance of martyrdom, 63, 73–6, 82; name of, 219n3; and place, 194; and reconciliation of Christian and Algonquin spirituality, 83; self-conception as a martyr, 14, 81–3; at Sillery, 68–9, 220n7; as a warrior, 71–3 Kahnawake, 4, 77, 190, 193 Kateri Tekakwitha (Saint). See Catherine / Tekakwitha Kempis, Thomas à, 153, 239n37 kinship: and Christian conversion, 68, 82; fictive, 73–4; and Iroquois diplomacy, 213n15, 216n54; 218n90. See also Iroquois League; Joseph / Onaharé, mourning wars La Conception (mission village near Trois-Rivières), 66, 67, 81 Lalande, Jean de, 48, 51, 147, 199, 212n6, 216n55 Lalemant, Gabriel: death of, 52–4; 58; as martyr, 58, 77, 199, 212n6; and relics, 146 Lalemant, Jérôme, 42, 48, 212n1; and earthquake, 112, 132; and

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relics, 146; superior of Quebec Jesuits, 120 Lallemant, Louis, 43–4 Lanaudière, Rose de (Mère de Sainte-Catherine), 150–2, 154. See also Pelletier, Didace Lauberivière, François-Louis Pourroy, 230n81, 241n64 Laval, François de, 6, 113, 127, 136, 200; and the Grande recrue, 179 Le Ber, Jeanne: as anchorite, 89, 99, 225n8; and attack on Montreal, 85–7, 107, 225n10; and colonial public, 90, 103–7; criticism of, 187; death and patronage, 108– 10; and female pattern of holiness, 103, 116; and gendered holiness, 185; and holy biographies, 25, 114, 224n5; as local holy person, 105, 109–10, 194 Le Ber, Pierre, 86, 225n10 Le Clercq, Chrestien, 166 Le Jeune, Paul, 127; and arrival of female missionaries in the colony, 94, 98, 121, 226n29; on Canada as wilderness, 96; on charity, 88; on female cloister, 98; on Indigenous Christians, 76; and Joseph / Onaharé, 69, 220n7; on martyrdom and mission, 42–3, 214n32; Sillery, 64–7; training, 43. See also Jesuits; missions; Sillery Le Mercier, François, 59–60; and Catherine de Saint-Augustin, 113 Le Royer de la Dauversière, Jérôme, 171, 175, 177 Lippomano, Luigi, 22 lived religion, 10, 13, 207n13

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Lives of the Saints, 7, 32, 207n18. See also hagiographic discourse; hagiography Local holiness / holy persons, 7–10, 11, 25; dissemination of reputations, 146, 148; and the faith community, 12, 107, 143, 145, 161, 167–8, 192, 195, 197–8; and hagiographic discourses, 34; as patrons, 103–4, 105, 108–9, 168–9; place in colonial cultural life, 169; veneration of, 145, 164. See also hagiographic discourse; performance local saints / sanctity. See local holy persons Louis XIV, 84; and Jansenism, 165 Maisonneuve, Paul Chomedey de, 170, 178; and the Grande recrue, 176–7. See also Mance, Jeanne Mance, Jeanne, 6; biography of, 173–6; and the Grande recrue, 176–7, 179, 246n30; and hagiography, 170–2, 178, 244n5; holy performance of, 178–80; as model of holiness, 103; and Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal, 177–8. See also Dollier de Casson, François; Grande recrue; hagiography; Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal; Maisonneuve, Paul Chomedey de; Morin, Marie; Sulpicians “Manuscript of 1652,” 77, 147. See also Jesuits; martyrdom; Ragueneau, Paul Marie de l’Incarnation, 6, 92, 177, 199; as author, 32, 114; and canonization process, 212n46,

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226n27; and Catherine de SaintAugustin, 113, 127, 129–30, 131–2; and colonialism, 93–4, 249n67; criticisms of, 187–8; and dream of Canada, 94–7; and female pattern of holiness, 116; hagiography, 30–1, 227n39; and immigration to Canada, 136; and Joseph / Onaharé, 63, 69, 220n6; and letters about Canada, 100, 119; and Jesuit martyrs, 49, 58; as a missionary, 93–6; as a model for others, 103, 193; mysticism, 130, 195, 235n72; public life of charity, 104–5, 110, 130; and regulation of female religious, 98–100, 185, 248n64; and rhetoric of female spirituality, 99–101; and spiritual journal, 100–1. See also Canada; charity; collaborative lives; colonialism; hagiographic discourse; female holiness; female religious; Martin, Claude; Ursulines Marie de Saint-Bonaventure, 113, 118, 122 Marie-Thérése / Gannant, 109 Marillac, Louise de, 91–2 Martin, Claude: confessor and biographer, 30–1, 100–2, 114– 15; on charity, 104–5. See also collaborative lives; hagiographic discourse; Marie de l’Incarnation martyrdom, 7, 14, 34, 212n5, 214n32; Brébeuf and Lalemant, 53–4, 56; and captivity, 36, 82; definition and theology of, 7, 215n44; and gender, 98; as grace of God, 45; and Huron, 216n55; and Jesuit mission, 42–3, 75; and

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Joseph / Onaharé, 76, 78–80; of Isaac Jogues, 48–9; politics of, 51; Quakers and, 29; reaction to news of, 58–9; ritual and drama of, 37, 44, 48, 61, 74; and Roman Empire, 18; in text, 49, 52, 54–5, 80; traditions of, 73–4, 81; and victimhood, 51. See also Jesuits; odium fidei Martyrs’ Tableau, 77–9 Matte, Nicolas, 144 memory: and belief community, 168, 173; control of, 143–4; and holy biography, 58, 183; and text, 174. See also textual community miracles, 7, 23; and the cult of the saints, 24–5; and the faith community, 168, 194–5; and historiography, 141; and importance of public witness, 159–61; as rituals, 153; at Sainte-Anne de Beaupré, 25; as social dramas, 142–3, 145–6, 154–5, 160–1, 168; and social networks, 157, 159, 160–1, 168–9; theology of, 145. See also Catherine de SaintAugustin; miraculé(e)s; Pelletier, Didace; performance; ritual miraculé(e)s, 141–2, 143, 144, 150; Jeanne Mance as, 178; and public testimony, 159–60, 168; social status of, 153–4. See also miracles; performance; ritual missions. See Algonquin; Canada; colonialism; conversion; Huron mission; female religious; Iroquois; Jesuits; Marie de l’Incarnation; Montagnais; Sillery

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Mohawk: divisions over Jogues’s murder, 49–50; and captivity rituals, 47, 214n21; mission to, 48; Catherine / Tekakwitha, 206n7. See also Iroquois; Iroquois League Montagnais, 220n9; alliance with French and Algonquins, 40, 64, 75; and Christian ritual, 65, 67, 223n65; and captivity rituals, 40, and French schools, 91; gifting, 70, 221n12; spirituality and disease, 65–6; and Sillery mission, 62, 66–9. See also Algonquin; disease; ritual; Sillery Montreal, 149; foundation of, 175– 6; history of, 171–2; and war with Iroquois, 62; and War of the Spanish Succession, 84–6. See also Dollier de Casson, François, Bourgeoys, Marguerite; HôtelDieu de Montréal; Le Ber, Jeanne; Le Royer de la Dauversière, Jérôme; Mance, Jeanne; Sisters of Saint Joseph; Société Notre-Dame de Montréal; Sulpicians Morel, Thomas, 25, 108 Morin, Marie, 86–7; and the decline of religion in New France, 136; and Jeanne Mance, 171–2, 174–5, 178, 179. See also Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal mourning wars, 39, and adoption, 73. See also adoption; captivity; condolence ritual; Hurons; Iroquois League; ritual mysticism / mystics, 192, 18, 125, 138, 229n66; in antiquity, 234n56; and Catholic Reform,

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34; and conservatism, 129–30, 195; and changing attitudes toward in eighteenth century, 184–5, 245n75; as dialogue, 125–6; regulation of, 115, 129; rhetoric of, 100; skepticism of, 99, 102, 188. See also Catherine de Saint-Augustin; Marie de l’Incarnation; Ragueneau, Paul Negabamat, 62, 67, 200 New England, 29, 221n17, 225n8 New France, 17, 28; and the Atlantic world, 8, 144, 195; colonization of, 27–8, 65, 149, 158, 176; and culture of sanctity, 89–90, 197; and French empire, 84, 86, 192, 232n9; hagiographic texts from, 17, 26, 31–3, 100, 125; historiography of, 142; local religious culture of, 12, 15, 34, 59, 103, 106–7, 109, 111–13, 133–4, 136, 138, 161, 184, 193, 197; as millennial kingdom, 120, 233n34; as part of holy performances, 95, 121, 127, 163, 194. See also Canada; conquest New Orleans, 7, 191, 207n17, 249n67 New Spain, 29, 89, 191 Nickel, Goschwen (Goswin), 59 Notre-Dame-de-la-Victoire (des Victoires), 106–7 novena, 85, 144, 153, 158, 160 obedience: and monastic vows, 86, 117, 180; as religious virtue, 45, 50, 112, 149; and traditions of holiness, 99, 101, 138, 177, 195– 6. See also humility, Marie de

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l’Incarnation; Pelletier, Didace; virtue odium fidei, 36, 46, 49, 51, 212n5; deaths of Brébeuf and Lalemant, 54–5, 61, 217n79; and death of Joseph / Onaharé, 80. See also martyrdom Olier, Jean-Jacques, 178 Onaharé. See Joseph / Onaharé Orlandini, Nicolas, 22–3 Ossernenon, 38, 45, 48 patronage: holy persons and, 9, 15, 24, 34, 105, 160, 168, 178, 193; financial, 232n17. See also faith community Paul, Vincent de, 91–2 pays d’en haut, 7, 191 Pelletier, Didace (Claude), Frère, 148–50, 200, 240n46; “Actes,” 150–1, 243n87; and canonization cause, 164–8, 196, 241n74, 242n81; connection to Canada, 161–2; and cure of Angélique Robineau, 152–3; and cure of Mère Sainte-Catherine, 151–2; and inquiries into miracles, 151, 157–9; and Godefroy family, 157–9; as patron, 154, 193; and Soeur Saint-Paul, 155–7; veneration of, 162–3, 241n74; and witnessing, 159–60. See also Boubert, Marie; Denis, Joseph; Godefroy, Michel; Godefroy de Tonnancour, René; Hameau, Marguerite; miracles; Picotte de Belestre, Perriné; Pottier, JeanBaptiste; Saint-Vallier, JeanBaptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de

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penance, 34, 133, 135; rituals of, 106, 152, 195; and Jansenism, 165 performance, 10–11, 17; of rituals, 40, 44, 49, 55, 69–74, 154, 168; of the traditions of holiness, 6, 7, 9, 10–14, 108, 114–15, 120, 126, 172, 190, 192–5; trans-atlantic contexts of, 124–5, 128. See also asceticism; audience; charity; holy performance; female holiness; local holiness / holy person; local saints / sanctity; martyrdom; ritual; sanctity Piccolomini, Francesco, 59 Picotte de Belestre, Perriné, 158. See also Godefroy, Michel; Pelletier, Didace Pijart, Claude, 37 Poncet, Joseph, 58; and collapse of Huron mission, 59–60. See also “manuscript of 1652” popular religion, 237n7 Pottier, Jean-Baptiste, 159–61. See also Boubert, Marie; Denis, Joseph; Pelletier, Didace; public life, 5, 13, 87, 104, 109, 143, 192. See also Catherine de SaintAugustin; charity; faith community; lived religion; local holiness / holy persons; local saints / sanctity; Marie de l’Incarnation; miracles; performance; ritual purgatory, 128–9 Quakers, 29 Quebec: Church of, 180, 188; colonial capital of, 39, 84, 87, 106–7, 122, 141, 159; conquest of, 189;

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Jesuits of, 37, 56, 60, 62; and Hurons, 57, 59, 81; media in, 4; Quen, Jean de, 60, 70 Quietism, 185 Ragueneau, François, 133, 236n80 Ragueneau, Paul, 42; and collapse of Huron mission, 59–61, 62, 81; as confessor and biographer, 100–2, 119, 132; and hagiographic narrative, 75–7, 117; and Life of Catherine de SaintAugustin, 113–15, 144, 174; and relics of Jesuit martyrs, 146–8; training, 43. See also Catherine de Saint-Augustin; collaborative lives; Huron mission; Jesuits; Joseph / Onaharé; ritual; spiritual journal Ransonnet, Michel-François, 183– 4; on masculine quality of saints, 184. See also Bourgeoys, Marguerite; Congrégation de Notre-Dame Rasle, Sébastien, 197, 251n14 Récollets, 51, 148–9, 150, 238n28; in Canada, 155–6; and Canadian recruitment, 162; and canonization of Frère Didace Pelletier, 167; and Jansenism, 166. See also Denis, Joseph; Jansenism; Pelletier, Didace Reformation, 6, 8, 16, 17, 34; and the cult of the saints, 18–22; 24 Regnaut, Christophe, 53, 55; as witness, 55–6, 59. See also Brébeuf, Jean de; martyrdom; performance; relics; ritual relics, 20, 59, 201; access to, 161– 3; distribution of, 146, 193; first

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and second order, 145; transatlantic context of, 148; use of, 145–6, 148. See also miracles Religieuses Hospitalières de SaintJoseph. See Sisters of Saint Joseph requickening ceremony, 40. See also adoption; captivity; condolence ceremony ritual, 11–13, 37; and AlgonquinFrench relations, 65–6; baptismal, 40; and Christian liturgy, 55–6, 70, 137, 143; of holiness, 12; and Lived Religion, 207n13; problems of, 13, 52, 208n33; participants in and observers of, 52–7, 78–80, 217n73; in text, 82–3, 174; as social dramas, 109, 152, 154, 169, 208n27; 237n7. See also adoption; Algonquin; captivity; condolence ceremony; disease; holiness; holy performance; martyrdom; Montagnais; performance; Sillery Robineau, Marie-Anne-GenevièveAngélique, 151, 154. See also Pelletier, Didace Rosa de Lima, 17, 29 St Lawrence Iroquois, 57 St Lawrence valley: French population of, 6, 232n9; settlements, 62, 84, 87, 176, 245n24; as site of holy performances, 7, 29, 89, 102, 157. See also Canada; New France Saint Perpetua, 185 Saint-Vallier, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de, 106, 143–4; and Didace Pelletier, 150,

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164, 167; and miraculous cure, 155, 162–3, 230n81, 241n68; and Clement XI, 241n73 Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré (shrine), 25, 108 sanctity, 3, 5–10, 21; and charity, 88; female models of, 87, 102, 116, 183–4; and heroic virtues, 17, 24; historiography of, 16–8, 32–3, 89; masculinity and, 185, 196; Protestants and, 19–20; reform of, 22, 24; theology of, 12, 19, 93, 164; traditions of, 10–11, 14, 41, 97, 126, 130; universal categories of, 18, 115, 174, 180, 193. See also Catholic Church; Catholic Reform; hagiographic discourse; hagiography; holy performance; local holiness; local sanctity; performance; ritual Savonnières de la Troche, Marie de (de Saint-Joseph), 32, 118, 200 Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, 85, 87, 170, 219n2, 224n5 Shaking-Tent ritual, 71–2; 222n47 Sillery, 63, 66–9, 81, 88, 96; ritual life at, 69–74; Augustinians at, 121–2. See also disease, Jesuits, Le Jeune, Paul; Joseph / Onaharé; Montagnais Simon, Charles, 132–3 Simon de Longpré, Jacques, 115, 117 Simon de Longpré, MarieCatherine. See Catherine de Saint-Augustin Sisters of Saint Joseph, 171, 173; and Montreal, 178; and Jeanne

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Mance, 179. See also Dollier de Casson, François; Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal; Sulpicians social drama. See audience; charity; holiness; holy performance; faith community; miracles; public life; performance; ritual Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal, 170, 171, 175–6; and the Grande recrue, 177, 179; ­cessation of rights to Montreal, 177–8. See also Le Royer de la Dauversière, Jérôme; Maisonneuve, Paul Chomedey de; Mance, Jeanne Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Soeur Saint-Paul. See Gravel, Marie-Madeleine Sorbonne, 164, 165, 232n17 speech acts, 208n27 spiritual directors. See confessors Spiritual Exercises, 36, 43–4, 123, 127. See also Catherine de SaintAugustin, Jesuits spiritual journal (autobiography), 100–1, 114–15, 178, 195. See also Catherine de Saint-Augustin; Mance, Jeanne; Marie de l’Incarnation; Martin, Claude; Ragueneau, Paul Sulpicians: and history of Montreal, 109, 172, 245n7; and Jeanne Le Ber, 99, 225n8; and Jeanne Mance’s holy reputation, 170–1, 179; and lack of colonial holy persons, 162; Louis Tronson, superior of, 247n38; as seigneurs of Montreal, 178. See also Grande recrue; Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice

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Sulpician Seminary. See Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice Talon, Jean, 156; and the Grande recrue, 179 Tekakwitha. See Catherine / Tekakwitha Teresa of Avila (saint), 16, 185, 249n75; and rhetoric of gender, 229n66 Tertullian, 42, 214n32 textual community, 174 theological virtues, 24, 88 translation (of remains), 143–4; 240n46 Tridentine Church: and expectations of sanctity, 99, 100; and hagiography, 25, 30; model for a new colonial society, 28, 33, 87, 96, 113, 120, 133, 136, 194; restrictions placed on women, 180, 188; and rituals, 237n12. See also Catholic Church; Catholic Reform; Council of Trent; hagiography Trois-Rivières, 149, 159, 240n52; faith community of, 161; and Godefroy family, 157–8; Récollets of, 150 Unigenitus, 164, 165, 167 universal Church: doctrines of, 12, 129; and Christian sanctity, 37, 102, 115, 164, 172, 174, 178, 180, 193; and gender, 103; saints of, 5–6, 8, 105–8, 169. See also Catholic Church Urban VIII (Pope), 23, 25 Ursulines, 21, 90; biographies of, 32; of France, 58; in Canada, 95,

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234n39; and education, 91, 103; of Quebec, 30, 98, 150; and service to the colony, 103; of TroisRivières, 149, 150, 156; in Pondicherry and New Orleans, 249n67. See also Marie de l’Incarnation; Pelletier, Didace Vachon de Belmont, François, 25; and Jean Le Ber, 87, 109–10, 114, 116; on sanctity, 105, 185. See also Séminaire de SaintSulpice; Sulpicians Vaudreuil, Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de, 84 Ville-Marie. See Montreal Vimont, Barthélemy, 59–60 virginity, as religious virtue, 76–7 virtue: heroic, 17, 24, 34, as holy quality, 130, 131, 173, 187, 189, 229n66; as male quality, 185, 188, 196; public recognition of, 94, 105, 113, 158, 163. See also

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cardinal virtues; charity; holy performance; humility; obedience; penance; theological virtues vita, 130. See also holy biography; hagiography Walker Expedition, 84 wars of religion, 29, 214n32; and religious penitentialism, 124–5, 215n34, 226n28. See also French Civil War Xavier, Francis, 16 Youville, Charles-Marie-Madeleine (Dufrost) d’: and Life of Marguerite d’Youville, 187–8, 249n70; and the changing church after the conquest, 189. See also conquest Youville, Marguerite d’, 90, 172, 196, 197, 200; holy biography of, 186–90

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