Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds 9780691233239, 9780691233222

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w h e r e pa r a ly t ic s wa l k a n d t h e bl i n d se e

Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See stor i e s of sick n e s s a n d dis a bi l i t y at t h e j u nct u r e of wor l ds

m a ry du n n

pr i nce­t on u n i v e r sit y pr e ss pr i nce­t on & ox for d

Copyright © 2022 by Prince­ton University Press Prince­ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro­gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting ­free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dunn, Mary, 1976– author. Title: Where paralytics walk and the blind see : stories of sickness   and disability at the juncture of worlds / Mary Dunn. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022] |   Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021051640 (print) | LCCN 2021051641 (ebook) |   ISBN 9780691233222 (hardback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780691233239  (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology of disability. | Disabilities in literature. Classification: LCC HV1568 .D864 2022 (print) | LCC HV1568 (ebook) |   DDC 362.4—dc23/eng/20220113 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051640 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051641 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Fred Appel and James Collier Production Editorial: Mark Bellis Jacket Design: Layla Mac Rory and Heather Hansen Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Kate Hensley and Charlotte Coyne Jacket Credit: Don Hall, courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Epigraph reprinted from Beardslee, Lois. “Fiction versus Nonfiction” from Words Like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers. Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press. This book has been composed in Arno Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

For Robert Charles Dunn, III

Fiction versus Nonfiction by Lois Beardslee I’ve noticed that at the Library of Congress they have a hard time with the concept of nonfiction and fiction merging, as though it could be any dif­fer­ent. So librarians dutifully tuck “history books” into the realm of nonfiction, as they have been so carefully taught, preserving the myths of our culture, the ones we have learned all our lives. At universities. At public schools. In day care. In front of the TV. At the kitchen ­table. In our ­mothers’ bellies. Myths about dominance and superiority and who owns what and who owns whom. Dignity. Re­spect. Good jobs. Continents.

c on t e n t s

Acknowl­edgments  Introduction

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1 Bedside Manners: Illness Narratives in the Jesuit Relations27 2 Recovery and Redemption in the Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Quebec60 3 Hagiographic Prosthetics in the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin90 4 Divine Presence in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier119 Conclusion

150 Notes  165 Index  205

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a book is not a baby, but it sometimes feels like it. ­Labor pains are real and it’s only with the help of other ­people that we scholars push our progeny out into the world. This book depended on the midwifery of so many, including my responsive and careful research assistant, Ethan Laster, my exceptional colleagues, especially Jeff Wickes, Grant Kaplan, Rachel Lindsey, and t­ hose in the American Studies reading group at St. Louis University, the Roman Catholic Studies Unit (especially John Seitz and Michael Pasquier), and the Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit attached to the American Acad­emy of Religion. I am deeply obliged to the Research Growth Fund at St. Louis University for granting me the year-­long research leave that facilitated the completion of this book, to Fred Appel at Prince­ton University Press for supporting the proj­ect, and to the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions and critique made the final product so much better. Special thanks to Emma Anderson whose thoughtful, thorough reading of this manuscript and incisive comments and challenges to the arguments made ­here pushed me to refine, sharpen, and more carefully calibrate what I have written. My deep gratitude goes, also, to Bob Orsi for his generous support of this proj­ect from start to finish and for his unflagging encouragement of the approach to Catholic history I take in this book. His is the sort of humane, compassionate, and rigorous scholarship always on my horizon. Although it has been years now since I finished doctoral work at Harvard ­under his supervision, Kevin Madigan continues to inspire me both by his scholarly work—­meticulous, creative, xi

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wide-­ranging—­and by his character. His humility, humor, and steadfast kindness are proof that eulogy virtues and résumé virtues sometimes go together. This book literally would not have been pos­si­ble without Drs. Matthew Mutch, my masterful surgeon, and Katrina Pederson, my expert oncologist. They saved my life. I am beyond grateful for their skills and expertise, but I am especially grateful for the times they called me, answered my emails, and asked me how I was ­doing. I owe an especially heavy debt to them. I ­can’t imagine how emotionally and intellectually exhausting it must be to do the kind of work they do. I can testify, however, to how much it mattered when they saw me and not just the prob­lem with my body. My c­ hildren, Bobby, Frankie, Johnny, and Aggie provided much-­needed distractions from the toil this proj­ect entailed and continue to be constant reminders to me about what m ­ atters most—­and when the distraction they provided was too much, my ­mother, Judy Corley, was always ­there to help. Most of all, my love and gratitude go to my husband, Bobby Dunn. For years now, he has listened to, reflected on, and helped me refine the ideas and arguments in this book. He has accompanied me to e­ very single one of my hospital appointments, blood draws, infusions, and scans. More than anyone, he deserves to be recognized for having coparented this book into existence, and it is to him that Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See is dedicated. St. Louis, Missouri May, 2021

I n t r oduc t ion

disability, writes Michael Bérubé, “demands a story.”1 So, I w ­ ill begin with a story. One misty March morning, not so many years ago, I was ­running with my husband through Berlin’s Tiergarten Park. In the com­pany of scores of o­ thers, we followed the maze of tidy paths that opened onto so many secret gardens and verdant laws, so many tiny playgrounds and monuments to g­ reat dead men. We jogged past the Victory Column and the Bismarck-­Nationaldenkmal, emerging fi­nally on the side of Tiergartenstrasse, just opposite the Berlin Philharmonic. We crossed the street and ­there, in the shadow of the Philharmonic’s irregular ­angles and impossible proportions, stood a monument of a dif­fer­ent sort. A long wall of blue glass sliced through the concrete plaza, cutting neatly like a surgeon’s knife. Extending the length of the wall was a waist-­high ledge that chronicled the pro­gress of Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, the Nazi euthanasia initiative that had ended in the systematic murder of some 250,000 mentally and physically disabled ­people. I made my way slowly and silently down the ledge, my heart beginning to twist into knots and my throat tightening like a vise. As the raindrops rolled slowly down the text displays and over the photographed ­faces of victims like Martin Bader and Ilsze Lekschas, I thought of my own d­ aughter Aggie, tightly curled in the ­hotel bed between her b­ rothers and sleeping u­ nder the watchful gaze of her grand­mother—­Aggie and her deep black eyes, Aggie and her 1

2  I n t r o du c t i o n

soft ­little hands, Aggie and her precocious sense of humor, Aggie and her infectious charm, Aggie and her ge­ne­tic difference that con­temporary American medical culture registers as disability. ——— The notion that disability “inaugurates the act of interpretation” is something of a truism in disability studies, particularly among scholars like Bérubé and o­ thers who have approached disability from the perspective of narrative studies.2 Variously, over the course of Western history, extraordinary bodies have been read as portents of civic disaster, punishment for the commission of sin, proof of the diversity of God’s creative genius, pathological ­mistakes to be corrected with the interventions of medical science, even cancers on the h­ uman race to be cut out and eradicated forever. The way we interpret extraordinary bodies has changed over time, reflecting historical context and cultural values. But what ­hasn’t changed, insists Garland-­Thomson, is the per­sis­tent “­human impulse to textualize, to contain, to explain our most unexpected corporeal manifestations to ourselves.”3 Disability “is always an interpretive occasion.”4 Since the Enlightenment, the meanings imputed to disability in the modern West have been tethered (albeit not exclusively) to emerging notions of normativity.5 ­W hether a side effect of the scientific revolution or its industrial counterpart (or some complex historical entanglement between the two), the category of the normal came gradually to define the contours of what counted as disability. By the mid-­nineteenth ­century, Lennard Davis argues, the “normal” had replaced the more religiously inflected “ideal” as the standard against which bodies w ­ ere mea­sured. Extraordinary bodies became abnormal bodies—­and abnormal bodies “intolerable” bodies.6 Bodies that c­ ouldn’t (or ­wouldn’t) conform to normative type frustrated modernity’s expectations of efficiency, order, and controlled predictability, not to mention the demands of industrial l­abor that fit p­ eople into factories like parts into a

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machine. By the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, disability had emerged as a prob­lem in need of a solution. The prob­lem was abnormality; the solutions proposed aimed, in vari­ous ways, to engineer a return to normality. Rehabilitation, surgery, therapies, and, most recently, ge­ne­tic modifications—­all ­these ­were (and are) the means by which disability in the modern West was (and is) treated.7 Shadowing ­these broader cultural and technological developments, the stories told about disability in the modern West hew to a fairly predictable set of plot lines. As Davis and Frank Kermode have argued, in most cases stories about disability recounted in novels, films, even nonfiction histories and news reports, foreground disability as a prob­lem that begs for resolution.8 ­W hether disabled characters take shape as threats or villains, tragically dependent or bitterly resentful, repre­sen­ta­tions of disability lean heavi­ly against the framework constructed by notions of the normal and abnormal.9 The stories told about disability overwhelmingly cast embodied difference as lack and loss (an absence suggested by the orthography of the term itself), and seek closure—­even if they ­don’t always find it—in the return to normalcy. Put differently, stories told about disability in the modern West are overwhelmingly stories of overcoming disability and only rarely stories of living (or, even more rarely, thriving) with disability.10 To be sure, not ­every disability narrative unfolds as a quest for normalcy. Some stories about disability seek, on the contrary, to disrupt the normative paradigm. Such stories are best described, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder insist, as counternarratives, “poetical and narrative efforts that expand options for depicting disability experiences.”11 Few and far between, however, ­these counternarratives are but exceptions that prove the rule. Cultural attitudes ­toward and social practices regarding disability in the modern West tend powerfully to at once reflect and reinscribe disability as a prob­lem to be solved. Indeed, even as Mitchell and Snyder gesture to possibilities for telling the stories of disability other­wise, they expose the per­sis­tent eugenic impulse that “lurk[s] like a social phantasm just below the surface, determining the

4  I n t r o du c t i o n

standards, manner, and par­ameters of our cultural, po­liti­cal, and intellectual debate about our embodied differences.”12 The murderous ambition to eradicate difference that began on Tiergartenstrasse and ended in the Holocaust was not an aberration from the law of modern pro­gress, but modernity’s logical extension. Modernity’s prioritization of rationalism, efficiency, and administrative order grated—­and still grates—­roughly against disability’s inherent heterogeneity. Viewed through this lens, surgical, rehabilitative, and ge­ne­tic therapies come into focus not as strategies for accommodating disability in the modern West, but as strategies for erasing disability, for making difference dis­appear against the monochromatic background of the normal. It was in response to my own need to textualize, contain, and explain my f­ amily’s encounter with disability that I undertook this proj­ect. I wanted alternatives to the dominant cultural narrative that limns disability as a prob­lem in need of a solution. I wanted to tell a dif­fer­ent kind of story about disability—­a counternarrative—a story that was not at its core about fixing what had gone wrong, about resolving difference into sameness. I wanted, at the very least, to expand the interpretative possibilities for making sense of disability in ways that d­ idn’t end with its effacement and the reinscription of the normative body. Aggie ­w asn’t a prob­lem. Aggie ­didn’t need a solution. She needed cultivation and patience and loving, singular attention—­just like her b­ rothers. And she—­we—­ needed a narrative that ­didn’t limit the mea­sure of a life to the rule of the norm. This is a historical study, an inquiry into the meanings made of what I call embodied difference in early modern Catholic Canada ­under the French regime. In pursuit of semantic alternatives that configure disability other than as a prob­lem in need of solution, I ask ­after the meanings made of impairment in early modern New France—­that area of North Amer­i­ca annexed to the French empire from the mid-­sixteenth ­century to 1763. How was disability ­imagined in Canada u­ nder the French regime? What did it signify for ­those mostly Catholic w ­ omen and men clustered along the

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Saint Lawrence River valley? ­Under what circumstances and within which contexts? And did questions like t­ hese even make sense? Disability, a­ fter all, is a fraught term—of sixteenth-­century provenance, culturally specific, as polysemous in the early modern period as it is ­today. Indeed, it ­wasn’t ­until the mid-­nineteenth ­century that disability as a category of identity began to “muscle . . . ​ out older competitors” like infirmity, affliction, monstrosity, and deformity.13 What does it mean, then, to ask ­after disability in the early modern Catholic past? In key ways, the enterprise of disability history at large has had to wrestle with the evident misfit between the con­temporary terminology of disability and the realities of the past.14 Disability is not, as is by now well established, synonymous with impairment. Impairments—­abnormalities in the structure or function of the body—­are something of a historical constant. The extent to which impairments disable t­ hose who suffer from them, however, varies considerably across time, place, and culture. In lieu of the medical model, which elides the difference between impairment and disability, scholars in the field of disability studies propose thinking about disability as an effect of social relations, the consequence not of conditions of impairment alone but of the interaction between impaired bodies and environmental obstacles like “pre­ judice and discrimination, inaccessibility and lack of accommodation.”15 It is this cultural model of disability, attentive to the ways in which disability takes shape through the dialectic between impaired bodies, physical environments, and worlds of meaning, that informs my approach h­ ere. But this i­ sn’t of course (and as the title suggests) just a book about disability. It is also a book about sickness. As a species of embodied difference, sickness, too, inaugurates the act of interpretation. Without collapsing the conceptual distinctions between disability on the one hand and sickness on the other, this book takes up questions of embodied difference—­the term I have deployed as a means of capturing both physical phenomena—in early modern Catholic Canada ­under the French regime in ways

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intended to test the strength of the semantic bound­aries between the two. Where, exactly, does disability end and sickness begin? To be sure, to align disability too closely with sickness is to risk repeating the ­mistakes of the medical model that equates disability with individual impairment. Disability is not sickness—­and yet, some sicknesses are disabling, and some disabilities cause sickness. The distinction between the two is in no way absolute. Both, ­after all, entail “real dysfunction in the body.”16 If stories about disability are overwhelmingly framed against the background of the medical model that renders it a prob­lem to be solved, con­temporary narrative repre­sen­ta­tions of sickness, too, tend to privilege a medical interpretation. “The story of illness that trumps all ­others in the modern period” is the linear one that plots sickness on a line graph leading straight from diagnosis to prognosis to recovery (or not).17 The “restitution narrative,” as Arthur Frank calls it, achieves closure with the event of the cure.18 In ­these stories, illness is but a momentary zag in the smooth arc of life, a mechanical prob­lem with the body that can and should yield to medicine’s remedies. B ­ ecause the restitution narrative, relentlessly peddled by physicians and patients, big pharma and hospital conglomerates, crowds out other possibilities for making sense of sickness in the modern West, ­little space is left for stories of illness whose coherence is not dependent on the event of the cure. But when restitution is impossible, what options are ­there for imagining illness other­wise? When sickness ends not in recovery but in death—or, if not in death, in the incurable per­sis­tence of chronic disease—­what are the alternatives to framing the narrative as a story of ultimate failure? And when, as it often does, the experience of illness proves so profoundly transformative (even in the happy event of a cure) that restitution in the strict sense of restoration is neither pos­si­ble nor desirable, what possibilities are ­there for a dif­fer­ent kind of narrative? ­These questions are not hy­po­thet­i­cal for any of us. All of us w ­ ill, sooner or l­ ater, grapple with our inevitable mortality. The demand, however, to tell the stories of sickness other­w ise imposes itself

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upon me with a par­tic­u­lar urgency. In January 2017, about a year ­after I began research on this book, I was diagnosed with cancer. Given my age (forty), lifestyle (healthy), and f­ amily history (none), the diagnosis came as a shock. In what world was it pos­si­ble that I could have cancer? Over and above the litany of questions I had about treatment, prognosis, and postoperative surveillance, I wrestled with a flood of other, more piercing questions that drove straight into the heart of my sense of self. What did cancer at forty say about my past? About my ­future? About my understanding of myself as a vigorous m ­ other of four with an emergent professional profile smack-­dab in the prime of life? With the diagnosis came my immediate conscription into the biomedical system, a conscription for which (let me be clear) I am deeply and thoroughly grateful, but which nonetheless impressed upon me a new and unwelcome identity. Against this identity, indexed to my diagnosis, my physician, and my oft-­repeated date of birth, I strug­gled over the course of twelve months of treatment to, as Audre Lorde puts it, “keep me available to myself.”19 I rode my bike to my radiation treatments (­because my body w ­ asn’t just a cancer body, it was a pedaling, sweating, breathing body) and ran the 10K loop in my city park while hooked up to my portable chemotherapy pump (which ­wasn’t hard, just awkward). When I walked through the hospital doors, as I did with biweekly regularity over the space of a year, it was cancer that overwhelmed me as the primary feature of my identity. Outside, though, I could refuse its power. Back on the gravel ­running paths of Forest Park, back among the gumballs and daffodils of my own backyard, I could put cancer where it belonged. I could relativize cancer as one (admittedly significant) event among ­others that needed to be integrated into my story, not mine into its. If, as I’ve come to see with the perspective of time, my stubborn refusal to park my bike and put up my feet was an embodied attempt to tell the story of cancer other­w ise, to assimilate cancer into the plotline of my own self-­narrative, this book is its reflective and articulate complement. In the chapters that follow, I have

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mined the early modern Catholic past for alternatives to con­ temporary narratives of sickness and disability, listening carefully to the kinds of stories told about embodied difference in the thick contexts of the religious worlds inhabited by my primary sources. I have done this not in order to harvest lessons from the past for use in the pre­sent. My ambition, lest the reader misunderstand, is not to advocate for anything like a ressourcement of the religious meanings made of disability and sickness in early modern French Catholic Canada. Many of the meanings made of embodied difference—­meanings that impute sickness to sin and justify pain as penitence, for instance—­are better left in the past, anyway. Would I want to trade the medical model that treats cancer as a prob­lem in need of solution for a religious model that conditions cure on genuine faith and confident prayer? Would I want to add to the unequal burden of bodily impairment the added weight of moral guilt that follows from the premodern equation between disability and fault? No—­and besides, the aims and ends of history are not to parse the good from the bad and to make normative claims about what should be resurrected to new life in the pre­sent. It is not the historian’s job to judge the past (although some degree of normative evaluation is inevitably implicit in all scholarship); it is certainly not the historian’s job to apply the past, as if, impossibly, meanings could migrate safely across temporal distance without mutation. I have mined the early modern Catholic past for stories of sickness and disability, bringing ­these stories into encounter with ­those made available to us within the con­temporary context of the modern West, not in order to substitute or supplement one set of narrative meanings with another, but rather in order to loosen the binds of both. Narrative, we have long understood, is a medium of constraint. Narrative silences, truncates, simplifies; narrative smooths out the wrinkles and shaves off the splinters of real life, pruning the “plurality and heterogeneity of experience” to shape a coherent w ­ hole.20 Narrative, however, ­doesn’t just exclude and suppress. Rather, narrative form (like any form) enables the

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possibility of or­ga­nized thought, for as Caroline Levine explains, “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”21 And not only that, but this: when forms collide, they are rerouted in new directions. When two or more narratives meet, the power of e­ ither to constrain is weakened and the effect is unpredictable. “An effective strategy for curtailing the power of harmfully totalizing and unifying w ­ holes,” argues Levine, “is nothing other than to introduce more w ­ holes.”22 Thus, I have engineered the encounter between the two sets of narratives at play in this book—­the one gleaned from the French Catholic past and the other reaped from the con­temporary modern West—as a means of unsettling the signifying power of both and making room for interpretative agency. Paradoxically, the multiplicity of narratives at play in what follows works—or so I hope and intend—to widen the range of options for thinking about and making sense of embodied difference. ——— At the foundation of this book, furnishing the raw materials for my analy­sis are four discrete primary sources: the Jesuit Relations, the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, the Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, and the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing inscribed in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier. To each, I dedicate a separate chapter, thickly contextualizing the source in its historical lifeworld with careful attention to genre, purpose, authorship, and audience. How, I ask in each case, are stories of sickness and disability told? Who are the subjects (and who the objects)? What does embodied difference signify? And how? Which narrative strategies, which relations of power, which discursive forms enable some meanings and foreclose ­others? Chronologically and geo­graph­i­cally narrow in scope, my four sources range from 1632 (the date of the first issue of the Jesuit Relations) to 1751 (when the Histoire was published in France). All ­were produced within the relatively intimate colonial settlements that spanned the Saint Lawrence River valley from Quebec to

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Trois-­Rivières and beyond. All, moreover, are distinctly religious in orientation, grounded in the shared sense of God’s real presence and s­ haped by the institutional authority of the post-­Tridentine Catholic Church and the North American mission. The Jesuit Relations are perhaps the best known among ­these sources. Published annually between 1632 and 1673 for a French readership e­ ager for the latest on the pro­gress of the Canadian mission, the Relations are equal parts travelogue, ethnography, historiography, and religious reflection. They ­were also, in their time, a powerfully effective means of garnering support for the missionary enterprise and securing the funds necessary for its success. More than any other single textual collection, the Relations have been indispensable to the growth and development of the field of New France studies, their importance attested to by the weight of the scholarship built on their foundation.23 The Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, the Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, and the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier are, however, less familiar to historians and maybe entirely unfamiliar to my readers. Each deserves a brief introduction ­here, with the promise of a more generous pre­sen­ta­tion in the chapters that follow. The Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, the textual focus of chapter 2, was written by Mère Jeanne-­Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté with the editorial assistance of Marie-­Andrée Régnard Duplessis de Sainte-­Hélène. Composed by cloistered nuns for cloistered nuns, the Histoire traces the institutional history of the Hôtel-­Dieu in Quebec from its establishment in 1636 to 1716. Like other monastic chronicles of its genre, however, the Histoire is neither exhaustive nor objective. It is, instead, a carefully curated sort of history, a selective pre­sen­ta­tion of edifying moments that, taken together, work to draw the bound­aries of Hospitaller identity and the dimensions of the Hospitaller vocation. Juxtaposed with the Jesuit Relations—an outward-­facing text in more ways than one, composed by missionaries on the colonial frontier with an eye t­ oward appealing to an overseas readership—­the Histoire ­faces inward, offering a counterpoint and a corrective to a colonial history written by men.

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The Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin (1671), which forms the substrate of chapter 3, sits at the intersection of the Jesuit and Hospitaller worlds. The first full-­length hagiographic vita generated within the context of New France, the Vie takes as its subject Catherine de Saint-­Augustin—­demoniac, visionary, and Hospitaller nun at the Hôtel-­Dieu. The work of Paul Ragueneau, superior of the Jesuits in Canada (1650–1653) and Catherine’s erstwhile spiritual director and confessor, the Vie is nonetheless (like the Histoire) a collaborative text, a w ­ hole cloth woven from the warp of Catherine’s own spiritual journal and the weft of Ragueneau’s interpretative overlay. Catherine’s body—­ tormented, ill, and unusually receptive to visions divine and demonic—­takes center stage in the Vie, rendered by Ragueneau both suffering and salvific in imitation of Christ in ways that illuminate the role of embodied difference in the construction of sanctity. The Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier to which I turn in chapter 4 is, like the Vie, a hagiographic text. Assembled in support of the canonization of Recollect ­Brother Didace Pelletier in 1719 by his confrère and erstwhile confessor Joseph Denis, the Actes includes both a brief biography of the defunct Recollect ­brother and twenty-­two miracle stories. Twenty-­one of ­these stories are accounts of healing attributed to Frère Didace’s intervention recorded in official procès-­verbaux undertaken between 1699 and 1717 and attested to by written certification. Alone among the sources examined ­here, the Actes preserve (albeit imperfectly) the testimony of lay men and w ­ omen, supplementing the narrative emphases in the Relations, the Histoire, and the Vie with perspectives on sickness and disability anchored in the experiences of ordinary French Catholics in early modern Canada. I have chosen t­ hese par­tic­u­lar sources as the grounds of my analy­sis in order to circumscribe the scope of this proj­ect within manageable limits and to impose a kind of coherence on the range of pos­si­ble narratives. At the same time, however, I have selected ­these sources as the four corners of my investigation as a means of getting at the diversity of the meanings made of embodied

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difference in colonial New France, for despite the clear affinity among them, the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes are very dif­fer­ent kinds of texts, each produced within the context of a distinctly dif­fer­ent religious community, each ­shaped by the demands of a distinctly dif­fer­ent (albeit traditional) discursive form. ­There is a logic, then, to my choice of ­these four par­tic­ul­ar sources, a rationale that accounts for why t­ hese four sources and not o­ thers anchor the analy­sis in the chapters that follow. Yet, in another sense, ­there is something almost incidental about my decision to ground this proj­ect in ­these four sources, for this is not a proj­ect conceived primarily in response to pressing questions posed by the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes (although I hope I have been sufficiently clear in the chapters that follow about the range of questions that do emerge, and with some insistence, from t­ hese par­tic­u­lar texts). This is a proj­ect, rather, conceived in response to vital questions generated by the circumstances of my own life and undertaken with the tools at my disposal. ­Were it not for my disciplinary training as a historian of religion and my expertise in early modern French Catholicism, I might very well have turned elsewhere for sources “to think with” on the broad set of questions that drive this proj­ect—­questions about the meanings made of embodied difference, questions about the contingency of narrative, questions about scholarship, creativity, and the yield of historiography pursued in the idiom of encounter. As it is, however, given my scholarly commitments, it was to the rich terrain of early modern French North Amer­i­ca and the religious context of colonial Catholicism that I looked for answers to the questions that hounded me. That I have undertaken this study in response to questions of my own might sit uncomfortably with some of my readers and colleagues who would query the integrity of an academic proj­ect animated by such shamelessly personal interests. In acknowledging—­ embracing, even proclaiming—­the presentist orientation that grounds this proj­ect, however, I am making a claim about the scholarly pro­cess, about not just my pro­cess as a scholar but about

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the pro­cess of scholarship in general. My claim is that sometimes, if not often, scholarship proceeds from the inside out rather than the outside in. Sometimes the questions that drive research begin not with a mysterious artifact or an ambiguous text that begs scholarly attention but with the scholar’s own existential uncertainties. That is to say, sometimes (maybe often), it is not the past that seeks a response from the pre­sent but the pre­sent that seeks a response from the past. Few would contest that the kinds of prob­lems scholars perceive in the artifacts and texts of the past are prob­lems frequently perceptible only from the pre­sent (Did the Jesuits in New France grapple with questions of illness and agency? Did the Hospitaller nuns of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu won­der about subjectivity and sickness?) but fewer still would admit to the ways in which scholarship is as often a m ­ atter of being pushed from the pre­sent as it is a ­matter of being pulled ­toward the past, as often a m ­ atter of affective drive as a m ­ atter of intellectual curiosity. History is written by the victors, yes, but also by flesh-­and-­ blood h­ umans who bring to the past their deeply felt needs and desires, their urgent questions and pressing concerns. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the inevitable entanglements between scholars and subjects, s­ houldn’t we at least aspire to something like purity of intention when it comes to the histories we write? S­ houldn’t we at least try to understand past worlds on their own terms unencumbered by the interests of the scholarly pre­sent? ­Shouldn’t we at least aim to explain the data “without recasting or judging the convictions, attitudes, or actions of the protagonists through any theories or values that distort them?”24 Since at least the nineteenth ­century, historians in the modern West have labored to develop methods that, as Howard Clark Kee puts it, “make the historian aware of differences between his own culture and the one he is studying.”25 To ­really understand the past, Kee insists, the historian must pursue a relentless program of contextualization, fitting facts about the past into “the wider, deeper social and cultural context[s],” the “larger framework[s] of meaning,” and the broader “network[s] of assumptions” in which

14  I n t r o du c t i o n

they occurred.26 ­Isn’t, then, the sort of presentist approach to history I am at once advocating and modeling in what follows at odds with the norms and standards of the discipline as Kee and ­others like him have articulated them? It is my contention not just that the mandate always to contextualize makes room for a presentist approach to historiography but that genuine historical understanding of the sort to which the discipline has long aspired demands it. It would be disingenuous, of course, to claim that a presentist approach to history is without its risks. Th ­ ere are dangers to reading the past through the lens of the pre­sent, to translating too quickly the alien events of dif­fer­ent worlds into the familiar terms of our own, dangers that include misreading the “commitments and experiences” of ­people in times gone by in ways that mutilate the facts.27 But ­there are dangers, also, to proceeding as if the pre­sent has no bearing on how we read the past. The history I have written in the chapters that follow is the result of close, careful, and painstaking analy­sis grounded in a commitment to understanding the sources on their own terms and within their own contexts of composition. Like any historian worth her publisher’s imprint, I have tried to read the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes with fairness and generosity, attentive to the differences in lifeworlds, patterns of belief, and habits of practice that separate my subjects from myself. Historiography, however, need not (must not!) stop t­ here but can and should probe the connections between past and pre­sent, for t­ here are dangers, also, to insisting too rigidly on the unbridgeable gap between worlds. ­There are risks that follow from the posture of scholarly distance, from the strict separation between scholar and subject as the grounds of academic integrity, the most real among which may very well be the risk of irrelevance. For if history is only about the past, then of what use is it to the pre­sent? And if history is of no use to the pre­sent, then why bother with it at all? Why major in history? Why fund history departments? Why publish historical books? Why support historical proj­ects? That t­ hese kinds of arguments are not entirely unfamiliar to us—­and, indeed,

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that ­these are the kinds of arguments offered in justification of financial cuts to humanities programs—­should signal to historians that we need to do a much better job of arguing for the relevance of our work. If anything, we need to be more explicit about breaching the line between past and pre­sent in the histories we write, not holding it. If anything, we need to highlight more vividly why history ­matters—­and not just for understanding where ­we’ve come from but also for imagining where we might go. A presentist approach to history of the sort I model h­ ere, however, does more than tender an argument in defense of the relevance of the discipline of history to public (and private) life. In pursuing this proj­ect as an exercise in the encounter between past and pre­sent, I am making a claim for empathy as the grounds of historical understanding. The fact that empathy is a crucial tool of historical analy­sis, as vital to understanding past worlds as careful academic research, was not lost on Howard Clark Kee. The pro­ cess of relentless contextualization that defines the historian’s métier, Kee explains, requires the historian to “enter empathetically into the world of a past time, place, and outlook.”28 Although Kee himself dared not press the point this far, it is my contention that the mandate of empathy as a prerequisite to understanding implicates the historian herself as a subject in the field of study. How ­else, ­after all, can the historian enter into “the life-­world of the other” than by bringing her own existential dilemmas and concerns into conversation with the past?29 How ­else can the historian r­ eally understand—­not just intellectually, but cognitively, affectively, somatically—­than by putting herself “on the line?”30 I do not mean to deny the (sometimes radical) difference that separates past from pre­sent, subject from scholar—­a difference that, if anything, is magnified in the secular study of religion. Nor do I mean only to dismiss modernist aspirations to objectivity and neutrality as naive, foolhardy, and insufficiently attentive to the postmodern truism that ­there is no view from nowhere. Rather, I am arguing for encounter as an essential feature of historical analy­sis—­the very grounds of the kind of understanding (verstehen)

16  I n t r o du c t i o n

that has structured the discipline of history since Dilthey.31 This is not an excuse for the substitution of scholarly theories and values for the convictions, attitudes, or actions of the subject, but for the deployment of such theories and values as bridges between two ­things. In the chapters that follow, the Jesuits, the Hospitaller nuns, Indigenous converts and ordinary French faithful are the protagonists of the history I write, their stories of infirmity, impairment, and illness the subject of my careful analy­sis. I have tuned my ear to the stories told of sickness and disability in my four sources, attentive to the social and cultural contexts that ­shaped them, the frameworks of meaning that gave them heft, and the networks of assumptions that undergirded them. The sharpest tools in the historian’s toolbox, however, cannot guarantee a “defigured” account of the past.32 My reading of the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes is not ­free of the distorting influences of the theories and values with which I encounter them. And how could it be other­ wise? History, ­after all (and as Hayden White has so compellingly argued), is not a science given to discovering what ­really happened, but a disciplined refiguration of accounts that pre­sent themselves to the historian “in an already enfigured form.”33 More than anyone ­else, White has theorized the craft of historiography as a narrative exercise.34 The task of the historian is to impose coherence on a set of disparate events—to tell a story about the past that illuminates its meaning and significance for the pre­sent. It is through the medium of narrative that the historian transforms the bare chronicle of temporally ordered events into a story that explains the past even as it represents it, privileging some motifs and suppressing o­ thers, foregrounding some themes and neglecting o­ thers. Through the alchemy of narrative the real­ ity of the past acquires the color of truth. Indeed, as White puts it, the historical “ ‘true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.”35 ­Shaped into narrative form, the past becomes meaningful, even intelligible—­a fact that was no less true for the Jesuit missionaries, Hospitaller

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nuns, and Recollect b­ rothers of early modern New France than it is for the con­temporary historian answerable to the modern acad­ emy. Refracted through their lived experience as missionaries on the Canadian frontier, sickness was made meaningful by seventeenth-­century Jesuits for what it enabled (or d­ idn’t) about the broader proj­ect of conversion; for Hospitaller nuns at work in Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, it was the “charitable imperative” and French Catholic imperial interests that gave interpretative context.36 Filtered through the lens of a post-­Tridentine missionary Catholicism alive to the realities of sin and salvation, Divine providence and demonic machination, embodied difference in Canada ­under the French regime was made to signify. Even in early modern New France, the sort of “presentist” orientation against which some historians inveigh left its imprint on historiography.37 The writing of history was then and is now (and perhaps ever ­shall be) “a kind of wisdom . . . ​about how to live a meaningful life in the here-­and-­now.”38 Although I have certainly not played fast and loose with my sources, disciplined by the texts themselves and the par­tic­ul­ ar dimensions of the lifeworlds that produced them, I encounter them from where I stand and from what I see as a historian of religion and a beneficiary of the modern biomedical system. My encounter with the sources is prefigured by my academic training and my sympathies for a style of religious studies attentive to the presence of the scholar in the field.39 Echoing, maybe even amplifying, claims made by White, Jonathan Z. Smith famously insisted that religion (like history) is always and only a product of the scholar’s imagination. “­There is no data for religion,” Smith argued.40 ­There is only the scholarly choice about what phenomena to compare and how, a choice that temporarily constitutes the subject for the sake of attempting to answer questions of significance to the “academic imagination of religion” at large—­questions generated by the scholar herself and in response to her own needs, “both personal and academic.”41 Much as some in the field of narrative studies have drawn attention to the role of the reader in fixing the meaning

18  I n t r o du c t i o n

of an indeterminate text, Smith’s point illuminates the ways in which academic interpretation depends on the encounter between scholar and subject. Scholarship, like reading, is “inherently dynamic,” requiring a relentless self-­consciousness.42 “This self-­ consciousness,” insists Smith, “constitutes [the scholar’s] primary expertise, his [sic] foremost object of study,” for without the scholar, the subject itself does not exist.43 In what follows, I have tried to proceed in just such a relentlessly self-­conscious mode. My decision to attend to narratives of sickness and disability in the Jesuit Relations, the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­ Dieu de Quebec, the Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin, and the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier prefigures my analy­sis in crucial ways. In my choice of t­ hese par­tic­u­lar sources and the par­tic­ul­ ar questions with which I encounter them, I have in advance already delimited the scope of what I can see. I have probed ­these sources, listening to stories told about embodied difference, as a means not only of understanding the past and its ­people, but also of hazarding responses to urgent questions of my own—­questions about how to live with the facts of sickness and the inevitability of disability. In approaching t­ hese sources with a set of conceptual and analytical tools honed by my training as a historian of religion and borrowed from the allied disciplines of disability studies and narrative medicine, among o­ thers, I proceed with an awareness that what I offer my reader is not a defigured account of the past, but a refigured account of the facts as I have encountered them. From the raw materials of my primary sources (which, indeed, ­were already cooked to begin with), I have constructed my own narrative of coherence. The conclusions reached in the ensuing chapters, however, are no less true for all their presentism and provisionality. The kinds of truths produced by historical writing, White reminds us, are truths tinged with irony—­truths asserted as if they ­were universal but presumed nonetheless to be contingent, temporary, and ineluctably local.44 In the same way that fiction, while not strictly factual, nonetheless offers a true interpretation of the world, so

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historiography impresses upon the rec­ords of the past the imprint of a certain kind of truth. The kind of truth conveyed by historiographical narrative is “the truth of meaning rather than fact,” a “specifically ­human truth” woven from the threads of connection between then and now, ­there and h­ ere, them and us.45 The story that emerges from the pages that follow might have been told other­wise, but it is a story as true as any other. ——— Illness, Arthur Kleinman writes in The Illness Narratives, “has meaning.”46 Distinguished from “disease,” which reduces “the innately ­human experience of symptoms and suffering” to a technical analy­sis of bodily malfunction, “illness” is a phenomenologically loaded term, encompassing not just physical disorder but the broader ways in which the ailing and infirm “perceive, live with, and respond to symptoms and disability.”47 Published in 1988, The Illness Narratives was intended as a corrective to modern medicine’s tendency to reduce multitextured experiences of illness to the narrow, technical prob­lem of disease.48 For Kleinman, it’s the experience of illness that counts most for the patient and her community. What m ­ atters is how illness feels—­not just physically, but phenomenologically—­and illness feels dif­fer­ent, Kleinman understood, depending on the stories we tell about it and the meanings we make of it. The meanings made of illness are meanings that emerge in narrative, in the stories p­ eople weave from the strands of culture, embodiment, and the arc of an individual life. Meaning is not ancillary to the experience of illness but at the heart of it, capable of amplifying or exaggerating, tempering or resolving the symptoms of disease. Narrative does “not merely reflect illness experience, but rather . . . ​contributes to the experience of symptoms and suffering.”49 I have written this book against the background of narrative medicine, which, following Kleinman, has coalesced around the works of Rita Charon, Arthur Frank, and o­ thers.50 Narrative

20  I n t r o du c t i o n

medicine, Frank asserts, “begins where [modern bio]medicine leaves off,” supplementing modern medicine’s focus on diagnoses and the “technical quest for the control of symptoms” with a renewed attention to the patient as the protagonist of the illness experience.51 It is with the aim to bridge the gap between the practitioner’s way of speaking about illness and the patient’s that narrative medicine attends to the stories of illness told by the sick. “To know what patients endure at the hands of illness and therefore to be of clinical help,” argues Charon, “requires that doctors enter the worlds of their patients, if only imaginatively, and to see and interpret t­ hese worlds from the patients’ point of view.”52 To prac­ti­tion­ ers willing to listen, the stories told by the sick transmit worlds of information, information of immea­sur­able value to the proper diagnosis and treatment of illness. For sickness, as Charon puts it, “does not travel in straight lines.”53 The yield of narrative medicine, however, goes beyond the practical gains to be had from listening to the stories told by the sick—­and, importantly, ­those with disabilities. Deeply ethical in its orientation, narrative medicine seeks to return agency to patients subordinated by the medical system. Frank, whose At the ­Will of the Body was written as a reflection on his own encounter with multiple serious illnesses—­f irst a heart attack and then cancer—­describes the patient experience as one of colonization.54 In the theater of con­temporary biomedicine, doctors act; patients are acted upon—or, at best, play supporting characters whose fear and hope and inarticulable apprehension are ultimately irrelevant to the plot about the malfunctioning body. An act of re­sis­tance against a totalizing biomedical authority, narrative medicine shares with a postcolonial hermeneutics the ambition to let the subaltern speak, restoring “power or control to t­ hose who have suffered.”55 It is, as Frank puts it, a rejoinder to “the demand to speak rather than being spoken for and to represent oneself rather than being represented or, in the worst cases, rather than being effaced entirely.”56 The theoretical commitments of narrative medicine shape my analy­sis in this book in at least two key ways. First, in its privileging

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of the semantics of embodied difference over and against the reductive assimilation of difference to disease, on the one hand, or disability, on the other, narrative medicine invites attention to the ways in which early modern Jesuit f­ athers, Hospitaller s­ isters, Recollect b­ rothers, and o­ thers made meanings of embodied difference through the medium of narrative. What­ever e­ lse embodied difference meant to Catholic men and ­women both clerical and lay in early modern New France, its significance exceeded the limits of physical disorder alone. Second, narrative medicine’s implicit critique of the subordination of patient stories to practitioner interpretations of illness buttresses the ethical ambition of the book as a ­whole. Although this is a historical study of the meanings made of embodied difference in early modern New France, it is at the same time an illness narrative in its own right, a counterpoint and a challenge to dominant ways of framing both sickness and disability in the modern West. Against the medical interpretation of sickness and disability as prob­lems in need of solution, I have tried to make room for a dif­fer­ent kind of story about embodied difference, a story made pos­si­ble by the juxtaposition of incommensurate narratives and the collision of meaningful forms. If on the near side of this study are the truncated stories of sickness and disability constrained by modern biomedicine—­stories that, if not univocally then at least overwhelmingly, frame sickness and disability as prob­lems in need of solution—on the far side are ­those stories enabled by the religious context of early modern Catholic Canada u­ nder the French regime. In t­ hese stories, embodied difference is ambivalent—­both problematic and profitable, both burden and benefit. The range of stories preserved in the sources I have examined ­here do not minimize the corporeal realities of sickness and disability. If anything, in keeping with the characteristically baroque Catholic emphasis on the suffering body, they exaggerate them.57 Sicknesses are chronic, intense, excruciating; disabilities are incapacitating, inveterate, hopeless. Refracted through the narrative prism of early modern Catholicism, however, the corporeal realities of sickness and disability are made

22  I n t r o du c t i o n

meaningful within the broader economy of Christian salvation and an existential horizon that included both this world and the next. ­These stories, for all their nuance and semantic diversity, universally treat sickness and disability as ­matters not just of the body but of the body and soul together. Embodied difference, however vividly and palpably rendered, is always more than a physical prob­lem in need of resolution or remediation. It is also and at the same time a phenomenon freighted with moral and spiritual significance—an opportunity for conversion, an occasion for virtue, an invitation to charity, a source of salvation, a medium of redemption, an overture to miracle, a summons to the real presence of God.58 In limning the differences between the kinds of stories generated within the con­temporary context of the modern West and ­those produced within the religious worlds of early modern New France, I do not mean to suggest that one is better, and the other worse. To be sure, t­ here is something confining—­even disabling—­ about stories that frame embodied difference as a prob­lem that needs fixing. But ­there is something just as confining—­even destructive—­about stories that bring concepts of sin, providence, and punishment to bear on repre­sen­ta­tions of embodied difference. The meanings made of sickness and disability in early modern Catholic Canada (meanings, incidentally, readily available in certain con­temporary religious contexts that continue to thrive in the penumbra of modern biomedicine) no doubt pressed down hard upon real p­ eople who strug­gled to live and to flourish within their given worlds. One can only surmise the extent to which intimations of a causal connection between physical impairment and moral fault, bodily healing and sincere piety, added to the pain felt by the sick and the suffering endured by the disabled. But I get it. In very real ways, the notion that the patient is somehow to blame for her condition persists, even in the modern West and even alongside the institutions of con­temporary biomedicine, only now the causal connection is between lifestyle choices and disease—­between smoking and obesity, Round-­Up and mobile phones, and the cellular mutations that corrupt the ge­ne­tic code.

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For t­ hese reasons and ­others, this is not a proj­ect inspired by a nostalgia for the early modern Catholic past. I’m not, it’s true, satisfied with the restitution narrative that dominates con­temporary stories of sickness and disability. The story line that constitutes embodied difference as a prob­lem in need of remediation does a disser­vice to the variety of ways in which sickness and disability ­really are—­and could be—­experienced. But the story lines that contextualized embodied difference within the horizon of Christian salvation w ­ ere no less confining. That t­ here was something oppressive, violent even, about early modern French Catholic interpretations of embodied difference goes mostly without saying. I have tried, nonetheless, to say something about it—­sotto voce— in chapter 1, interrupting my own analy­sis of the Jesuit Relations with an imaginative counternarrative in the fictionalized voice of the real Emery Tchames. The methodological experiment I have undertaken in chapter 1 anticipates, in microcosm, the ambition of the book as a macrocosmic ­whole. Much as I have juxtaposed Emery Tchames’ fictional counternarrative with the Jesuit illness narratives in chapter 1, so I have engineered the encounter within the bounded space of this book between two sets of narratives, past and pre­sent. My ambition is not, in e­ ither case, to advocate for the relative merits of one kind of narrative over another but rather to expose the contingency of both. Without dismissing the necessity of restoring the subaltern to speech, I have aimed in what follows simply to clear the space for a broader range of narrative possibilities. What the collision of narratives affords, as I have conceived it ­here, is a certain freedom from form and the circumscription of the meanings made of sickness and disability in any given time and place. This is, in the end, a proj­ect not about fixity but flexibility and the creative potential for meaning-­making beyond the limits of the norm. ——— The kinds of questions I ask about sickness and disability in the chapters that follow are fundamentally questions of meaning. I am

24  I n t r o du c t i o n

less interested in how sickness and disability ­were experienced by ­people in early modern New France (if only, perhaps, ­because such experiences are impossible to access) and more interested in what ­these experiences signified to ­those who wrote about them. In the end, though, meaning and experience cannot be neatly disentangled. In very real ways, to apprehend an experience is to have already invested that experience with meaning—­and central to both apprehension and interpretation is the narrative pro­cess. The etymological roots of both “knowing” and “narrative” in the Sans­krit gnâ catches, writes H. Porter Abbot, “the two sides of narrative. It is a universal tool for knowing as well as telling, for absorbing knowledge as well as expressing it.”59 The stories we tell about sickness and disability may not determine the events that befall us, but they do constrain at once how we interpret and at the same time how we experience ­those events. Interpretation and experience, ­after all and as many before me have shown, are simultaneous pro­cesses.60 Thus, although questions of experience are not at the center of this book, they are not altogether absent and, indeed, ground the analy­sis that follows in an impor­tant sense. Storytelling, argues the anthropologist Michael Jackson, actually changes “our experience of events that have befallen us by symbolically restructuring them.”61 I proceed with the awareness that the stories told about sickness and disability in the Relations, the Histoire the Vie, and the Actes ­shaped, for better or worse, the experience of embodied difference in the lives of ­those early modern Catholic subjects who wrote, read, and heard them. More profoundly, however, it is the urgency of my own questions about the meaning of sickness and disability—­and the range of pos­si­ble experiences such meanings enable—­that haunts each of the four chapters that follow. Like a specter whose presence is felt but not perceived, my own encounters with sickness and disability shadow my analy­sis of the stories of ailing Indigenous converts, convalescing patients at the Hôtel-­ Dieu, the extraordinary Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, and Frère Didace’s recovered miraculés. In very real ways, this proj­ect was a

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response to an existential imperative. I needed this book “in order to live.”62 I needed to recover my sense of agency against the pressures of the modern biomedical narrative that renders patients (and their caregivers) bit players in the drama of sickness and health, passive foils to the real actors in the story—­the medicines and machines, the science and technology, the surgeons and the physicians. I owe both Aggie’s good health and my own to t­ hese medicines and machines, this science and technology, ­these surgeons and physicians, it’s true. But this is also true: it hurts to be wrenched out of life as you know it and conscripted into a drama not of your own making. ­There is an alienation that becomes the patient newly diagnosed with disease. It is modern medicine’s par­tic­u­lar achievement, however, to sever the patient slowly and steadily from the specificity of her own story (witness the plastic wrist bands, the generic and ill-­fitting gowns, the standardized questionnaires about developmental milestones, pain, and quality of life). I have written this book as an aid to recovery, for recovery in the best of circumstances and as I have come to understand it requires not just following doctors’ ­orders but reclaiming one’s own agency “in the face of forces that render us inactive and ­silent.”63 Recovery, that is to say, is as much (maybe more) about finding ways to make the story of sickness or disability one’s own as it is about the restoration of health or the rehabilitation of the body. Thus, with this proj­ect I have labored to “actively rework” my own experiences of embodied difference in dialogue with my primary sources, reconstituting personal catastrophe as the grounds of generative historical inquiry.64 A disciplined exercise in historiography conceived as a narrative medium of encounter between the testimony of the past and the scholarly pre­sent, this is a proj­ect in meaning-­making. I have harvested the textual field of early modern Catholic Canada u­ nder the French regime in an attempt to stretch the range of available grammars for telling the stories of embodied difference other­wise. I have defigured the past in order to refigure the pre­sent and to prepare for the f­ uture, for disability

26  I n t r o du c t i o n

is endemic to the ­human condition and sickness our common fate. We cannot (not yet, anyway) escape ­these recalcitrant facts of our embodied existence, but we can learn to narrate our way into richer and more life-­giving ways of experiencing them. If I have done more than simply loosen the ties of the narratives that constrain us, it is only ­because “[s]torytelling remains one of our most power­ful techniques for healing ourselves and restoring order to a broken world.”65 If I have, in the end and in spite of myself, told a par­tic­u­lar kind of story about sickness and disability it is one that renders embodied difference not a prob­lem that gets in the way of life but a possibility for another kind of life, for flourishing and thriving not in spite of impairment but with it and maybe even ­because of it.

1 Bedside Manners I l l n e s s N a r r at i v e s i n t h e J e s u i t R e l a t ion s

in the early spring of 1642 when the icy crust that covered the Saint Lawrence River was just beginning to crack, Emery Tchames lay sweating next to the fire, immobile upon the bark mat that buffered his aching body from the still-­frozen ground. Through half-­slit eyes, he could just make out the blurry figures of his kinswomen, their vague shapes moving to the rhythm of the eve­ning meal preparation. The familiar smell of sagamité, the stew of corn and animal fat to which (given the season) smoked fish had been added, drifted to his nostrils, but Emery had no appetite for food. His stomach seized. Emery shifted in his robes, drawing his knees up to his stomach. He had been languishing for weeks, confined to the shadowy corner of the long­house where he alternated between lucidity and delirium and lost track of the passage of time. Emery’s eyes burned. His throat itched. The heavy smoke from the cooking fires clung to his matted hair and settled into the pores of his skin. ——— The barest outlines of Emery’s story are sketched in the Jesuit Relation of 1642. Paraphrasing for his readership the report of Jean de Quen, who had been sent to instruct the Innu (Montagnais) of 27

28  C h a p t e r 1

Tadoussac, Barthélemy Vimont related how the exemplary new convert had been “tried by means of an illness.” The devil, taking advantage of the Indigenous proclivity to obey dreams “as a sovereign Divinity,” had attacked Emery in his sleep, ordering him to host an eat-­all feast and “above all, [to] pray no more, [for] it is prayer that has made thee ill.” Emery, however, w ­ asn’t about to give in. Weeks before, he had offered “proofs of his constancy,” handing over to the Jesuits his precious stone, that “last Relic of his superstition.” Now, he was determined to stand firm against the temptation to return to traditional ways. “ ‘No ­matter if I have to die,’ ” Emery insisted with the resolution of a martyr (the Relation of 1642 tells us), “ ‘I ­will never return to what I have abandoned . . . ​ Even if I saw death before my eyes, I would never do what [the devil] has commanded me.’ ” Soon a­ fter this bold declaration of faith, Emery was cured—­restored to good health by God who, Vimont invited his readers to conclude, had chosen to reward Emery for his spiritual constancy with the gift of physical recovery.1 Emery’s story is hardly exceptional in the Jesuit Relations, ­those mid-­seventeenth-­century journals compiled by the Jesuits in New France and published in Paris for a readership e­ ager for details of the Canadian mission. Accounts of sickness and healing, death and disease are pervasive throughout the Relations. In the searchable text of the four volumes that make up the Relation of 1637 alone, the word “sick” appears nearly three hundred times. While some of ­these stories feature Jesuits, ­women religious, or colonists of French descent, overwhelmingly the stories of sickness in the Jesuit Relations are stories of Indigenous Americans like Emery Tchames whose be­hav­ior ­under the straightened circumstances of pain and suffering was subject to missionary scrutiny. French Jesuits writing home about the mission dedicated an enormous, and enormously surprising, share of their attention to the ailing and infirm Indigenous Americans they had crossed the Atlantic to save. But why? Why is it that stories of the ailing and infirm take up so much space in the Relations? Why, in a series of journals ostensibly given to reporting on the pro­gress of a spiritual mission, are

B e d s i de M a n n e r s  29

narratives of physical infirmity so widespread? Why such overwhelming attention to compromised bodies when the Jesuits’ ambition was the salvation of souls? It might be, simply, that the Jesuits wrote so much about the sick and disabled ­because sickness and disability ­were intractable facts of life in early modern Canada. In a world in which disease and disability remained, for the most part, beyond the reach of medical technology, physical impairment must have been rather the rule than the exception. The frequency with which the blind, especially, but also the deaf, the lame, the paralytic, and ­others appear in the Relations would suggest as much (although Biblical prototypes must also have had an influence ­here). The introduction of Eu­ro­pean pathogens only exacerbated the vulnerability of a premodern Indigenous population to the effects of disease. Between 1634 and 1640, at the height of Jesuit activity in New France, the Wendat (Huron) population alone declined by more than fifty ­percent, devastated by a series of epidemics.2 Old World diseases spared none, laying waste to Indigenous communities across Canada well a­ fter the era of epidemics had come to an end for the Wendat. Smallpox, to take the most notorious of Eu­ro­pean imports, killed thousands, and ­those who survived w ­ ere often left visibly disfigured and sometimes blind.3 In cases like t­ hese, the line between sickness and disability was blurred. It might be, then, that the Jesuits wrote so much about the sick and disabled simply ­because sickness and disability ­were everywhere in early modern New France. I suspect, however, that ­there is more to it than that. Although a thorough inquiry into Jesuit understandings of the relationship between body and soul is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is clear from the Relations alone that the Jesuits conceived of the two as entangled together in ways that resist easy classification. Sometimes the health of the body and the health of the soul track together in the Relations; sometimes they ­don’t. Sometimes physical health follows spiritual health, as in t­ hose many stories linking recovery with the sacrament of baptism. Sometimes it ­doesn’t—­sometimes physical wellbeing is at odds with spiritual health, rendered an obstacle to the

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kind of humility and desperation conducive to conversion and the gradual ac­cep­tance of the Christian faith. What­ever the par­tic­u­lar case, however, it’s generally evident that sickness and disability ­were for the Jesuits always more than mechanical breakdowns of the body, health and recovery always more than returns to physical ­wholeness. For the Jesuits of early modern New France, heirs to a deeply rooted Christian tradition that i­magined physical health and spiritual salvation as but two sides of the same coin, sickness and disability implicated both bodies and souls. Any attempt to understand just why it is that stories of embodied difference figure so prominently in the Relations must necessarily begin from this conceptual ground, for only within a framework of presumptive entanglement between bodies and souls does the Jesuit fixation on sickness and disability make sense. From such conceptual grounds and in dialogue with the theoretical commitments of narrative medicine, I build my argument in what follows, making the case for reading stories of embodied difference in the Relations as not irrelevant to the Jesuit missionary proj­ect but integral to it. My contention in this chapter is that stories of sickness and disability proliferate in the Relations ­because embodied difference was meaningful within the wider context of the seventeenth-­century mission. Situating sickness and disability within the narrative framework of the mission and the broader landscape of the Christian tradition, the Jesuits made sense—or tried to—of the endemic suffering and chronic disease that plagued the ­people among whom they labored. For the Jesuits of New France sickness and disability w ­ ere the handmaids of mission—­transfigured by narrative into transformative experiences that offered opportunities for the conversion of the ­dying, occasions for the practice of Christian virtue, and invitations for the dramatic display of divine power.4 ——— Énemond Massé, Jean de Brébeuf, and Charles Lalemant arrived in the port of Quebec in the spring of 1625. This was not the first

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time the Jesuits had set foot in New France. The original Jesuit mission to Canada had lasted but two short years, from 1611 to 1613, ending with the capture of Massé and his confrère Pierre Biard by an En­glishman come north from V ­ irginia. This time, however, the Jesuits had come to New France to stay. When Massé and his fellow Jesuits disembarked on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, Quebec was nothing more than a small trading post, host to a handful of French settlers and four Recollect missionaries. Founded seventeen years e­ arlier by Samuel de Champlain, Quebec claimed fewer than one hundred inhabitants and must have seemed to the Jesuits a long way from home, indeed. Over the course of the next forty years, Jesuits continued to arrive steadily from the collèges of France, drawn by Canada’s heightened opportunities for suffering in imitatio Christi and the very real possibilities of martyrdom.5 By the time French Canada fell to the En­glish in 1763, more than 300 hundred Jesuits in toto had come to sow the seeds of the gospel among the Indigenous p­ eoples of the Saint Lawrence River valley and beyond, many to die among ­those whom they had traveled so far to save. The pro­gress of the Jesuit mission in New France was slow, at least in the early years. Concentrated among the semi-­agricultural Wendat, the earliest Jesuit missionaries faced two dif­fer­ent sorts of obstacles. First, the Jesuit conviction that conversion to Chris­ tian­ity required total spiritual transformation proved a hard sell to the Wendat whose dispositions inclined more ­toward synthesis.6 For the Wendat, what the Jesuits offered could supplement traditional beliefs and practices; one could both accept the novelties of Chris­tian­ity and hew to the familiar ways of the past. For the Jesuits, however, conversion meant an about-­face from ancestral traditions; one ­either accepted Chris­tian­ity w ­ holesale or rejected it entirely. Second, inhibiting the Wendat from embracing the Christian faith was the apprehension, borne of observation and experience, that the Jesuits w ­ ere the purveyors not of salvation, but of death and disease. A key component of Jesuit missionary strategy, particularly in the first half of the seventeenth c­ entury, was the baptism of the sick and the d­ ying. Already by the 1630s, however,

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the Jesuits’ careful solicitude for the sick and commitment to baptizing the ­dying had led some natives to conclude that the Jesuits themselves ­were the authors of bodily affliction and baptism the harbinger of death. If the baptism of the ­dying was a missionary strategy, it was one destined for misinterpretation. By the 1640s the tide had turned for the Jesuits in New France. At long last, the mission among the Wendat had begun to bear fruit. Although it was the fact of endemic disease that dissuaded many in the mission’s early years from embracing the faith, paradoxically and over time, sickness and disease worked to the benefit of the missionary proj­ect.7 The successive epidemics that by 1640 had reduced the Wendat population to one-­fifth of what it had been twenty years before meant rising numbers of deathbed baptisms—­and incentivized surviving f­ amily members to accept baptism in the interest of joining their ancestors in the Christian afterlife. At least as impor­tant to the success of the mission ­were the cultural consequences of the profound demographic changes wrought by sickness and disease. W ­ hether it was the susceptibility of Indigenous populations to (and the relative immunity of the Jesuits from) germs imported from Eu­rope that corroded native confidence in traditional beliefs and practices or the compelling logic of an evangelical theology that invested suffering and loss with salvific significance, Chris­tian­ity had become more credible in the eyes of the Wendat by the 1640s.8 The Jesuit triumph among the Wendat was, however, short-­lived. Between 1648 and 1649, Huronia suffered a series of overwhelming setbacks as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) systematically laid waste to Wendat settlements up and down the Saint Lawrence River valley and massacred hundreds, including the eight Jesuits commemorated as the North American martyrs. By 1650, Huronia was no more, its ­people dispersed geo­graph­i­cally or assimilated into neighbouring tribes. ­After this point, the Jesuits shifted their evangelical attentions to the Haudenosaunee, eventually establishing missions among all five Haudenosaunee nations and making way for Kateri Tekakwitha, North Amer­i­ca’s first (and only)

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Indigenous saint, whose facial disfigurement and visual impairment would be made meaningful as the proximate cause of her conversion by her Jesuit hagiographer at the end of the seventeenth ­century. Over the next several de­cades, the bound­aries of the Jesuit mission would continue to stretch, extending as far as Lake Winnipeg to the west and the confluence of the Mississippi and the Arkansas to the south. Even a­ fter 1763, the Jesuits retained a presence in Canada where they ­were permitted to continue their work (if not to recruit new men) and where the last Jesuit, Jean-­ Joseph Casot, died in 1800. All along, the Jesuits proved themselves faithful chroniclers of the missionary enterprise in New France. Although, from the beginning, Jesuits like Biard wrote letters back home and to confrères around the globe reflecting on the pro­gress of the mission, it ­wasn’t ­until 1632 that the first of the Jesuit Relations was published in France. The fruit of collaboration between Jesuits in the field (who supplied the first-­person accounts), their superior in Quebec (who collated and culled t­ hese accounts into a single comprehensive report), and the French provincial (who applied his heavy editorial hand to the text “with current conditions in Eu­rope in mind”), the Relations ­were published annually ­until 1673.9 Given evidence of second and even third editions, the Relations ­were popu­lar, appealing to a diverse audience that included not just the devout and the philanthropic on whose generosity the mission famously depended, but also ­those interested in colonial politics, markets, and the curiosities of the New World. Alongside ethnography, hagiography, and epistolography, illness narratives constitute one of the principal genres of the Jesuit Relations. Jesuit chroniclers of the mission to New France dedicated literally hundreds of pages to the stories of the sick, the infirm, the diseased, and the d­ ying. Stories of illness travel down many disparate paths in the Relations. Sometimes t­ hese stories end with the thick description of traditionalist remedies, including feasts and sweats and dreams and emetics and the “twelve kinds of dances that are so many sovereign remedies for sickness.”10

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Other times the stories conclude with a paean to the Hospitaller ­sisters of the Hôtel-­Dieu who succored the innumerable sick “with a charity that cannot be sufficiently praised.”11 Still other stories of illness resolve in the miraculous cure of the moribund, and point forward to the inevitable public proclamation of faith that followed—as happened when one grateful m ­ other “published everywhere that prayer was good, and that it had cured [her] ­children.”12 Their variety notwithstanding, illness narratives are neither aleatory nor peripheral to the broader story of the mission told by the Relations. They are, instead, purposeful and central, meaningful as rec­ords of events remembered and read as part of the missionary drama enacted by the Jesuits and their Indigenous counter­parts in seventeenth-­century New France. From the seminaries and collèges of early modern France, the Jesuits imported to the North American colony a set of ideas about sickness and disability that blurred the lines between the physical and the spiritual. To the Jesuits of New France, embodied difference was “a providential warning and an instrument of spiritual asceticism before it was a natu­ral evil.”13 God sent sickness, explained Bishop Claude Joly in a 1677 manual, to mortify our bodies and render us obedient to the spirit, to detach us from love of creatures, to draw us ­toward him, and to prepare us fi­nally to die well.14 Good Christians understood that physical infirmities ­were not “scourges” but “spiritual trea­sures” capable of expiating a lifetime of sin, “­favors and gifts” for which God deserved thanks and without which “you might still be an unlucky slave to the world and to dangerous desires.”15 Jesuit presumptions about the spiritual dimensions of embodied difference ­were not exceptional in early modern France, but ordinary and widely shared across class and status lines. That the ultimate cause of embodied difference was divine, moreover, did nothing to detract from the understanding that sicknesses and disabilities had natu­ral ­causes, too. As much as it “remained umbilically linked to the discipline of theology,” early modern French medical theory and practice was deeply informed by the science

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of Galen, the second-­century Roman physician whose ideas about how the body worked proved unusually enduring.16 Inspired by Galenic humoral science, natu­ral c­ auses of sickness and disease ­were attributed to an imbalance of the four humors; treatments, accordingly, aimed to eliminate humoral excess—­t ypically through vari­ous media of purgation—­and restore equilibrium to the body. Even physicians, however, understood that ­whether a patient lived or died was ultimately up to God. At the bedside of the sick and the d­ ying in early modern France, physicians and priests collaborated, working “in parallel streams” to heal both bodies and souls.17 It was as heirs to beliefs and practices like ­these that the Jesuits encountered the sick and disabled on the mission field of seventeenth-­century New France. What we know of Indigenous medical theory and practice comes largely from the Relations, which, tendencies t­ oward Western Eu­ro­pean chauvinism notwithstanding, offer rich ethnographic descriptions of Indigenous conceptions of embodied difference and the range of remedial treatments.18 In broad strokes, the picture of Indigenous approaches to sickness and disease that emerges from the Relations is one marked by a strong sense of super­natural etiology and the fitness of religio-­medical curative techniques. The Indigenous ­people of Canada’s eastern woodlands, like their French counter­parts, ascribed to phenomena of embodied difference ­causes both natu­ral and super­natural. Illnesses of natu­ ral origin called for the application of natu­ral remedies, most of which w ­ ere purgative in character, like emetics concocted from the boiled juices of leaves or cedar, bloodletting, and sweat baths into which “they slip entirely naked . . . ​all together, men and ­women, pell-­mell.”19 Infirmities of super­natural origin demanded interventions of another sort. ­Those attributed to possession by demons or evil spirits called for targeted techniques of exorcism. Medicine men, summoned to consult on a kinsman’s ailment, applied themselves to extracting from the body the malevolent agency, or manitou, that caused the illness. Sometimes, emetics

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­ ere prescribed, designed to induce the patient to vomit up what w ailed him—­whether “a knot of hair; a piece of a man’s nail, or of an animal’s claw; a piece of leather, or of bone; a leaf of a tree, some grains of sand, or other similar t­ hings.”20 Other times, malign charms w ­ ere removed at knife-­point or, in a practice that never failed to impress the Jesuits, by mouth: “sucking hard at the part of the body where the ailment was, [healers] would say that they had successfully extracted that which they had in the mouth, which they spit out before the eyes of the sick man, declaring that this was a veritable Demon, which was the cause of his pain.”21 Some infirmities derived from neither natu­ral ­causes nor demonic ones, but from the unfulfilled desires of the patient—­desires exposed ­whether by “soothsayers, who, as they think, have a divinely-­ imparted power to look into the inmost recesses of the mind” or by the dreams of the patient himself. In cases like ­these, effective treatment involved the satisfaction of such desires.22 Elaborate dances, eat-­all feasts, and gifts of material objects like “awls, scissors, knives, bells, ­needles, and a thousand other trifles”—­these ­were some of the many “extravagant and abominable” demands made by the ailing and infirm of early modern Canada and immediately met, no ­matter the expense, by their willing kinspeople.23 To the Jesuits, Indigenous medicine men w ­ ere so many “sorcerers,” “jugglers,” and “charlatans” who deluded their ­people and practiced their deceptive arts for the sake of material gain. They ­were “altogether ignorant of the art of medicine,” unable to remedy even the most minor of infirmities.24 Although the Jesuits presumed that “the majority of [Indigenous healers] are only impostors, practicing their enchantments to obtain pre­sents from the poor sick, to render themselves popu­lar, or to make themselves feared,” they suspected that some operated in concert with the dev­il.25 ­These “true sorcerers who have access to the devil” competed with the Jesuits for access to the bodies and souls of the Indigenous infirm, for in the context of the mission field of early modern New France physical affliction was a powerfully cathected site of religious and cultural contest and the sick bed the theater of pitched ­battles waged for the salvation of souls.26

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What we get from the Relations is, of course, a one-­eyed rendering of the history of sickness and disability in early modern New France. As a remedy for the myopia that marks Jesuit illness narratives, therefore, I engage in a methodological experiment ­here—­a risky one to be sure but one, I hope, that effectively highlights both the liabilities of the Relations and makes room for alternative Indigenous interpretations of embodied difference. In what follows, I interrupt and disrupt my analy­sis of the narratives forwarded in the Relations with the fragmented fictional counternarrative of Emery Tchames, the Innu convert with whose story this chapter began. Creatively reconstructed on the basis of ethnographic data culled from the Relations, supplemented by secondary scholarship, and ornamented by my own imagination (which, as Hayden White reminds us, is as much the historian’s instrument as the artist’s), Emery’s counternarrative is intended, if not to let the subaltern speak (for my sources are too thin for that), then at least to carve out narrative space that sustains the possibility of subaltern speech.27 I am sensitive to the practical and ethical difficulties that attach to the attempt to represent the experience of an Indigenous American living centuries ago. Eloise Brière has argued compellingly that “the discourse of ventriloquism” whereby a nonnative author adopts the voice and perspective of the native subject can amount to a repetition of the vio­lence of colonization—­but not always. The exercise of ventriloquism, Brière suggests, can also function as a kind of critique of Western imperial power, creating “the possibility of social transformation within the fictional dialogic space created by the writers whose Native American questions the practices and institutions” of colonial rule.28 This is my intention ­here. ——— The subject of bodily impairment, ­whether sickness or disability, in the context of the Jesuit missions has received surprisingly l­ ittle scholarly attention, although t­ here has been substantial work on disease and depopulation in the Amer­i­cas that necessarily touches

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on the Jesuits and a modest engagement with Jesuit attitudes ­toward sickness and disease.29 The most sustained treatment of sickness in the par­tic­ul­ar context of the Canadian mission is Thomas Worcester’s 2005 essay, “A Defensive Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-­Century New France.”30 Contextualizing the Relations in the mid-­seventeenth-­century climate of Jesuit vulnerability to both Gallican and Jansenist foes, Worcester reads ­these reports from the mission field of New France as a “defensive discourse.” For Worcester, stories of sickness proliferate in the Relations as narrative strategies deployed by the Jesuits in order to vindicate themselves against calumnies uttered by their enemies back home. In a religiopo­liti­cal climate in which Jesuit legitimacy was in question, the stories of sickness published in the Relations ­were crafted to underscore Jesuit successes and Jesuit victories. Rendering suffering the stimulus to spiritual growth and miraculous cures evidence of divine f­ avor, the Jesuits (argues Worcester) repurposed the facts of endemic disease to shore up their status in France.31 Worcester is, of course, right to remind readers of the po­liti­cal and ideological context within which the Relations ­were published and received—­and right, too, to remind readers that the Relations are not innocent, objective, and unencumbered by special interests and agendas. Oriented ­toward multiple ends, the Relations offered a platform on which Jesuits in Canada could defend themselves against their detractors, prove the value of their l­ abors, and justify the enormous sacrifices their evangelization cost them.32 Situating the Relations in the par­tic­u­lar context of their publication and reception in France invites us to read ­these texts, as Worcester does, as outward-­facing discourse—as texts written by the Jesuits, about the Jesuits, in the interest of creating and maintaining a Jesuit reputation in the metropole. But ­there is an inward-­facing dimension to the Relations, too. At least as much as the Relations tell us about the situation of the Jesuits in France, they tell us about the Jesuits in New France, too—­their beliefs, their opinions, their inclinations, their aversions. Even as the Relations

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are not entirely reliable as a historical source that reports what ­really happened in early modern Canada, they illuminate, like nothing ­else, Jesuit mentalités and the meanings the missionaries grafted onto the world around them. Although I d­ on’t doubt that the Jesuits—­particularly the provincial in France who had final editorial control over each installment—­had the Jansenists and Gallicans in mind when composing the Relations, to reduce t­ hese texts to outward-­facing polemical discourse is to overlook the sincerity of the Relations as a testimony to the missionary experience. In ways theorized by narrative medicine, the Jesuits of seventeenth-­ century New France made sickness and disability meaningful through the alchemy of narrative, transmogrifying the pervasive facts of physical affliction into so many opportunities for spiritual growth. Refiguring embodied difference as the handmaid of mission—an opportunity for baptism, an invitation to virtue, and a summons to divine intervention—­the Jesuits changed not just what sickness and disability meant on the Canadian mission field, but how they felt. ——— As Emery listened, half-­aware, to the chattering of c­ hildren and the steady hum of ­women’s talk, his mind wandered to the dream he had had just a few days before. In the dream, it had been revealed to Emery that the remedy to what ailed him was a feast. “Prepare an eat-­all feast,” the figure in the dream had commanded, “if thou wilt be cured, put Ea­gles’ feathers on thy body, in the manner that I s­ hall tell thee; thou art a dead man if thou dost not obey.”33 At the time, Emery had awoken, unsettled by what he had seen. A newly baptized Christian, he knew that dreams w ­ ere just meaningless figments of his imagination—at least, that’s what the Jesuits said. Now, however, Emery wondered. Maybe his dream was telling him something. He thought of his two ­children, and his wife who would grieve upon his death, keeping to herself and neglecting her appearance as custom prescribed. He lifted his wasted arm to brush away the ash that had alighted upon his

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forehead. Too exhausted to return it to his side, Emery let his arm drop where it lay crooked across his clammy face. ——— Throughout the course of the mission’s history, the Jesuits ­were well-­known—­sometimes notorious—­for seeking out the ailing and the infirm with the intention of baptizing the d­ ying while ­there was still time.34 Jesuit f­ athers like Charles Garnier wandered the villages, offering both spiritual and material assistance to the sick in the hopes of “discrediting . . . ​[the] sorcerers with their imaginary treatments” and leading “­these poor p­ eople even to the gate of Paradise.”35 In times of both general health and contagious epidemics, the Jesuits “made the rounds of the cabins incessantly,” occupying themselves in the capacity of physician priests. “This is the order that we maintained,” wrote François le Mercier in 1637, describing the Jesuit response to an epidemic that had ravaged a mission village: “We visited [the sick] twice a day, morning and eve­ning, and carried them soup and meat, according to the condition and disposition of the patients—­always taking occasion to exhort them to have recourse to God, and to ­gently influence them to Baptism.”36 In focusing their efforts on the baptism of the moribund, the Jesuits w ­ ere hedging their bets, conferring the sacrament only upon ­those least likely to apostatize. Writing on the mission of Saint Jean Baptiste at Onnontagué in 1674, Jean de Lamberville explained that “it is dangerous to administer baptism to [­those] who are not sick . . . ​lest they might, ­later on, profane it by . . . ​ infidelity.”37 To a witnessing Indigenous public, however, the attentions showered by the Jesuits upon the sick looked less like charitable solicitude and more like nefarious interference. When the newly baptized died (as they often did), it seemed to the Indigenous Canadians that the relationship between baptism and death was one of cause and effect. It was, in part, ­because of the suspicion that the sacrament would hasten a loved one’s demise

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that Jesuit ministrations t­ oward the sick and the d­ ying w ­ ere sometimes met with determined re­sis­tance, as in the case of “a ­woman of Tsonnontouen who had been ill for nine or ten months.” Convinced, like her compatriots, that “the Faith and Baptism . . . ​ served only to hasten the time of their death,” the ­woman refused to let ­Father de Carheil approach her, regarding him “as a man who was infected and who carried a deadly poison about with [him], which [he] breathed into p­ eople through their eyes and ears.”38 In other cases, it was not the patient herself who resisted baptism, but her or his kin, forcing the Jesuits to catechize and baptize the sick “without appearing to do so.”39 As late as 1674, F ­ ather de Lamberville found himself compelled to baptize a ­dying child “without the knowledge of his parents” who feared that this child, too, would die ­after baptism just like his ­sister before him.40 If sickness and disease provided opportunities for the deathbed baptisms that constituted many of the mission’s early gains, they also gave occasion for acts of Jesuit charity, allowing the Jesuits to write themselves into the illness narratives they composed in the Relations.41 In key ways, the “temporal assistance” the Jesuits rendered to the sick and the d­ ying worked, over time, to weaken the connection between baptism and death and moved some Indigenous Americans actively to request the sacrament.42 Writing in 1649 in the aftermath of a Haudenosaunee raid on the mission village of Saint Jean that left Charles Garnier dead of a musket wound to the chest, Paul Ragueneau praised the apostolic zeal of his confrère. “During the prevalence of contagious diseases, when they shut on us everywhere the doors of the cabins, and talked of nothing but of massacring us,” Ragueneau recalled, Garnier went “unswervingly where he felt t­ here was a soul to gain for Paradise,” omitting not a single “act of corporal Mercy which he could perform for the salvation of souls.” In language reminiscent of Raymond of Capua’s hagiography of Catherine of Siena, Ragueneau went on to describe how Garnier had “been seen to dress ulcers so loathsome, and which emitted a stench so offensive, that the Savages, and even the nearest relatives of the sick man, ­were

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unable to endure them. He alone would ­handle t­ hese, wiping off the pus and cleansing the wound, e­ very day, for two and three months together, with an eye and a countenance that betokened only charity, though he often saw very clearly that the wounds ­were incurable.” Garnier had done this, he himself had explained, “that I may lead ­these poor p­ eople even to the gate of Paradise, and keep them from falling into sin at a time which is for them the most perilous in life.”43 Garnier’s strategy was a familiar one—­and it worked. Jesuit solicitation t­ oward the sick and the d­ ying did win converts to the faith. The modest medicines distributed by the missionaries—­ the ointments, the raisins, the prunes—­worked “­little miracles” in New France, restoring health to both bodies and souls and persuading ­those who, before, had concealed the sick now to confide them to the Jesuits.44 Take, for instance, the story of the Haudenosaunee man from Ag­nié who had been suffering for “a long time [from] an inflammation of the lungs which gave him no respite.”45 Intending “more to win his affection than to procure him an entire cure,” ­Father Bruyas gave the man the only medicine he had left and proceeded to exhort him to repent and convert in the l­ittle time remaining to him. The man softened, asked for further instruction, and was baptized on his deathbed, surviving “but a week . . . ​[but showing] so ­great fervor and devotion” that Bruyas was almost made speechless.46 It ­wasn’t just phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, however primitive, that won the confidence of the Indigenous sick, but the compassionate attention shown by Jesuits like Garnier to the ailing and the infirm. In keeping with the logic of Jesuit illness narratives, which operated through a series of bold distinctions between Indigenous healing practices and missionary ones, the Jesuits contrasted their own generous charity with the native tendency to neglect the infirm. Repeatedly throughout the Relations, Jesuits drew attention to the baffling Indigenous custom, observed across the mission field, of abandoning the sick and the d­ ying. Indigenous Canadians, it was noted, “readily despair of the sick, and neither provide them

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with food nor care for them in any way.”47 Literal burdens to a nomadic ­people whose survival depended on mobility, the ailing and the infirm ­were, the Jesuits reported, “looked upon as beings of another world, with whom is held no intercourse, no conversation,” deserted to the natu­ral pro­cess of life’s decline.48 Into this narrative space left open by reports of Indigenous indifference, the Jesuits readily slipped, nursing the sick back to health, providing comfort to the d­ ying, and prompting some Indigenous observers (or so the story goes) to conclude “that it was a good t­ hing to be a Christian, since the black gowns . . . ​assisted, even unto death, ­those who had loved prayer.”49 To Jesuits like ­Father Buteux, illness was an occasion for charity and charity the occasion for the salvation of souls. Finding himself in the com­pany of a “paralytic w ­ oman” who was covered only “with a quarter of a very meager and worn-­out blanket” and exposed to the open air on all sides, which left her “sometimes all stiff and frozen with the cold,” Buteux got to work. He fed his grateful patient “like a child” and instructed her in the mysteries of the Christian faith—­ although, in the end, the w ­ oman was put to death by her own kin just a few days a­ fter her baptism.50 The tragedy was not that the ­woman had died (for the telos of Jesuit illness narratives was not the restoration of physical health) but that she had been deprived, when she needed it most, of the gift of Christian charity. The story, Buteux knew, could have ended differently as it had for a young Wendat man who had been dragged into the woods to die. “Left all alone” with l­ittle to eat, the man was at death’s door when the Jesuits found him and “succored him so effectually that this carcass again became a body.” The man recovered completely and now, Paul le Jeune happily reported, “preaches to his own p­ eople, reproaching them for their vices and their ingratitude with a freedom that consoles us.”51 In the best of cases, Indigenous converts themselves assumed the mantle of charitable ser­v ice, demonstrating the sincerity of their religious transformation. Among the sick and the ­dying, Indigenous neophytes like Charles Meiaskwat dedicated themselves

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to the care of the “poor and infirm,” “taking . . . ​a singular plea­sure in comforting them, and in speaking to them of God.”52 Sounding a similar note, Antoinette Ouabistitecou gave proof that she had triumphed over the “savage” tendency to neglect the sick, taking it upon herself to care for two orphaned c­ hildren (the one “afflicted in a frightful manner with scrofula on his neck” and the other beset by “a hemorrhage which was reducing her to a skeleton”). She washed the orphans, fed them, and tended to their fire in imitation of t­ hose Jesuits who modeled so compassionately the exercise of Christian charity.53 Although the association between baptism and death never dis­ appeared entirely from the Canadian mission, over time Jesuit ministrations ­toward the sick and the d­ ying effectively attenuated the connection between the two—so much so that many Indigenous Americans came to seek out baptism in the conviction that the sacrament possessed curative powers. Despite the Jesuits’ occasional explicit (although perhaps disingenuous) disavowal of any connection between baptism and physical health, the unexpected recovery of so many converts convinced ­whole families that “­those sacred ­waters not only do not cause death, as was formerly held, but even give health to the sick and restore the d­ ying to life.”54 The inverse of suspicions that baptism hastened death, the growing belief in the restorative capacities of baptism prompted even ­those Indigenous traditionalists who cared “only for the world” to request the sacrament.55 In exchange for the baptism she trusted would beget her recovery, an ailing Wendat ­woman promised to believe in the articles of the Christian faith (reversing the usual order of events by which belief preceded baptism). Although le Jeune tried to explain that curing her disease “was not in our power,” the ­woman persisted and, at length, received the sacrament only to apostatize shortly before her death.56 ­Father Nouvel was more equivocal: When a Papinachois captain named Ouiskoupi attributed his own cure and the cure of his ­children to the healing powers of baptism, Nouvel reframed the story as one of divine generosity. Sometimes, Nouvel explained, God is “so good that he gives to ­those who believe and have trust in

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him, more than they ask of him; and that Baptism, which is instituted to confer holiness upon the soul, often gives health to the body.”57 Against the grain of orthodoxy, some Jesuits did offer baptism as the cure for what ailed the Indigenous sick. Even le Jeune himself suggested on at least one occasion that “baptism restored health to the body rather than took it away.”58 Most, however, ­were careful to preserve the distinction between the spiritual healing guaranteed by baptism and the physical healing that sometimes followed. What baptism ­really promised, Jesuits reminded their Indigenous interlocutors, was medicine for the soul and the promise of spiritual rehabilitation. This was the lesson a Sonnontouan “of the village of Saint Jacques, of g­ reat age and high station” learned from Julien Garnier in 1670. The man, having fallen ill and worsening by the day, persisted in refusing Garnier’s assistance ­until he had a dream that changed his mind. In the dream, he saw Garnier “offering him a medicine very beneficial to his health,” which “was enough to compel him to send for the ­Father without delay, with a pressing entreaty to visit him at the earliest moment.” Garnier reassured the man that he would “most gladly . . . ​give thee a medicine, but a far dif­fer­ent and a much better one than thou sawest in thy dream.” In lieu of ordinary medicine, which would “but hasten the coming of thy last day of life,” Garnier promised to administer “one which is wholly of heaven [and which] . . . ​­w ill restore health and life to thy soul, ­w ill deliver it from eternal death, and ­will procure for it, in place of this wretched life which we have in common with the animals, a blessed and eternal life in Heaven.” On the spot, the moribund man demanded instruction in the faith and was baptized the following day. Twenty-­four hours ­later he was dead, “leaving with his pastor the conviction that he was, without doubt, one of the number of the predestined.”59 ——— One ­thing Emery did know for sure was that his was an illness of super­ natural origin. The powdered roots and herbal potions prescribed by the village herbalist, a­ fter all, h­ adn’t made a bit of difference. And

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Emery knew—as had his ­father and grand­father before him—­that super­natural illnesses called for super­natural remedies. But which one? Should he persist in praying to the Christian God? Should he trust in the healing properties of the Eucharistic host? Or should he return to the time-­tested ways of his own p­ eople, taking his dreams for truth and making preparations for the feast he had been commanded to host? The wind whistled through the gaps in the cedar bark that sheathed the long­house. Emery’s fire shivered. Maybe, Emery mused as he gathered his robes more tightly around him, he should hedge his bets and try a ­little of every­thing. The barest whisper of a gust brushed across Emery’s brow. It felt good, cool. He should never have given up that stone. He should have kept it—­and kept it hidden from t­ hose nosy Jesuits who made even the smallest details of his ­peoples’ lives their business. Maybe if he ­hadn’t disposed of the stone, that ­little manitou that had, for years, brought him such good fortune on the hunt and in ­battle, he would never have gotten sick in the first place. With ­great effort, Emery drew in his breath and coughed thickly. His head throbbed. ——— Tales of the Indigenous infirm told by the Jesuits rendered sickness and disability meaningful not just as opportunities for conversion and invitations to the practice of charity, but also as occasions for the cultivation of Christian virtue. Transformed by the Relations, sickness and disability, u­ nder the best of circumstances, provoked the afflicted to turn physical suffering to spiritual benefit, stimulating the exercise of patience, constancy, and holy resignation. The Relations—­sounding a note in harmony with centuries of Christian hagiography—­abound with stories of the exemplary virtue of converts like Lazare Petikouchkaouat, who “left us one of the rarest examples of patience that it is pos­si­ble to see.” Lazare spent seven months in the Hôtel-­Dieu, the hospital staffed and operated by Augustinian Hospitaller nuns, “afflicted with very painful sores in several parts of his body, with a fever that

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continually preyed upon him and so parched him that he could not quench his thirst,” and an insatiable appetite that did nothing to slow the pro­gress of his wasting disease. ­Toward the end of Lazare’s life, his bones “actually pierced through his skin” and his flesh began to rot. It is true, admitted the ­Mother Superior, that Lazare “suffered strangely,” but his astonishing “patience [was] still more strange.”60 By the logic of Jesuit illness narratives, the more extreme the suffering, the richer the opportunity for the cultivation of virtuous patience. Another convert, only sixteen years old, presented a similar example of “patience of iron” in the midst of unimaginable agony. Suffering from an abscess in his head, this boy “became para­lyzed; his poor body began to rot before being in the ground; worms came out of his ears; his skin was all torn, and his limbs ­were falling away almost piecemeal.” Unable to “be moved, or turned, or touched without suffering extremely . . . ​ [the boy] had only enough sense to suffer patiently, and to pray to God.”61 Like nothing ­else, the desperate circumstances of physical affliction put to the test the strength of Indigenous converts’ attachment to the faith. In some cases, the ­trials of sickness and disability ­were too much for the newly converted, prompting reversion to traditional ways. Le Jeune recalled what happened with a new Christian from the mission village of La Conception who, “having fallen sick, and being in most severe pain,” “relaps[ed] u­ nder stress of circumstances” and consented to the overtures of a traditional healer who offered “to chant for him ­after the fashion of the country.” Caught red-­handed by ­Father de Quen (“who inveigh[ed] against ­these remedies better adapted to kill the sick than to heal them”), the man repented and “dismissed the Sorcerer.” Within a few days he had recovered and came to the church where “in the presence of the French and of the Savages he publicly asked ­pardon for the scandal he had caused.” Drawing an implicit connection between the man’s repentance and his recovery, le Jeune concluded that this “good Neophyte is now in the practice of patience, and of resignation to the ­will of God.”62

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Sometimes, though, repentance came too late. An Indigenous convert named Geneviève “who had a sick son about eight or nine years of age did her utmost to make him recover his health, or to prepare him for a holy death.” She sought the interventions of the Jesuit ­fathers, the Hospitallers nuns, and even the Ursuline ­sisters, “render[ing] herself troublesome to every­one.” All the while, she “turned a deaf ear” to traditional healers u­ ntil fi­nally, “seeing herself hard pressed,” she relented. Her countrymen spared nothing in their efforts to return the boy to good health, consulting with the spirits, asking ­after his dreams, and hanging “about his neck three ­little disks, made of porcupine quills and of the size of small ­counters, saying that his ailment, hidden in the intestines, was of the same size, and must be made to come out.” They did all of this “in the dead of night, for fear lest the ­Fathers should gain knowledge of it.” The boy, however, continued to languish, whereupon “the Jugglers took their drums, yelled, sang, blew upon the patient, and feasted on a red dog, in order to arrest the course of the malady.” With this, his ­mother at last came to her senses. She drove the healers out and “passed the rest of the night in lamentations and tears, pierced with grief at having reposed any faith in ­those charlatans and deceivers.” But her boy never did recover. As for his ­mother, she remained convinced that she had caused his death and, worse still, “defiled [his] poor soul by permitting ­those foolish and superstitious rites to be performed over [his] l­ ittle body.”63 ­Under the best of circumstances, sickness and disability prompted not a return to traditional ways, but a deepening of Christian commitments rendered by the Jesuits as proof of the virtue of constancy. Jerome Lalemant told the story in the Relation of 1645–1646 of a “poor w ­ idow” who “sympathize[ed] with her invalid son, whom she loved as the sole support of her old age.” Despite the hopelessness of her impaired son’s condition, the ­widow rebuffed the advances of a “sorceress [who] presented herself to cure him,” preferring to “los[e] sight of my son to losing my soul and his.” It w ­ asn’t that the w ­ idow doubted the sorceress’ healing powers but rather that she was unwilling to trade the promise

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of eternal life for the sake of a temporal cure. “If I am poor and forsaken,” she reasoned, “it ­will not be for long; it is necessary to suffer in this world in order not to suffer in the other.”64 In stories like ­these, the newly converted honed the virtue of constancy against the durable desire for physical healing, transfiguring the challenge of illness from a mere test of faith into an opportunity to evangelize. This is what happened in the case of “an extremely proud w ­ oman . . . ​so changed by her baptism, that she [became] as docile as a ­little lamb.” Professing to her ailing kinsman that she would “rather see thee die, than that God be offended through my instrumentality,” the ­woman refused to summon the local shaman to “chant and breathe upon” him and urged her kinsman, instead, to “ ‘have recourse to him who made thee.’ ” The Relation is ­silent on w ­ hether the kinsman survived (and what, in the end, he thought of his kinswoman’s refusal to send for the local healers), but what’s clear is that ­here illness is rendered a goad to constancy and an invitation to public witness to the faith.65 Jesuit narratives underscored the constancy of the afflicted not only by dramatizing converts’ stalwart re­sis­tance to the temptation of traditionalist treatments, but also by highlighting the strength of their devotion to the sacraments and the rituals of Chris­tian­ity even in extremis. ­Sister Geneviève Agnes de tous les Saints, the ­daughter of Wendat converts and the first Indigenous Hospitaller nun, “did not omit to sing [lessons from the Tenebrae] on each of the three days of holy Week . . . ​never [forgetting] her ­little prayers, least of all her Rosary” in spite of suffering a mortal sickness. Her illness, “common enough among the Savages,” had left her weak, feverish, and physically exhausted. Even as “she wasted away . . . ​with an inflammation, accompanied by a severe cough, which affected her w ­ hole chest to such an extent that her lungs w ­ ere gradually destroyed,” she lost nothing of her spiritual fortitude. The adolescent nun “did not cease to work as much as, and more than, her strength permitted her, attending all the ­observances of the Choir and of the Community; and if, a­ fter that, she had any time left, she would employ it in paying visits to

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the Blessed Sacrament.”66 ­Sister Geneviève was no singular exception. Marie Oukiwichunoukwe, too, “never failed to perform her minor duties ­toward God, night and morning,” although she “burned with a fire that devoured her tongue, her throat, and all her chest [so that] she became emaciated like a skeleton.”67 And Marc-­Antoine, consumed by a malady that had reduced him “to bones and skin,” nonetheless prayed ceaselessly, complaining only that the nuns of the Hôtel-­Dieu with whom he lodged did not demand enough of him. When his precious rosary “fell from him, or was misplaced, they had to turn the bed and cabin upside down in order to find it.”68 If anything, the constancy of the sick was too much. A captain’s wife suffering from a dangerous illness “had to be absolutely forbidden” to come to mass—an obligation she took so seriously that “she would drag herself on the ground . . . ​lean upon a stick, or have herself carried by her ­daughter”—in order to preserve what health remained to her.69 On another occasion, an anonymous Jesuit “met a very infirm Savage w ­ oman, who was coming to Mass in the midst of the snow.” The Jesuit assured the ­woman that both the weather and her infirmity relieved her of the duty to go to church and cautioned her that if she continued, she would aggravate her disease to the point of death. The w ­ oman, however, insisted that she could not employ “what l­ ittle life” she had left “better than in serving so good a Master” and explained that she no longer feared death anyway, ­eager to “enter into the joys of the other world.” The ­woman survived and returned to the full bloom of health—an indication, in the eyes of the Jesuits, of the “many blessings” God showered upon her f­ amily.70 Walking the knife’s edge between condemnation and commendation, the Jesuits of New France rendered the excessive, perhaps even masochistic, piety exhibited by the freshly converted into occasions for reproval, to be sure, but also and at the same time occasions for admiration, won­der, and awe. Reflecting on the example of a ­woman left disabled ­after an attack by the Haudenosaunee some years e­ arlier, Lalemant marveled that despite her

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debility the w ­ oman “was always so fervent in prayer that she never failed to be pre­sent ­every morning and ­every eve­ning in the Chapel . . . ​­until, one day, returning from Church, whither she had dragged herself, although afflicted with a mortal disease, she was obliged to take to bed, and soon afterward she devoutly died.” Let this be a lesson, Lalemant concluded, turning this extraordinary story into a teachable moment for a French readership back home: “This poor ­woman’s constancy w ­ ill be a ­great reproach to the delicacy of t­ hose ladies who, for slight incon­ve­niences, easily forego their devotions” and her patience a rebuke to “­those who break out into so many murmurs and complaints for a trifle, a toothache or some other incon­ve­nience.”71 The exemplary patience and constancy of the Indigenous infirm added up, as the Jesuits figured it, to the crowning achievement of holy resignation in some cases. Like the “very infirm” ­woman above who subordinated her health for the sake of the mass, the sick and disabled among the newly-­converted found in affliction the opportunity to practice detachment ­toward both life and death—an indifference all the more remarkable given that “as a rule” Indigenous Americans cared “only for the life of the body.”72 Faced with the facts of physical suffering, Indigenous converts to the faith (at least as the Relations render it) w ­ ere pressed to acknowledge God’s ultimate authority over life and death and to submit themselves to divine decree. Informed that ­there was no hope for his recovery, an ailing man at the Hôtel-­Dieu, for instance, replied that “my life is not at my own disposal; let him who has made all order it as he pleases; he is the Master of it.”73 Some converts went further, expressing not just a neutrality t­ oward illness, but a desire for it. In the conviction that God sent sickness in order to “constrain [them] to have recourse to his goodness,” Indigenous neophytes like Thomas Sawenhati found themselves compelled to admit that “sickness is a good t­ hing,” capable of restoring health to the soul even as afflicted the body.74 ­Others yearned for death, “anxious to be in Heaven where my heart assures me that God w ­ ill reward me for my faith, and for the confidence that I have in him.”75

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Disabling impairments, too, could stimulate sentiments of holy resignation and gratitude for the spiritual advantages afforded by physical compromise. A blind man who had spent the year 1648 in Montreal, recalled Jerome Lalemant, “had virtue enough for twenty-­five”—­enough “to compensate” for his infirmity. “How often I praise God for having deprived me of my sight,” the blind man declared, “for, other­w ise, I would have been all my life a proud and arrogant man.”76 An anonymous in­for­mant to the Jesuits expressed similar sentiments some years l­ater, playing on the paradox between physical infirmity and spiritual opportunity. Remembering the example of an “old man [who] was enlightened through his blindness,” the in­for­mant suspected that “never, perhaps, would he have perceived the brightness of the Faith, had his eyes been open to earthly objects. But God, who brings forth light out of darkness, and is pleased to give us occasional glimpses of the workings of his Providence, ordered all ­things so favorably for this poor blind man, that the F ­ ather came just in time to enlighten him and open Heaven’s doors to him, when he already had one foot in Hell.”77 Sometimes, as happened in the case of a Wendat man who watched helplessly as his wife and ­daughter languished in the winter of 1648, God rewarded t­ hose who exercised the virtue of holy resignation with the gift of physical recovery. The man—­who, incidentally, had recently defended both his wife and d­ aughter against assault by “a Pagan [who] had crept at night into [his] cabin . . . ​to seek some girl or w ­ oman, according to their former custom”—­instructed his wife and ­daughter to entreat God with a carefully crafted prayer, one that si­mul­ta­neously acknowledged God’s authority over life and death, delicately raised the possibility of healing, and professed total submission to God’s w ­ ill. Offering them a ­little holy w ­ ater, the man urged them to “lift up your hearts to God and say to him: ‘Cure me, if it be thy w ­ ill. Thou canst do all ­things. If thou say of me: “Let her be cured!” I ­shall be cured. If thou wilt not cure me, follow out thy own purpose. I do not believe in thee only that my health may be restored.’ ” To his wife’s

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and d­ aughter’s supplications, the man added his own. “One of them,” Jerome Lalemant reported, “was suddenly cured.”78 The other improved over time. ——— Months e­ arlier, Emery had asked to be baptized by the Jesuit f­ather who lived in the strange half-­timbered h­ ouse at the w ­ ater’s edge. For many moons now, the hunting had been bad and times w ­ ere hard—­ and not just for Emery, but for every­one in the village. Every­one, that is, except the Jesuits. ­Those pale, bearded men always had enough and Emery ­couldn’t help but notice that they shared generously of their provisions with ­those who had become Christian. So, before he left on the autumn hunt, Emery had demanded of F ­ ather Vimont the ritual ­waters of baptism. Vimont had demurred, insisting that Emery wait ­until spring. With the polished skills of a natu­ral rhetorician, however, Emery had reminded Vimont of the danger posed by the devil and his need for divine protection. In the end, the Jesuit had relented, and Emery had gone off in search of a healthy harvest of elk, content that he had done what he could to guarantee his ­family’s survival in his absence. He’d returned, though, with only a stingy yield and the first twinges of an abdominal ache that had only gotten worse over time. What good ­were the Jesuits now? They offered nothing but prayer as a palliative for his pain. Emery gazed at the fire, watching listlessly as the branches shrank and twisted slowly, turning from brown to black to the pallid gray of ash. ——— It is hard not to read the professed indifference ­toward life and death in stories like that of the Wendat man above as an artful cover for hope of healing. Often enough, in Jesuit illness narratives, the virtuous display of holy resignation gives way to physical recovery—as reward follows risk and effect follows cause. Perhaps the most steadfast among Indigenous converts r­ eally w ­ ere

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indifferent about ­whether they lived or died in this world, persuaded by the promise of eternal life in the next. Some, however, must surely have exercised the virtue of holy resignation in extremis as a final remedy for what ailed them, a desperate last move intended to stimulate miraculous healing and the restorative intervention of God. Jesuit illness narratives, ­after all, made embodied difference meaningful not just as an opportunity for the cultivation of Christian virtue but also as an invitation to the dramatic display of divine power as God interceded to heal the infirm—­often suddenly (as in the case cited above) and to the astonishment of the witnessing public. More than anything ­else, the spectacle of miraculous cure won converts to the Christian faith, offering palpable proof that God was real and what the Jesuits taught was true. The Relations fairly teem with stories of ­people miraculously healed by prayer of inflammation, fever, paralysis, bloody flux, pain in childbirth, jaundice, even deafness, muteness, and blindness.79 Sometimes the prayers offered by the sick or their kin hewed to the formula followed by the Wendat man above, uniting supplication to submission in an effective summons to divine intercession.80 Other times, the sick and their kin appealed to God more directly, like the grand­mother of a boy named François who brought the feverish boy to the Chapel near Lake Erie, explaining to F ­ ather Nouvel that she had “recourse solely to prayer for his cure.” Her prayer was granted, Nouvel reported in the Relation of 1676, “for, ­after I had read a Gospel over [François] at the end of mass, he was completely cured; and on the following day I saw him, ­free from all sickness.”81 As often as prayer (undertaken in sincere sentiments of piety) prompted the healing intervention of God, blasphemy—­prayer’s inverse—­brought sickness and even death. In the autumn of 1647, an apostate named Joseph Oumosotiscouchie, known other­wise as “The Frog,” fell sick with disease. Convinced that “the Faith was causing him this misfortune,” Oumosotiscouchie did every­thing he could to persuade his kin to return to traditional ways. ­Toward night, recalled Lalemant,

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this braggart, imagining that he was about to triumph over our belief, made a ­great feast; he invited to it many p­ eople, and especially ­those whom he thought he had perverted by his speeches. He declare[d] to this assembly that he [did] not expect his cure through the prayers, but only through his dreams and visions, and through the other superstitions which his nation has always employed. The next morning, no sooner had Oumosotiscouchie declared himself entirely recovered, than “a violent fever seize[d] him . . . ​, prostrate[d] him to the earth, [and] thr[ew] him into a wreck and into torments so unusual that he foamed like one possessed.” His kinswoman rushed to tell the Jesuits who promptly sent for the surgeon, but Oumosotiscouchie was already “stone-­dead,—­ the drivel and foam issuing from both sides of his mouth.”82 By the narrative logic of the Relations, the apostate’s fatal illness was divine payback, punishment for having renounced and, l­ ater, blasphemed the faith as the cause of disease. The idea that devotional practices—­including, but not l­ imited to prayer—­might stimulate physical recovery seems to have been widespread among seventeenth-­century French Jesuits. It w ­ asn’t that prayer, the sacraments, and the sundry sacramentals of early modern Catholic life w ­ ere efficacious media of healing in themselves, but rather that they ­were potent means of soliciting divine intercession. Sometimes God worked to restore health to the unwell through the medium of the holy Eucharist, as happened in the case of a ­woman who had labored without success for two days to deliver her child. Finding the ­woman nearly done in by her acute suffering, F ­ ather Gabriel Druillettes summoned the villa­gers together to celebrate the sacrament of the mass. Within a few hours, the ­woman gave birth and was “­free from pain and sickness.”83 In still other instances, it was the manipulation of sacramentals like relics and holy ­water that persuaded God to intervene, bringing the ­dying back to life to “the astonishment of all.”84 One young boy, who had fallen into a swoon from which he would not

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awaken, was revived when the relics of Saint Francis Xavier ­were placed on his breast. Even the relics of colonial holy men who had died in the odor of sanctity but had not yet been officially canonized ­were effective. F ­ ather Nouvel, for example, healed a child of a serious disease by giving him “a ­little ­water in which I had dipped a relic of ­Father de Brébeuf ’s.”85 Holy ­water alone—­even without relics—­worked won­ders. One young man, among “the greatest hunters and warriors in the country,” was afflicted by a disease that caused him to become blind. He suffered thus for months ­until two missionaries arrived and, “exhort[ing] him to hope in God,” applied “to his eyes some holy w ­ ater, with a sign of the cross, uttering t­ hese words: ‘May he whom you have taken for master, Our Lord—­the ­Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, cure you.’ ”86 In short order, the man’s sight returned. Jesuit illness narratives drew par­tic­u­lar attention to the efficacy of baptism as a goad to divine intervention, crediting the sacrament with producing instant recoveries against all odds. Take, for instance, the “poor ­woman of the Neutral nation” who had fallen gravely ill, received instruction in the faith, and fi­nally consented to be baptized in the last moments of life. “We did not think that she would live one day,” confessed François Le Mercier, “but God, wishing to reclaim her entirely from her error, permitted t­ hose sacred w ­ aters to have a salutary influence on both her soul and her body at the same time.” What’s more, Le Mercier continued, “this cure, which was so unexpected, gave her so high an opinion of the Faith, and put her into so rare a fervor of devotion, that she did not walk on the streets without telling her Beads; and she served as an example, even to the most fervent of that Church.”87 The poor w ­ oman had not just recovered her bodily health, but in recovering her health had become an evangelist for the faith in more ways than one. The point of the story was not—­not ultimately anyway—to celebrate the ­woman’s cure but to give proof of the omnipotence of the Christian God. In this story, as in o­ thers of miraculous healing, recovery was but a means to the end of evangelical witness, at once spectacular evidence of the power

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of God and a stimulant to public devotion. Even if readers of the Relations missed the moral of stories like t­ hese, the poor w ­ oman, and ­others like her, had not. With her beads in hand, the poor ­woman brought back from the brink of death was a walking, breathing example of what the Christian God could do. De­cades ­earlier, Le Mercier had concluded his account of Joseph Chiwatenhwa, a middle-­aged Wendat man laid low by a severe illness, in much the same way. Within two days of appealing to the intercession of Saint Joseph, Chiwatenhwa had recovered completely and resigned himself not only to stay faithful to God for the rest of his days, but also to “so act that the o­ thers w ­ ill know it.”88 Even Emery Tchames was not content to return to life as he knew it a­ fter the event of his cure, but set himself instead to the task of drawing his own c­ hildren into the ambit of the faith, bringing them “into the ­Father’s cabin, and urgently exhort[ing] them to lead a good life, to be obedient, and to be instructed for Baptism.”89 Physical recovery meant something in Jesuit illness narratives, but what it meant was subordinated, always and ineluctably, to the spiritual aims of the mission. The poor ­woman, Chiwatenhwa, and Emery Tchames got better, it’s true. But most Indigenous protagonists of Jesuit illness narratives d­ idn’t. Morbidity and mortality ­were endemic in the mission field of seventeenth-­century New France; ­these ­were the facts and all the rhetorical finesse in the world ­couldn’t change them. Contextualized within the broader arc of the evangelical agenda, however, sickness and disability, illness and infirmity, recovery and even death ­were made to ­matter. Remember the blasphemer who died, drivel and foam oozing from his mouth in a lurid spectacle of sin? In Lalemant’s capable hands, even this episode of Indigenous re­sis­tance was made to signify, spun as a cautionary tale and a compelling public lesson about the dangers of apostasy and the rewards of Christian fidelity. ­After the apostate’s gruesome death, “no one dared longer open his lips against the Faith; it was now spoken of only with . . . ​dread and re­spect.” Blasphemy might have killed one man, but it “raised several to life; the good Christians gave a thousand blessings to

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God, the lukewarm ones became warm, the Apostates became reconciled to the Church; and the Pagans, honoring Jesus Christ, asked his holy Baptism.”90 ——— Emery pressed his fin­gers against his stomach, as if to unloose to the knots that made him double up beneath his robes. He pursed his parched lips together and held his breath ­until he felt his muscles relax. The pain ebbed. What if, Emery wondered, he had been the victim of witchcraft? He had no direct proof, of course, but as a person of status among his kin—­and especially in ­these uncertain times—­someone might have cast a spell that had lodged in his gut. Maybe it was a twig or a ­little pebble or a tuft of hair that was making him sick. Without a medicine man to extract it, Emery would only continue to weaken ­until he eventually slipped out of this world and into the next. Before she became a Christian, his wife would have summoned a medicine man to get to the bottom of t­ hings. Now, though, she w ­ ouldn’t dare for fear of angering the Jesuits who objected to traditional healing practices as some kind of blasphemy. A bead of sweat rolled off Emery’s t­ emple and into the hollow of his eye. He would have to make preparations for his death before it was too late. ——— ­ fter Vimont’s 1642 account of his difficult illness, Emery Tchames A dis­appears without a trace from the Jesuit Relations. For Vimont, Emery’s illness had been a test of his commitment to his nascent Christian faith, an opening through which the devil had slipped to tempt Emery to abandon Chris­tian­ity and return to traditional ways. The way Vimont told the story, Emery had emerged victorious from his ordeal: he had refused the dev­il’s invitation, proved his spiritual constancy, and recovered his physical health. Through the alchemy of narrative, Vimont made Emery’s illness meaningful, transforming the brute facts of physical affliction into a

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redemptive tale of exemplary virtue and evangelical witness. Emery’s illness—­like so many other instances of embodied difference in the Relations—­was made to signify within the broader context of the Jesuit mission in seventeenth-­century New France. But how did Emery himself remember the experience? When he pieced together the story of his own brush with morbidity, where did he begin? Did Emery, too, conceive of his illness as a heaven-­sent trial? Did he, too, interpret his feverish dream as the handi­work of the devil? In Emery’s own eyes, was his exhausted, aching body the site of contest over the fate of his soul? His recovery a reward for his virtuous constancy? Or w ­ ere the edges of ­Emery’s own narrative softer, more ambiguous, fuzzier, and less dramatic? The beginning more complicated and less absolute? The ending less definitive and more indeterminate? We ­can’t know, of course, but t­ here’s room to imagine a story told other­wise. ——— Emery opened his eyes. Threads of ­matter clung to his eyelashes, forming something of a curtain through which he glimpsed the silhouettes of his wife and two ­children beside him. The fire had been reduced to a smoldering heap of ashes, save for a single coal that glowed orange, pulsing as with the breath of life. Emery shifted slightly. His hip chafed uncomfortably against the deerskin beneath him. He exhaled slowly. His thick, sour breath hung in the icy air. Emery turned his face upwards. From where he lay, he ­couldn’t see the stars in the night sky. But he knew they w ­ ere t­ here—­thousands of them punctuating the infinite blackness.

2 Recovery and Redemption in the Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Quebec

writing from quebec in the summer of 1634, Paul Le Jeune told the harrowing tale “of the very remarkable punishment of a Canadian ­Woman, who, having closed her ear to God during her sickness, seems to have been rejected at her death.” The w ­ oman, Le Jeune reported, “prostrated by sickness, and [her p­ eople] wishing to break camp,” had been dragged first to another Indigenous ­family and then to a nearby French fort. Monsieur de Champlain agreed to shelter the w ­ oman for one night only, and in the morning called for her kinsmen to retrieve her, reproaching them “for their cruelty in abandoning this creature.” They reluctantly “dragged her t­ oward their Cabins, repulsing her as they would a dog.” With neither a blanket for her body nor a roof for her head, the “wretched w ­ oman, finding herself abandoned by her own ­people and exposed to the severity of the cold,” begged her kinsmen to send for the Jesuits (whose offer of Christian instruction she had repulsed only days e­ arlier). But no one both­ered, and in short order “hunger, cold, disease, and the c­ hildren of the Savages, as it is reported, killed her.”1 This was a cruel story, but one Le Jeune could have told many times over. To Jesuits like Le Jeune, the Indigenous neglect of the 60

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sick and infirm was baffling, an appalling custom that left no room to doubt just how sorely the ­people of the eastern woodlands needed the moral influence of Chris­tian­ity. But it was also (and as we have seen) an opening through which the Jesuits could slip to begin the work of conversion. Abandoned by their kin—­sometimes in deliberate proximity to Jesuit settlements—­moribund Indigenous Americans w ­ ere so many sitting ducks, easy targets for the rudimentary Christian instruction the Jesuits provided alongside material gifts of food, medicine, and blankets. A year ­after the unfortunate death of the wretched ­woman described above, Le Jeune told another story, this one with a happier ending in which the opportunity presented by illness had not been squandered. Ouetata Samakheou, abandoned by her kinspeople near the Jesuit settlement in the dead cold of winter, had been discovered “very sick and lying upon the hard ground.” Wishing neither to see the ­woman “die before our eyes a victim to the cold” nor to shelter her in the fort “where t­ here ­were only men,” Le Jeune and his confrère Jacques Buteux fi­nally resorted to force, compelling her kinspeople (at gunpoint and with the aid of the local French) to “return . . . ​ from the woods . . . ​[and] put up a l­ ittle cabin for her, where e­ very day we carried her food and then instructed her.”2 Ouetata survived long enough for the Jesuits to “expound . . . ​ to her the Articles of our belief ” and baptize her in the chapel at Trois-­Rivières. What Le Jeune hoped to impress upon the readers of the Relation of 1635, however, was not so much the fortunate outcome of this par­tic­u­lar case but the untapped potential of illness in general as an accessory to the missionary proj­ect. If this single success story could be replicated on a larger scale—­the “miserable hut” where Ouetata drew her final breath institutionalized in the form of a well-­staffed hospital—­the pay-­off for the mission could be tremendous. “Imagine,” Le Jeune urged his readers, “how g­ reat is the necessity for a Hospital h­ ere, and how much fruit it could produce.”3 Alone, the Jesuits could only do so much. With the aid of w ­ omen religious, however, trained in the techniques of ameliorative and palliative care, the mission might make substantial

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gains—­and not only among t­ hose persuaded to deathbed conversions by the “miracle of charity” but also among their ­children who would “belong” to the nursing ­sisters a­ fter their parents died.4 ­There ­were w ­ omen willing in France, Le Jeune knew, to undertake the long journey across the Atlantic and commit themselves to the hard l­ abor of caring for the sick. What was needed was only “some brave Lady . . . ​who ­will give a Passport to ­these Amazons of the ­great God, endowing them with a House in which to praise and serve his divine Majesty in this other world.”5 Months ­later, edited, revised, and neatly bound, the Relation of 1635 landed in the hands (or at least within earshot) of Marie Madeleine de Vignerot du Pont de Courlay, Duchesse d’Aiguillon and the niece of Cardinal Richelieu.6 Widowed a­ fter only two years of marriage, the Duchess, like other pious Catholic ­women of her means and station in seventeenth-­century France, had made a name for herself as a patron of Christian charities.7 By the time Le Jeune’s Relation reached her, she had already contributed liberally to foreign missions, the church and Seminary of Saint Sulpice, the convent of the Carmelites, and hospitals both in and beyond Paris, persuaded that care for the body conduced to religious salvation. It ­didn’t take much, therefore, for the Duchess to be moved to action by Le Jeune’s impassioned appeal. Encouraged by her spiritual director Vincent de Paul, she determined to underwrite the hospital in Quebec in order to “aid in the salvation of the poor Savages.”8 In a letter addressed to Le Jeune and reprinted in the Relation of 1636, the Duchess resolved “to send thither this year six workmen, to clear some land and to construct a lodging for t­ hese good ­Sisters.”9 Cardinal Richelieu himself, wanting to show support for his niece’s charitable proj­ect, contributed 22,400 livres tournois for the maintenance and support of the new hospital. Le Jeune, naturally, was beside himself. “What s­ hall I say,” he wrote in the Relation of 1636, “save that all Heaven pre­sents before the throne of God ­these holy thoughts, ­these noble resolutions; and that all the Angels redouble their Chants of honor and praise for so holy an undertaking.” When he told his Indigenous charges

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that “a ­great Lady was about to erect a large h­ ouse, where all their sick would be received; that they would be laid on soft beds, and daintily fed; that they would be supplied with the medicines and ointments needed for their cure, and that no pay would be required for them,” they could scarcely believe it. But it is enough, Le Jeune concluded that “the God of hearts, who c­ auses this holy thought to spring up in a pious heart, sees his divine work and takes plea­sure therein.” The hospital, Le Jeune confirmed, would serve as a ballast and support for the missionary enterprise, enabling Christian charity to achieve an economy of scale that would only accelerate the rate of conversions in the colony. “Verily,” Le Jeune concluded, “­there is nothing so power­ful as this device to win ­these poor Barbarians, nay, even to fill among them the seminaries for boys and girls.”10 On May 4, 1639, Marie Guenet de Saint-­Ignace, Anne le Cointre de Saint-­Bernard, and Marie Forestier de Saint-­Bonaventure—­all Augustinians de la Miséricorde de Jésus from the Hôtel-­Dieu in Dieppe, France—­set sail aboard the Saint-­Joseph (in the com­pany, incidentally, of Marie de l’Incarnation, celebrated mystic and founder of the first Ursuline convent in the Amer­i­cas).11 The journey across the Atlantic was long and sometimes harrowing (an iceberg “monstrously wide and prodigiously tall” nearly dashed the ship to pieces), but when they fi­nally disembarked in Quebec on August 1, 1639 ­Sisters Saint-­Ignace, Saint-­Bernard, and Saint-­ Bonaventure “fell on their knees, thanked the God of Heaven and kissed the soil of their beloved country.”12 They ­were “received . . . ​ with all pos­si­ble honor” by the governor of the colony, guided to the chapel where the Te Deum laudamus was chanted and the cannons rang out in salute, and fi­nally directed to a ­house borrowed from the mercantile Compagnie de la Nouvelle France where they spent their first night in the New World.13 The next day, the three nuns made their way to Sillery, a reserve created by the Jesuits for Algonquin converts to the faith just south of Quebec along the St. Lawrence River.14 “I d­ on’t know which of us [the Indigenous residents or the Hospitaller nuns] had more

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joy or astonishment upon meeting,” recalled S­ ister de Saint-­ Bonaventure. “What astounded them the most was that we had no men and that we ­were virgins; they ­couldn’t believe it and did not stop testifying to their surprise about it.”15 Once settled, ­Sisters Saint-­Ignace, Saint-­Bernard, and Saint-­Bonaventure gave themselves over to learning the Algonquin language, memorizing prayers and the catechism with the help of Le Jeune who visited daily to assist with pronunciation. They learned quickly (“the desire we had to instruct t­ hese poor p­ eople gave us the fa­cil­it­ y,” Saint-­Bonaventure explained)—­and a good t­ hing, too, for no sooner had they made up the beds than the ailing and infirm started to arrive in such numbers that the three nuns ­were forced to build temporary bark cabins to accommodate them and even to transform their kitchen into an infirmary.16 ­Those who came first to the hospital—­such as it was—in Sillery w ­ ere victims of smallpox, a “very disgusting illness” that riddled the bodies of the infected “with g­ reat numbers of ulcers and cankers.” The nuns ­were overwhelmed. To the Indigenous sick, they gave their linens, even their guimpes and bandeaux; from the hastily erected cabins, they carried out the dead in beaver robes and blankets. “Our occupations,” wrote Saint-­Bonaventure, “grew daily” ­until, done in by relentless fatigue, all three ­sisters fell ill. In just six short months, the Hospitaller nuns had exhausted a supply of provisions intended to last two years, forced to borrow ­until the ships returned in the spring. It ­hadn’t been for naught, however, for “among so much ­labor and misery that lasted ­until the end of February 1640, we had the consolation that among the number of sauvages we assisted, none died without baptism.”17 It was a promising beginning to institutional healthcare in the French colony, and exactly what the Jesuits had hoped for. “Oh,” wrote Le Jeune with characteristic effusiveness in the Relation of 1639, “how often I have wished that Madame the Duchess d’Aiguillon might see, even for three days, what she has commenced to effect in ­these countries!” But it ­wasn’t enough. The nuns “had sick persons to nurse, but nothing to give them.”

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Weaving together the familiar themes of the Indigenous neglect of the sick and the evangelical yield of Christian charity, Le Jeune adroitly made the ask: “We hope,” he wrote, that Madame the Duchess, by increasing the aid, ­will cause increased pity t­ oward the sick p­ eople of her h­ ouse . . . ​let us rather say, of the ­house of God. If the Savages are capable of astonishment, they ­will experience it h­ ere; for among them no heed is paid to the sick . . . ​Now, when they witness the tender care and attention that is given to their Countrymen, it ­causes them to entertain a high esteem for the person for whose sake this g­ reat help is given them, who is Jesus Christ, our Savior.18 The Duchess made a second donation on behalf of the hospital in the amount of 18,100 livres tournois on January 31, 1640. An account of the hospital’s early history is given in the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, published in France in 1751. Originally entitled Histoire abregée de l’établissement de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec, fondé par l’illustre Dame Marie de Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon, en l’année 1636, the Histoire tracks the evolution of the Hôtel-­Dieu from its genesis in 1636 through periods of growth and expansion, wars and epidemics, to 1716 when the narrative comes to a close. A lengthy text in its published form, the Histoire is light—­ unexpectedly light—on details about the “poor sick” whose care constituted the “spirit of [the Hospitaller] vocation.”19 Landmark events in French Canadian history, from 1636 to 1716, figure in the Histoire alongside reports on triennial elections, sporadic epidemics, new postulants, building proj­ects, and other ­matters of community concern. But stories about the sick who suffered and died and sometimes recovered u­ nder the watchful eyes of the Hospitaller nuns are in surprisingly short supply. Juxtaposed against the Jesuit Relations, which fairly teem with stories of sickness and disability (and this, in spite of the Jesuits’ investment in spiritual conversion), the Histoire begs a dif­fer­ent set of questions: Why would a written history of an institution vowed to “helping the neighbor in his poverty and in his sicknesses” include so very few stories

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about ­those neighbors, their poverty, and their sicknesses?20 About the quotidian experiences of caregiving, healing, and hospital work? About the patients who came and went (in one way or another) through its venerable gates?21 It is a ­matter, I think, of audience. Unlike the Jesuit Relations, which w ­ ere crafted to appeal to a French reading public interested in the pro­gress of the colonial mission, the Histoire was intended for circulation only within the Hospitaller community. The ambition of the Histoire was not to advertise the gains of the Canadian mission (as it was for the Relations) but rather, as I w ­ ill elucidate below, to teach generations of nursing ­sisters what it meant to be a Hospitaller nun attached to the Hôtel-­Dieu in Quebec. Patient stories are few and far between in the Histoire (albeit purposeful and deliberate) but illness narratives, I argue in what follows, abound. Overwhelmingly stories of ailing and infirm nuns who wore themselves out in the ser­vice of the sick while perfecting the practice of Christian virtue, illness narratives work in the Histoire to draw the bound­aries of Hospitaller identity. Harnessed to didactic ends, the stories of sickness recounted in the Histoire—­both ­those about patients who came from the outside and t­ hose about the nuns who labored on the inside—­figure the nursing ­sisters of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu as missionaries whose vocation was to save the souls of ­others and to sanctify themselves. ——— Mère Jeanne-­Françoise Juchereau de la Ferté began writing the Histoire in 1717. Born in Quebec on May 1, 1650, Juchereau had entered the Hôtel-­Dieu as a postulant at the age of twelve. She served seven terms as superior of her religious community u­ ntil, having exhausted her “strength and her health,” Juchereau determined to “writ[e] about all that has happened ­here since the founding of the Hôtel-­Dieu.” The Histoire would be the final mark of her affection for her s­ isters in Christ, intended to “excite you by this account to praise the infinite mercy of God of which you w ­ ill

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see so many examples and to imitate the heroic virtues of t­ hose who have gone before you.”22 Based largely on notebooks left by Marie Forestier de Saint-­Bonaventure, as well as on miscellaneous writings culled from other members of the community, the Histoire was completed and edited by Marie-­Andrée Régnard Duplessis de Sainte-­Hélène who added her own reflections on the Hôtel-­Dieu’s more recent history and edited Juchereau’s manuscript for style, order, economy, and orthodoxy.23 The Histoire was “the product of a collective effort,” a rough “textual equivalent of the shared experience” of the female community from which it emerged.24 The Histoire, as its title suggests, is a history, but a history of a dif­fer­ent sort—­more monastic chronicle than meaningful narrative.25 Like generations of monastic chronicles before it, the Histoire “bewilder[s] the casual reader with [its] range of subject ­matter and variations according to circumstances.”26 Events of note are listed, year by year, with ­little direct commentary on the meaning of t­ hose events within the broader context of the community’s history and with scant attention to the “causal or subordinating relations” between them.27 Reports on the arrival of the boats each spring, election results, new postulants, and impor­tant deaths (which often overflow into rich hagiographic novellas) punctuate the Histoire with predictable regularity, lending to the text a temporally-­patterned, rhythmically-­recursive feel. Although it’s pos­si­ble to read into the Histoire an implicit narrative structure—­ over the course of its 425 printed pages, the Histoire tells the triumphant story of French Catholic Canada’s protracted strug­gle to defend itself against its vari­ous enemies, culminating with an account of the disastrous Walker expedition in 1711 that left roughly one thousand British sailors dead and Quebec temporarily out of harm’s way—­the text is largely aimless, unfolding as a mere sequence of disparate, disconnected events. That the Histoire lacks a clear sense of direction might bewilder the modern reader, but it would not have seemed strange to the religious ­women whose history it preserved. In keeping with the generic orientation of the monastic chronicle, the Histoire aims

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not faithfully to reconstruct the past or to illuminate the connections between c­ auses and their effects, but to “show how God works his ­will throughout time.”28 ­There is a certain humility to monastic chronicles fitting to the religious contexts in which they ­were produced, a sense in which the past cannot yield to ­human analy­sis ­because only God knows how ­things happen and why. Written as encomia intended to glorify God and “to teach lessons, ennoble the spirit, and stimulate proper action,” monastic chronicles like the Histoire subordinated h­ uman agency to the inscrutable workings of God.29 In contrast to the Relations, which, from the beginning, aimed to reach a broad and diverse readership, the Histoire was written by Hospitaller nuns, about Hospitaller nuns, and for Hospitaller nuns. The Histoire is a history composed from the inside—­literally, in the case of the Hôtel-­Dieu, from inside the cloister walls. A type of historiography that, over the course of the seventeenth c­ entury, came to be known as l’histoire de cabinet, the Histoire constructed an account of the past pieced together from details culled from personal experience, private insights, and intimate memories.30 Alternatives to the official, public histories written by men for the edification of society in general, histoires de cabinet ­were often the work of ­women who, while excluded from public displays of power, nonetheless had privileged access to conversations and machinations that tran­spired b­ ehind closed doors. Christened “par­tic­u­lar,” early modern histories of the sort composed in the enclosed spaces of the convent, the f­ amily, and the court went “not out of [their] own circles, but [turned] on [their] own ax[e]s, and for the most part [kept] within the circumference of truth.”31 For all their particularity, however, early modern histoires de cabinet ­were hardly insulated from the wider world of public politics—­and the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec is no exception. Landmark events in French Canadian history, from 1636 to 1716, enter the Histoire from stage left and stage right. Th ­ ere in broad outline, are the martyrdoms of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, the jurisdictional conflict between Vicar General

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Gabriel Thubières de Levy de Queylus and François de Laval, the birth of Montreal, the unsettling cosmic phenomena of 1663 and the devastating earthquake that followed, the arrival of Intendant Jean Talon, Viceroy Alexandre de Prouville, Marquis de Tracy, and the Carignan-­Salières regiment in 1665, the long-­awaited peace with the Iroquois, the benediction of the Cathedral in Quebec, and the death of Louis XIV at Versailles in 1716.32 As they are rendered in the Histoire, however, landmark events like t­ hese are not significant in their own right but rather contextualized against the institutional presence of the Hôtel-­Dieu and mea­sured by the yardstick of the Hospitaller vocation. Thus, the Histoire registers the arrival of Governor de Mouzay, praising him for his “profound humility and limitless charity which led him to render to the poor the most h­ umble of ser­vices without regard for his own status, ­going so far as to carry them upon his shoulders” in the city streets;33 the departure of Intendant Talon for France, admired for his “­great piety” and charity ­toward the poor sick for whom he exerted himself tirelessly in order to “help them and put them at ease;”34 and the death of Governor Louis de Buade de Frontenac, remembered for his affection for the Hospitaller nuns and for his annual gifts of two casks of wine, one for the nuns and one for the poor “whom he served himself on Easter.”35 No less than the Jesuit Relations, the Histoire is selective in the events it rec­ords, highlighting not ­those historical moments of greatest significance to the subsequent course of events as one might expect from a narrative history, but t­ hose most instructive for what they communicated about the dimensions of the Hospitaller vocation. Like other histories of its genre, the Histoire aspired to instruct, to teach nursing s­ isters who they w ­ ere, why caregiving mattered, and what illness—­their own and o­ thers’—­meant. This was a text whose principal aims w ­ ere didactic. It was a history that rendered the past meaningful in light of the pre­sent and in terms appropriate for the community to which it was addressed, a history that figured the cloistered nuns of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu as missionaries on par with their Jesuits peers whose work redounded

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to the conversion of o­ thers even as it contributed, si­mul­ta­neously and in ways elucidated by the Histoire, to their own salvation. In 1751, the Histoire was published in Montauban, France. A copy of the manuscript had left Canada some twenty years ­earlier in the hands of Bertrand de Latour, the unpop­u­lar, exacting ecclesiastical superior of Quebec’s female religious communities. De Latour’s decision to publish the Histoire did not sit well with the nuns of the Hôtel-­Dieu—­although it is hard to know if their opposition was sincere or simply the per­for­mance of the modesty expected from w ­ omen authors in the early modern world.36 What does seem clear enough, however, is Sainte-­Hélène’s disappointment about the numerous typographical errors and de Latour’s liberal revisions to the published text. De Latour had not only removed all annotations and subheadings from Sainte-­Hélène’s original manuscript, but had also excised ­whole sections, proving the oft-­noted rule that early modern men could rarely leave female-­authored texts alone.37 Mère de Sainte-­Hélène’s original manuscript survives, however, in the archives of the Monastère des Augustines de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec.38 Although a critical comparison of the original and the de Latour edition remains to be done, Sainte-­Hélène’s manuscript was faithfully reproduced, introduced, and edited by Dom Albert Jamet in 1939 on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of the Hospitaller nuns’ arrival in Quebec. It is this edition, published ­under the title Les Annales de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, 1636–1716, that furnishes the raw material for my analy­sis h­ ere and to which I cite in this chapter. ——— ­ others Saint-­Ignace, Saint-­Bernard, and Saint-­Bonaventure had M been recruited for ser­v ice to the colony from the Hôtel-­Dieu in Dieppe, an institution that in one way or another had ministered to the poor sick since the early M ­ iddle Ages. Recently reformed (interestingly, at the impetus of lay p­ eople) in accordance with

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standards set by the Council of Trent, the Hospitaller nuns attached to the Hôtel-­Dieu in Dieppe ­were part of a broader network of ­women both lay and religious committed to the active apostolate of nursing in the wake of the Catholic Reformation.39 Although hospitals had long been part of the landscape of Catholic Eu­rope, it would take the energies released by the Reformation to reshape them as institutions vital to the public welfare in both its corporeal and spiritual dimensions. Most medieval hospitals ­were not devoted to the care of the sick in par­tic­ul­ ar, but rather to the more general category of the poor and the needy. “Less centers of medical care than of hospitality,” medieval hospitals tended to be quite small—­capable of accommodating no more than a dozen patients—­staffed by religious men and ­women, and inspired by the theological equation between the suffering Christ and the suffering poor.40 The reform movements that swept Catholic Eu­rope in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fundamentally reshaped the hospital, the Hôtel-­Dieu of Dieppe included, effecting pro­cesses of reor­ga­ni­za­tion, rationalization, and even laicization.41 Tightly linked to post-­Tridentine efforts of moral reform, hospitals—­most notoriously, the hôpitaux généraux—­marshalled religious energies for the purpose not just of providing hospitality to the poor sick but of confining them, correcting them, and protecting the social order from the contagion with which they threatened it.42 Its distinctly moral valence notwithstanding, however, the early modern hospital put a novel premium on the care of the body.43 Spiritual healing remained, as the guiding princi­ples that governed the Hospitaller nuns, the Constitutions de la Congrégation des Religieuses Hospitalières de la Miséricorde de Jésus, explained, “more impor­tant than the health of the body,” but institutions like the Hôtels-­Dieu in Dieppe and Quebec operated on the distinctly early modern assumption that the health of the body contributed to, and even in some cases enabled, the health of the soul.44 Reversing centuries of tradition, early modern hospitals focused on treating the bodies of the poor sick (albeit as a means to the end of saving their

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souls), supplementing the traditional theology that recognized Christ in the person of the poor sick with a theology that recognized in the caregiver herself a species of Christus medicus.45 As the Constitutions put it, effectively having it both ways, “the holy practice of the functions of our vocation is . . . ​an excellent imitation of the mercies of Our Lord [and si­mul­ta­neously] . . . ​it is we who are performing works of mercy for Jesus, hidden mystically in the poor received in our Hôtel-­Dieu.”46 Working in persona Christi, the Hospitaller nuns of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu devoted a substantial proportion of their daily energies to caring for the bodies of the sick “with as much affection of care and perseverance as if they w ­ ere serving Jesus Christ himself.”47 They visited their patients four times a day—in the morning, at lunch, for after­noon instruction, and at dinner. They kept the rooms clean, sweeping the floors and emptying the trash. They provided basic medical care to the patients, following doctors’ ­orders and giving the sick what­ever medicines had been prescribed.48 For the nuns of the Hôtel-­Dieu, however, ­these corporeal ministrations ­were not ends in themselves. Rather, they ­were ancillary to the chief objective of spiritual salvation that constituted for the Hôtel-­Dieu its ultimate raison d’être: “The ser­ vice that we render to the poor for the health of the body is connected to the salvation of the soul, for it is for them to be able to ­handle their illnesses in a Christian manner and to pass out of this world more happily,” affirmed the Constitutions, “that we receive them into our h­ ouse.”49 Although the causal connection between sin and sickness was by this point in Christian history hardly absolute, the Hospitaller nuns of the Hôtel-­Dieu shared with their Jesuit counter­parts a loose sense of the entanglement between the two s­ haped by centuries of ambiguous tradition. Thus, the Church had enjoined doctors since 1215 to solicit a confession from the sick as a first line of treatment—­a directive the Hospitaller nuns approximated in requiring newly admitted patients to confess and commune within twenty-­four hours of admission to the hospital.50

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It would not have been lost on patients that their physical recovery (though impor­tant) was subordinated to their spiritual regeneration within the four walls of the Hôtel-­Dieu. The relentless feeding, washing, dressing, and treatment of the sick took place in an institutional context that was, from its architectural structure to its quotidian rhythm, profoundly religious. Within twenty-­four hours of entering the Hôtel-­Dieu, new patients w ­ ere required to make a confession and receive communion. ­Until 1672–73, when an additional room was built for male patients, a single salle des malades led directly to the chapel from which resounded, with predictable regularity, the familiar strains of daily mass.51 The salle de malades itself consisted of two rows of beds lined up against the length of the facing walls. At the foot of each bed was a plaque bearing the name of a saint or other holy figure, which served to identify the patient in a kind of early modern Catholic analogue to ­today’s digital arm band. On the walls hung a number of paintings with distinctly religious themes, including (­after 1673) three paintings depicting vari­ous stages of Christ’s crucifixion, the collective effect of which would have reminded patients of their privileged status (at least in theory) as proxies for Christ. Elsewhere in the Hôtel-­Dieu and alongside portraits of the institution’s secular and religious patrons, including Louis XIV, Intendant Talon, Vincent de Paul, the Duchess d’Aiguillon, and Cardinal Richelieu, hung two evocative paintings—­the one featuring a bloody and battered Christ, the other an Augustinian nun tending to Christ in the person of the sick, both of which surely would have impressed upon the poor sick and the nuns alike the Christological implications of their respective roles.52 The organ­ization of time at the Hôtel-­Dieu, moreover, yielded to the structure of the liturgical calendar. Bed curtains ­were changed twice a year—­once on the Wednesday of Holy Week, once on All Saints Day. E ­ very Holy Thursday the nuns washed the feet of the sick (in imitation of Christ at the Last Supper). The first Sunday of e­ very month was reserved for the confession and communion of patients. Even the daily order at the Hôtel-­Dieu

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followed a predictable, almost religious, rhythm. With unerring regularity, the nuns arose at 6:00, pro­cessed into the salle des malades, and knelt before the altar before distributing holy w ­ ater to the sick. A ­ fter straightening the beds and tidying the rooms, the nuns prepared to serve breakfast with the ceremony of a ritual meal: Entering the salle des malades in order of rank, they knelt before the altar while the superior delivered the blessing. They then readied the poor sick to eat and waited while the server brought to each patient what the superior had prepared. When the supper had ended, the nuns cleared the dishes and recited a prayer of thanksgiving at the altar before pro­cessing again, in rank and file, out of the salle des malades.53 If all this was not enough to persuade patients that spiritual rehabilitation was at least as impor­tant as physical recovery within the institutional context of the Hôtel-­Dieu, the daily fifteen-­ minute religious lesson, which, the Constitutions warned, ­ought “never to be neglected” except u­ nder extraordinary circumstances, would surely have removed all doubt.54 When patients recovered and left the Hôtel-­Dieu—­and most of them did—­they returned to the world not just physically ­whole but also (and especially) spiritually fortified with new habits of prayer, penitence, and moral scrupulosity and fluent in the Our ­Father, the Angelic Salutation, and the Confiteor.55 ——— From the beginning, the Hospitaller nuns of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu ­imagined themselves—­and w ­ ere i­magined by ­others—as the cloistered, female counter­parts to the Jesuits at work in Canada’s eastern woodlands. By the terms of the Duchess d’Aiguillon’s founding donation, the nursing s­ isters had been commissioned to “aid in the salvation of the poor Savages,” charged with missionary responsibilities of no less consequence to the evangelization of the New World than t­ hose shouldered by the Jesuits—­and this, despite the rule of enclaustration imposed by the Council of Trent.56

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In language that blurred the lines between Jesuits on the frontier and nuns in the cloister, Juchereau wrote in praise of M ­ others Saint-­Ignace, Saint-­Bernard, and Saint-­Bonaventure: ­These remarkable w ­ omen “left their parents, friends, acquaintances, [and] the comforts of a beautiful country . . . ​to come to the end of the world, across the sea, exposing themselves to losing every­thing in the harshest of climates, in order to contribute to the salvation of souls.” The Indigenous ­people’s reputation for cannibalism and barbarism notwithstanding, t­ hese “fervent religious w ­ omen . . . ​ concerned themselves only with the desire to sacrifice themselves for God,” yearning to do what they must “to acquire souls for Our Lord [and] persuading themselves that they c­ ouldn’t satisfy their zeal . . . ​­unless they followed the barbarians into the woods like the missionaries do.”57 The language of “exposure” in Juchereau’s paean is hardly accidental. Far from their families, friends, and patrons, bereft of the familiar comforts of home, Hospitaller nuns like ­Sisters Saint-­ Ignace, Saint-­Bernard, and Saint-­Bonaventure tested the limits of enclaustration. Even from within the four walls of the Hôtel-­Dieu, nursing ­sisters pursued a vocation whose missionary dimensions ­were undeniable. No barrier to a missionary vocation, the cloister wall of the Hôtel-­Dieu merely reversed the flow of traffic: it was not nuns who went out, but patients who went in. Theirs was a charitable charge, to be sure, but charity conceived as conversion strategy. Spending themselves out in the ser­v ice of the sick, the nursing s­ isters “hoped to win [their patients] to Chris­tian­ity . . . ​ [or] at least to give them a good impression of such a useful and generous religion, to lead them l­ ittle by l­ ittle to embrace it.”58 And although the cloistered nuns could not always see the yield of their ­labors, the Jesuits did: “­those who recover their health,” affirmed Le Jeune, “go back to their cabins, without often letting [the nuns] know the good which this charity has wrought in their souls[, but] the Savages, having received therein help in their sicknesses have been firmly won to God.”59 Discharged from the Hôtel-­Dieu, patients returned to the world agents of a reformed

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Catholicism capable of spreading piety and sobriety among t­ hose who needed it most. Given the nature of the Hôtel-­Dieu as an institution adjunct to the broader missionary enterprise in early modern New France, it is not surprising that ­those occasional stories about patients in the Histoire hew, in broad outline, to narrative patterns found in the Jesuit Relations, figuring physical affliction as an opportunity for conversion and an occasion for the cultivation of virtue. The stories in the Histoire that most closely resemble ­those inscribed in the Relations are stories about ailing and infirm Indigenous Americans who constituted the bulk of the hospital’s patient population before 1644. H ­ ere is an example: A particularly stubborn Indigenous man who lived in “­great libertinage” and who seemed to take plea­sure in “showing how far he was from the faith” was brought to the Hôtel-­Dieu with a “dangerous wound” that would prove “the cause of his happiness.” Nothing, wrote Juchereau, “made an impression on his spirit” u­ ntil he found himself on the receiving end of the care given by the Hospitaller nuns. Astounded by “the gentleness, the modesty, and the charity with which the w ­ omen religious served him,” the man wondered at the generosity of the nursing ­sisters who wanted nothing from the poor sick to whom they gave “their provisions and their l­abors with so much goodness.” He could only conclude that they must expect their reward in the afterlife. “­These thoughts and ­these reflections,” concluded Juchereau, softened his hard heart and, “having been made a good Christian, [the man] showed that charity is an excellent preacher.”60 For ­those Indigenous patients already baptized at the time of their admission to the Hôtel-­Dieu, illness provoked the exercise of the familiar virtues of patience, constancy, and holy resignation. Like the young Abenaki girl “covered in wounds” who nonetheless displayed “so much patience and gentleness that we all served her devotedly,” Cecile Gannendaris, “a virtuous Huron girl . . . ​[who] was brought sick to our hospital,” impressed the nuns with her “heroic patience” despite near-­total paralysis and pains so acute that they “provoked the compassion of all who tended her.”61 The

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story of the final moments of a “­great chief ” of the Maliseets echoes ­these themes and extends them in a vivid illustration of the mechanics of missionary work undertaken b­ ehind the cloister wall. Having traveled far from home in order to seek out the sacraments, the chief had fallen “dangerously ill” and took refuge at the Hôtel-­Dieu. “We w ­ ere witnesses to his holy dispositions,” wrote Juchereau, “for seeing death approach, he called one of his sons . . . ​ and spoke with him so affectingly that ­those pre­sent ­were moved to tears.” In a virtuous display of constancy even at the end of life, the chief testified to his high esteem for Chris­tian­ity and to “the joy he felt for having embraced prayer and never having abandoned it.” He begged his son to cling to the faith and to urge his wife and relatives to do the same, for “they would find it good, and God would take care of them.”62 So powerfully had Hospitaller charity moved the Maliseet chief that he himself commissioned his own son to go out and preach the good news. With the hospital’s move in 1644 to the relative safety of Quebec at the height of the Beaver Wars, the patient population at the Hôtel-­Dieu gradually started to shift. Hospitaller nuns continued to treat the Indigenous sick, but their attentions ­were focused increasingly on a mostly Eu­ro­pean clientele. ­These demographic transformations at the Hôtel-­Dieu are reflected in patient illness narratives, which shift over the course of the Histoire to feature mainly protagonists of Eu­ro­pean descent. Significantly, however, while the majority of hospital patients from 1644 on w ­ ere Catholics of French heritage, patient illness narratives in the Histoire privilege a motley crew of French Huguenots, British Protestants, and even Jansenists to the exclusion of the French Catholic sick.63 Stories like ­these figure in the Histoire not ­because they ­were average stories, but ­because they w ­ ere power­ful stories, stories that reinforced to a Hospitaller readership the missionary dimensions of its nursing vocation. ­These ­were stories that packed a didactic punch, stories that drew the bound­aries of Hospitaller identity in ways that reinscribed the nursing s­ isters of the Hôtel-­Dieu as vectors of post-­Tridentine Catholicism in the New World—­and

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safeguards of French Catholic hegemony in the colony. In ­these stories, illness is figured as a medium of conversion in keeping with the model of the Jesuit Relations, but conversion limned specifically as spiritual reform and the abjuration of heresy. The efficacy of Hospitaller charity in persuading Protestants to return to the Catholic Church is illustrated by the delightful story of “one of the most obstinate heretics we have ever seen.” The man, a Huguenot, had been solicited and urged to convert to Catholicism many times before, but had become increasingly bull-­headed, swearing that he “would never reject the religion he professed.” As luck would have it, though, the man “fell dangerously sick and was brought to [the Hôtel-­Dieu].” The nuns, moved by his unfortunate condition, prayed fervently for his recovery to no avail ­until Catherine de Saint-­Augustine thought to slip into the man’s drink a pinch of the pulverized bones of Jean de Brébeuf, recently martyred by the Haudenosaunee. Immediately, “this intransigent man became as sweet as a lamb, begged to be instructed, embraced the [Catholic] faith with joy, and made a public abjuration [of his Huguenot heresy] with such admirable fervor that he astonished himself with his transformation.” He left the hospital fully recovered, God “want[ing] to give him the health of the body as well as that of the soul.”64 By the early eigh­teenth c­ entury, the Hospitaller nuns w ­ ere treating not just the occasional French Huguenot but ­whole contingents of British Protestant soldiers, casualties of Queen Anne’s War (fought as a series of British assaults on France’s North American possessions). Among the captives brought to Quebec in 1709 ­after the French victory in Newfoundland was the governor of St. John’s, a small port town in the southeastern part of the island. “As many En­glish soldiers who had been captured with him ­were sick in our hospital,” wrote Juchereau, “he came often to see them and ask if they w ­ ere well ­here.” The soldiers confirmed that they ­were, and “told him a thousand good t­ hings about us”—­about the nuns’ fervor, kindness, and charity, and about the pains they took “day and night” on the soldiers’ behalf. The governor wondered at

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the nursing s­ isters’ joy and contentment as they carried out their menial tasks. “He examined us very curiously,” Juchereau continued, and unable to hide his surprise, he said . . . ​that he admired the religious w ­ omen of the Hôtel-­Dieu and that he could easily see that ­people in ­England w ­ ere mistaken [in believing] . . . ​that the convents in Catholic lands ­were filled only with scoundrels who had been locked up to do penance for their crimes, ­because it was impossible that girls [confined] . . . ​against their w ­ ill could have spirits as joyful as ours.65 Lamenting that he could see now how wrong it had been “to have abolished all the monasteries in E ­ ngland,” the governor pledged to “publish the truth about what he had witnessed.”66 The governor “took so much plea­sure” in watching the Hospitaller nuns in action that he even insisted upon viewing the religious pro­cession planned to celebrate the Feast of the Assumption at the Hôtel-­Dieu. On this par­tic­u­lar occasion, the governor got more than he bargained for—­a lesson not just in Catholic ceremony and Marian devotion, but in the inextricable connection between love of Church and love of crown and the imperial dimensions of Hospitaller identity. To the usual prayers on behalf of the king, the ­Mother Superior added some extra flourish, intended “to show this stranger . . . ​how zealous we ­were for the glory and salvation of our g­ reat monarch.”67 In the end, the charitable ser­v ices rendered by the nursing ­sisters impressed not only the governor, but also at least fourteen of the captive soldiers who made public abjurations of their Protestant faith and converted to Catholicism on October 16 of that same year. The nursing ­sisters “shared with [Monsieur de Mériel, the Sulpician priest who had received their abjurations] the joy that he had about it . . . ​and . . . ​render[ed] thanks to God for the conversion of ­these heretics and the blessings that it attracted on our ­house.”68 Against the background of the ongoing contest between Catholic France and Protestant Britain for dominance in eastern North Amer­ic­ a, this par­tic­u­lar illness narrative resounds

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on a dif­fer­ent register, suggestive not just of the spiritual dimensions of hospital work but, significantly, of the imperial interests at stake in the Hospitaller missionary vocation as it worked itself out in early modern New France.69 Jansenists, too, figure in the Histoire, although (curiously) not as an example of Hospitaller success in stimulating spiritual rehabilitation but of salvific opportunity squandered. In a striking variation on the narrative pattern that renders illness an opportunity for conversion, the Histoire tells the story of a “young and very modest man” who went by the name of Monsieur du Pont. For four years, the man lived like a hermit in a ­little cabin in the woods on the outskirts of Quebec. He begged for his food and knelt “before all t­ hose he met, kissing their feet and saying to them some edifying words;” many thought him a saint, although “he never took the sacraments.” ­Later, it would be discovered that the man was, in fact, a disgraced Benedictine named Georges François Poulet who had spent time in Holland with Pasquier Quesnel and fallen ­under the spell of Jansenism—­that rigorous seventeenth-­ century theological movement so inimical to Catholic orthodoxy. In 1718, Poulet was brought to the Hôtel-­Dieu with a high fever. ­There, he was treated “suitably and charitably” by the Hospitaller nuns and visited regularly by the colony’s clergy who urged him to submit to Unigenitus, the papal bull condemning Quesnel’s teachings. Th ­ ese concerted efforts at spiritual healing notwithstanding, however, Poulet refused to bend, averring that he “would rather be deprived of the sacraments” than obey the Holy See. In the end, the intransigent Jansenist left the Hôtel-­Dieu as unrepentant as he entered. At least the nuns managed to preserve themselves from the contagion of heresy: In gratitude for the ser­vices rendered him during his stay at the Hôtel-­Dieu, Poulet offered to one of the Hospitaller novices a book. The Superior, however, “seeing that it was a translation of [a Jansenist text] gave it back to him, telling him that we d­ on’t read t­ hose kinds of books h­ ere” at the Hôtel-­Dieu.70

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But why would Juchereau have both­ered to include in the Histoire this story of the unrepentant Jansenist? This is a story, a­ fter all, of Hospitaller failure, a story about the insufficiency of Hospitaller charity, about the durability of spiritual disease in spite of the best the nursing ­sisters could offer. What did this story elucidate about the dimensions of the Hospitaller vocation? What did it teach generations of nursing s­ isters about who they w ­ ere, why caregiving mattered, and what illness meant at the Hôtel-­Dieu in Quebec? Although we can only guess, my hunch is that this was a story designed to illuminate for the Hospitaller community just how far its missionary vocation extended. Even if it ended badly, the point of the story was clear: Hospitaller charity targeted not just Indigenous Americans and Protestant Christians but Jansenist heretics, too. U ­ nder the best of circumstances, care for the body softened the hearts of the hardened and redounded to the salvation of souls. Success was not pos­si­ble in ­every case, but what mattered was that they tried. ——— Patient illness narratives like ­these—­narratives featuring sick Indigenous Americans, French Huguenots, British Protestants, and the one-­off Jansenist—­are crucial to the didactic aims of the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, reinforcing for a Hospitaller readership the missionary dimensions of Christian charity. Although few and far between in the Histoire, stories like t­ hese elucidate the ways in which illness offered opportunities for conversion, and caregiving the occasion for the salvation of souls. Overwhelmingly, however, stories of sickness in the Histoire privilege nursing s­ isters themselves as narrative protagonists. The Histoire abounds with stories of nuns who exhausted themselves in the ser­vice of the ailing and infirm at the Hôtel-­Dieu and who perfected Christian virtues through a life of charitable ser­vice. No less crucial to the articulation of Hospitaller identity, t­ hese other illness narratives make

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physical affliction meaningful as the byproduct of charitable ­labor and the medium of personal salvation, drawing the outlines of a missionary vocation oriented equally to the redemption of o­ thers as to the sanctification of the self. Alike i­magined as alteri Christi, alike tested and tried by the experience of illness (such that “[i]t is hard to tell which of the two needs more patience or devotion—­the sick or the one who serves him, [for] both have occasion for indifference, sorrow, and impatience”), the poor sick and the nursing s­ isters who tended them shared mutually in a single economy of salvation.71 The practice of Christian charity as it worked itself out in the Hôtel-­Dieu was doubly redemptive, redounding at once to the spiritual rehabilitation of the hospital’s patients and at the same time to the sanctification of the nursing ­sisters. That caregiving was presumed to bring its own rewards was no innovation, but the outgrowth of a theology that had inspired corporeal works of mercy in Christian contexts from ancient times. The theology that underwrote Christian charity was one that recognized in poverty and disease useful stimulants to good works; the ambition of charitable ser­v ice, at least ­until the early modern period, was not so much to ameliorate the prob­lems of poverty and disease as it was to accumulate, bit by bit, credit that conduced to one’s own salvation. Although by the seventeenth c­ entury, genuine programs of social reform supplemented the traditional theology that undergirded Christian charitable institutions, the salvific payoff of charity was never in doubt. “The recompense of such an office of charity,” their Constitutions reminded the nursing s­ isters of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, “is extremely ­great. The merciful ­w ill receive mercy . . . ​the prayers of ­those who perform works of mercy [­will be] readily granted,” and ­those who assist o­ thers can expect God’s assistance themselves “at the moment of death.”72 Caring for the sick in the context of the early modern Catholic hospital remained “a vital exercise for ­those bent on mastering themselves and struggling for the souls of the sick and ­dying.”73 It was also “impor­tant as an ascetic exercise and a technique for

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mortifying the senses.”74 The natu­ral conditions of the early modern hospital obviated the need for supplementary mortifications on the part of the religious w ­ omen and men who staffed them, for the hospital’s “querulous and malodorous patients” provided opportunity enough for humiliation in imitatio Christi.75 The Constitutions put it this way: The penances and mortifications proper to our institute consist principally in the abnegation of our ­will, in the submission of our judgment, in taming our passions, in holding all our senses ­under bridle, and in suffering joyously all the incon­ve­niences imposed by the poor sick without showing any impatience ­toward them, bearing their sorrows with love and charity and with a gentle and affectionate compassion, surmounting courageously our disgust among the rubbish of a hospital, [and] overcoming our sensuality that naturally abhors this holy exercise so agreeable to Jesus Christ our Lord.76 Over the long haul, t­ hese “penances and mortifications” incurred in the ser­vice of the sick presented opportunities for the kind of self-­denial that made martyrs of men in the Jesuit mission field.77 The Histoire abounds with illness narratives that interpret the final sicknesses and deaths of nuns who spent themselves out in the Hôtel-­Dieu as the ultimate gifts of self in amorem fidei. Juchereau attributes the death of Marie de Saint-­Ignace, for instance, to the “­great fatigues” she suffered during the winter of 1646 in tending to Wendat refugees on the run from their Haudenosaunee foes: “without doubt, so much trou­ble contributed greatly to making her sick.”78 Although she survived the winter, Saint-­Ignace never recovered from the illness acquired in ser­vice at the Hôtel-­Dieu, eventually expiring on November 5, 1646 with last words that echoed Christ’s own: “My God, your ­w ill be done.”79 Years l­ater, the “malady of Siam” would reduce twenty-­ four nuns to extremis. Of ­these, six would ultimately die, exhausted by “excessive fatigues and the necessity of keeping vigil twice weekly throughout the winter months.”80 Stories like ­these do, of

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course, reflect the historical fact that nursing ­sisters must have often weakened themselves in ser­vice to the poor sick and contracted illnesses brought to the Hôtel-­Dieu (despite the prohibition against the admission of contagious patients). But the way ­these stories are told in the Histoire, with a marked emphasis on the connection between charitable ser­v ice and personal suffering even unto death, suggests a martyrological dimension that limns the nuns as missionaries of no less consequence to the Christianization of French Canada than their Jesuit ­brothers. In analogue to the likes of Brébeuf and Lalemant, nursing ­sisters like Catherine la Cointre de Sainte-­Agnès and Catherine Berthier de Sainte-­Geneviève gave themselves up as “victims of charity,” happy to “contract . . . ​[their] final illness[es] in the exercise of hospitality” and willing (like Christ) to die for the sake of salvation.81 Even ­those narratives that fall short of martyrological standards make illness meaningful as the theater within which virtues acquired in the ser­vice of the sick w ­ ere exercised to edifying ends. In the deathbed scenes that dramatize nursing ­sisters’ final hours, illness sets the stage not for the first soundings of Christian virtue (as in the Jesuit Relations), but for the final perfection of virtue, offering to the living a template for how to die well and an object lesson in the fruits of Hospitaller charity. Honed on the whetstone of quotidian ser­vice to the sick, the virtues of patience, constancy, and holy resignation ­were on full display in the final moments of nuns like Marie Renée de la Nativité, Antoinette du Tartre de la Visitation, and Marie Tavernier de Sainte-­Monique. Para­lyzed, unable to speak, and afflicted with a painful edema, de la Nativité nonetheless “never showed the least sign of impatience or chagrin,” but rather made it understood that “she felt an inexplicable joy for having left every­thing for God.”82 De la Visitation, for her part, could not be dissuaded—­not even at the end of life—­“from following all the observances with an exactitude that was admired by the ­whole ­house.” It was only ­after her Superior, “wanting to put limits on her fervor,” ordered her to stay in the infirmary that de la Visitation retired from public devotion. From her sick bed,

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however, she recited the office alone u­ ntil the eve of her death, “unable to say [it] any longer with the ­others.”83 And ­Sister de Sainte-­Monique, a ­widow who had entered the Hôtel-­Dieu along with her ­daughter, managed “to conserve, up to the last moment of her life, the fervor with which she had given herself to God.” In a touching per­for­mance of holy resignation, Sainte-­Monique “suffer[ed] with a ­great patience the pains that overwhelmed her, taking her remedies with courage and a generous mortification, although she wanted to die more than live.” Like Elizabeth de Hallot de Honville who, years l­ ater, would “wait . . . ​for death with a surprising tranquility,” Sainte-­Monique did not ­tremble at death’s door, but “confessed to our ­mother Superior that she was thinking with plea­sure about death, that her conscience was at peace, [and] that she had a sincere trust in God.”84 When nuns at the Hôtel-­Dieu fell ill, they did not—or so it seems from the Histoire—­suffer alone, but u­ nder the watchful gaze of a witnessing public ­eager to look and learn from ­those whose final moments put their faith to rigorous test. Death, as it is rendered in the scenes that so often follow from Hospitaller illness narratives in the Histoire, was not a private event, but an intensely public one. Marie Bourdon de Sainte-­Thérèse, for instance, who in life had given her Hospitaller s­ isters “­great examples” of “patience, kindness, and ardent devotion” edified them by a death “which responded perfectly to a life as innocent and fervent as the one she had led.” Even Bishop Laval who visited her several times during her illness was “charmed by [her] holy dispositions”—so charmed, in fact, that he insisted on keeping vigil over her himself together with Charles de Lauson de Charny, ecclesiastical superior of the Hôtel-­Dieu, who had wanted to witness “the pious words she addressed to all ­those who came to see her.”85 No death described in the Histoire, however, was more spectacular than Catherine de Saint-­Augustin’s. Gathered around her bed, Catherine’s confessor, ­mother superior, fellow nursing ­sisters, and “the ­little pensioners who . . . ​wanted to witness her death” watched Catherine attentively, hoping “to profit from t­ hese last moments.”

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Juchereau recalls, “Our w ­ hole community was pre­sent and very attentive,” observing Catherine as she slipped out of consciousness and back again u­ ntil she fi­nally drew her last breath, her cheeks rosy with the appearance of full health in sensible testimony to her eternal reward.86 Hospitaller illness narratives that ended in accounts of exemplary deaths like ­these w ­ ere intended to teach. Much as Jesuit illness narratives framed spectacular phenomena of miraculous cures as power­ful teaching moments for a witnessing Indigenous public, so the Histoire purposed the deathbed scenes of nursing ­sisters like Marie Renée de la Nativité, Marie Bourdon de Sainte-­ Thérèse, and Catherine de Saint-­Augustin to didactic ends. Stories like t­ hese presented to the Hospitaller community a vivid illustration of what it was not just to live well as a nursing ­sister but to die well, too. One final example suffices to make the point: ­Sister de Saint-­Paul, attacked by a sudden paralysis that gave way to a creeping infirmity, “continued to edify us during her illness, as she had in health, as much by her patience as by her frequent and loving sighs to Heaven, for she sincerely desired to leave this world to go enjoy God.” So confident was Saint-­Paul in her eternal destiny that she suggested to her superior the idea of a party on the eve of her death, to be held in cele­bration of her imminent removal to God’s side. “She died on July ­fourteenth,” writes Juchereau, “in sentiments so charming that she lovingly embraced every­one who came to see her.” In a litany fitting to the life of a saint, Juchereau commends her “sweetness, humility, charity t­ oward the poor, assistance ­toward neighbor, obedience, exactitude in observing our holy rules, fervor in all her exercises, mortification, [and] assiduity in prayer,” concluding only to affirm that t­ here w ­ asn’t a single nun “who d­ idn’t desire to imitate [her] life . . . ​to die like her in transports of divine love, and to taste in this dreadful moment the peace and contentment that we admired in ­mother Agnes de Saint-­Paul.”87 Read alongside the patient narratives of Indigenous converts and recovered Protestants, Hospitaller illness narratives come into focus as stories of conversion, too, but conversion rendered as a

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gradual turning t­ oward sanctification. Th ­ ese are stories not of sudden change (as in the case of the intransigent Huguenot cured by the bones of Brébeuf) but of the slow burn of holiness fueled by the painstaking, tireless l­abor of piety, regularity, and charity in ser­vice of the poor sick. Stories of the same genus, if not the same species, as the stories of ­those exemplary patients who yielded to the healing touch of the nursing s­ isters, Hospitaller illness narratives follow a predictable plot line that leads from sickness to salvation. In ­these stories, however, the semantics of illness is doubled: at once the crucible within which nursing s­ isters forged, over years of relentless ser­v ice, virtues of hagiographic proportions and at the same time the final stage upon which ­dying nuns exercised ­those virtues to edifying perfection, illness was made to signify in the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec in ways that left no doubt about why caregiving mattered and the good it could do for the soul. ——— I have argued that the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec is a didactic text, a community history that aimed to teach the nursing ­sisters of Canada’s first hospital who they w ­ ere, why caregiving mattered, and what illness—­their own and o­ thers’—­meant. Through the medium of illness narratives, the Histoire draws the bound­aries of Hospitaller identity, inscribing the nursing ­sisters as missionaries of no less consequence to the spread of post-­ Tridentine Catholicism in the New World than their Jesuit counter­ parts. Hospitaller work was body work—­work that implicated not just the bodies of the sick at the Hôtel-­Dieu, but the bodies of the nursing ­sisters, too. It was at the same time (and ultimately) spiritual work that redounded to the salvation of souls in ways that blurred the lines between the sick and their charitable servants within the institutional space of the hospital. That the stories of sickness forwarded in the Histoire are stories as often (more often, ­really) about ailing and infirm nuns as about the patients they treated is suggestive of something crucial about early modern

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missionary work. Missionary work had its own rewards. For the nursing s­ isters of the Hôtel-­Dieu, as for their Jesuit counter­parts in the field, missionary work was doubly redemptive, redounding to the sanctification of the self even as it stimulated the conversion of ­others. From where we stand (or sit) in the antiseptic waiting rooms of modern hospitals, rendered other to our doctors by disparities in education, status, and agency, it’s hard to conjure this other world in which patients and their prac­ti­tion­ers shared in a single economy of caregiving and harder still to conjure a world in which caregiving conduced to the benefit of both parties. But this is how it worked in the early modern Catholic world—­and still works, even ­today, not always, but sometimes, and prob­ably more often than we realize. In his moving 2019 memoir, The Soul of Care, Arthur Kleinman admits that caregiving is “[i]ncon­ve­nient; often unpleasant; sometimes taking more than it gives; something that can break us.”88 It can, however, also transform us for the better, rebuilding us even as it destroys us. Kleinman, who built his c­ areer around advocating for the return of “courtesy, decency, and helpful ­human warmth” to medical theory and clinical practice, had long understood t­ hese t­ hings in the abstract.89 It took his own experience, however, as the primary caregiver for his wife Joan over the course of her protracted and, at times, excruciating strug­gle with Alzheimer’s disease for Kleinman to feel them in his bones. ­After years of bathing Joan, dressing her, feeding her, enduring her outbursts, and cleaning her messes, Kleinman fi­nally understood that the soul of care (that quotidian commitment to being-­with) enabled to the “care of the soul.”90 The experience left Kleinman altered, feeling “as if I replaced, at least partially, who I was in the past with what Joan had become for me . . . ​I found my soul in that frustrating and elevating work [of caregiving].”91 “In the end,” Kleinman insists, caregiving “is about us.”92 It “feeds back to engage and re­adjust who we are,” reshaping the self, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.93

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The Hospitaller nuns of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu might have said it differently (putting the accent on salvation rather than the self), but they would surely have shared with Kleinman the conviction that caregiving worked on two levels and in two directions, implicating both bodies and souls, both patients and prac­ti­tion­ers in ways that left neither unchanged.

3 Hagiographic Prosthetics in the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin

as the first maples in Quebec’s upper town ­were beginning to turn, Marie de l’Incarnation took up her quill in the Ursuline monastery, just a short walk from the Hôtel-­Dieu. She was writing to Jesuit F ­ ather Joseph-­Antoine Poncet. It had been more than thirty years since Marie had sailed from Dieppe to Quebec in the com­pany of Poncet and Hospitaller ­Mothers Saint-­Ignace, Saint-­ Bernard, and Saint-­Bonaventure. Since that time, Marie and ­Father Poncet had corresponded regularly, even ­after Poncet’s return to France, trading news and sharing details about their lives and religious vocations. On September 17, 1670, however, Marie took pen to paper not out of cordiality alone but to respond to Poncet’s very pointed questions about Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin, the Hospitaller nun who had died an edifying death at the age of thirty-­six just two years ­earlier u­ nder the watchful gaze of her confessor, her religious ­sisters, and the community’s assembled pensioners. “Regarding ­Mother de Saint-­Augustin, about whose life you ask my opinion,” Marie wrote, “between you and me, I w ­ ill tell you that I’m not very knowledgeable on ­these ­matters.” Restricting herself to comment on what could be observed of Catherine from 90

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the outside, Marie attested to Catherine’s faithful observance of the rules of her religious order and to her admirable exercise of charity. She admitted to having heard from colonial notables like Charles de Lauson-­Charny and Bishop François de Laval about the “strange temptations and terrible persecutions” inflicted upon Catherine, day and night, by a battery of demons. “As we ­don’t know what took place in her soul,” she continued, “some p­ eople might think that she was obsessed [with demons].”1 Marie, however, refused to pass judgment: “I cannot give you my opinion about such extraordinary ­matters, as you wish, and I beg you to excuse me from it, seeing that persons of knowledge and virtue suspend judgment about it and remain in doubt, not daring to trust in extraordinary visions of this sort.”2 Although we can only guess at the content of Poncet’s queries regarding Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, Marie’s response suggests that ­there ­were legitimate and serious questions about the orthodoxy of this young Hospitaller mystic and her personal history of visionary excess. Born in Bayeux, France in 1632, Catherine had come to Canada as a nursing ­sister intended for the Hôtel-­Dieu. By all accounts, she acquitted herself of her nursing duties in an exemplary manner, serving the colony’s ailing and infirm with energy, industry, and “a maturity that surpassed her age.”3 Every­one who saw her in action, attests Marie, “loved her and esteemed her” for the charity she rendered to the patients at the Hôtel-­Dieu. But what Catherine had managed to hide from her religious s­ isters and from the poor sick in the salles des malades—­and what Marie alludes to, albeit obliquely, in her 1670 letter to Poncet—­was her complex and sometimes disturbing interior life, the details of which slowly came into public focus in the months following her death in 1668. ­Until that point, only her Jesuit confessor and spiritual director Paul Ragueneau had been aware of Catherine’s innumerable visions of holy figures as diverse as Polycarp and Francis de Sales and her chronic strug­gles against demonic infestation. Catherine’s encounters with beings both divine and demonic ­were by no

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means beyond the pale of seventeenth-­century French Catholicism. U ­ nder the influence of a flourishing mysticism that had begun in Spain and Italy in the sixteenth ­century and reached the borders of France by the turn of the seventeenth ­century, holy ­women and men like Margaret Mary Alacoque, Pierre de Bérulle, and Marie de l’Incarnation herself grounded their spiritual lives in claims to direct visionary experience.4 The flip side of visions of divine origin, encounters of demonic provenance w ­ ere no less uncommon in seventeenth-­century France.5 Although belief in the agency of demons would give way by the end of the seventeenth ­century to a growing confidence in natu­ral causality, demonic confrontation was a live possibility in Catherine’s lifetime and a familiar theme in the vitae of saints like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.6 It was an especially common theme in the lives of holy ­women, in par­tic­u­lar.7 As “prosaic” as both visions and demons had become in seventeenth-­century France, however, such phenomena did not go unquestioned.8 With the intention of facilitating u­ nion with God, the new spirituality that (by the seventeenth ­century) had come to be known as Quietism emphasized passive meditation over reasoned contemplation. A posture of spiritual passivity, however, could just as easily invite demonic possession as divine communication. When the soul was at rest, having annihilated itself in anticipation of u­ nion with and absorption in the divine, what safeguards ­were t­ here against the machinations of the devil? Indeed, Teresa of Ávila and Miguel de Molinos had acknowledged the risk, testifying in writing—at length and in detail—to the possibility of demonic temptations along the path to spiritual perfection.9 It was in response to the threats posed by the growing number of claims to interior mystical experience that a robust science of discernment emerged over the course of the seventeenth ­century, intended to parse the wheat of divine visions from the chaff of demonic infestation. A “social practice that involved a pro­cess of negotiation rather than a fixed theology or a coherent endeavor,” the science of discernment turned private visions into ­matters of public concern.10

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But it ­wasn’t enough. By the late seventeenth ­century, suspicions about the new spirituality had reached a tipping point in France. The beliefs of the Quietists threatened the Church on multiple fronts. Not only did the contemplative techniques advocated by the Quietists expose aspirants to the possibility of diabolical deception, but the emphasis on spiritual passivity left l­ittle room for the sacraments and traditional ritual devotions—­and, taken to the extreme, threatened to obviate the need for the institutional Church altogether. The controversy over the Quietists would culminate in the last de­cade of the seventeenth ­century with the debate between Jacques-­Bénigne Bossuet and François Fénelon over the writings of Jeanne-­Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon whose Short and Easy Method of Prayer read like a manifesto on spiritual passivity. Fi­nally, in 1699 Innocent II issued the papal brief Cum alias ad Apostolos condemning certain Quietist propositions and officially bringing the movement to an end. It was within the context of the burgeoning concern about Quietism that Poncet wrote to Marie de l’Incarnation in 1670 with a request for her take on Catherine de Saint-­Augustin. It ­wasn’t that Poncet questioned the truth of Catherine’s claims to divine visions and demonic temptations, but rather that he wanted to know what they meant. ­Were Catherine’s visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and baby Jesus real, or w ­ ere they just figments generated by demonic manipulation? ­Were her contests with ­those legions of demons indications of spiritual corruption or heaven-­sent ­trials intended to purify her soul? Catherine de Saint-­Augustin sat astride the fault line generated by the new spirituality’s emphasis on passive interiority. The ambiguity of her abundant “embodied encounters with the super­natural” begged for interpretation.11 Just a year ­after Marie’s demurral to Poncet’s request for judgment on Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, Paul Ragueneau offered his own opinion on the ­matter with the publication of his Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin. Over the course of 384 pages of text plus several additional pages of front ­matter, Ragueneau argues compellingly and conclusively in the Vie for the interpretation of Catherine as a saint, contextualizing (circumscribing?) the

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Hospitaller nun within centuries of hagiographic tradition to fashion her in imitation of Christ. Catherine de Saint-­Augustin’s body looms large in Ragueneau’s Vie, racked with “continual sufferings” and tormented by “corporeal infirmities” of the most “crucifying” sort.12 In addition to the chronic illnesses that tried her patience and tested her faith (not to mention the mortifications she willingly undertook to “chastise [her] body”), Catherine endured abuse at the hands of innumerable demons who seized her by the arm, grabbed her by the throat, and beat her so violently that her body was “bludgeoned all over” and “­there ­were marks on her face and her hands.”13 Although not by any means an unusual hagiographic strategy, Ragueneau’s decision to foreground Catherine’s body was out of step with trends in post-­Tridentine writing about the saints. Eschewing the ascetics and miracle-­workers of former times in f­ avor of reforming bishops (like Francis de Sales), apostles of charity (like Jeanne de Chantal), and contemplative mystics (like Teresa of Ávila), seventeenth-­century hagiography tended in more sober directions, showcasing exceptional virtue of character rather than astonishing feats of the body.14 It would have been natu­ral—­even easy—­for Ragueneau to write the Vie as a paean to Catherine’s heroic charity. Her de­cades spent in ser­v ice to the poor sick of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, a­ fter all, would likely have furnished ample evidence of holiness in an early modern mold. Why, then, Ragueneau’s con­spic­u­ous fixation on Catherine’s physicality? What exactly is Catherine’s oozing, shivering, writhing, burning, throbbing body d­ oing in the Vie? In what follows, borrowing terms and concepts from the field of disability studies, I forward an interpretation of Ragueneau’s Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin as an extended illness narrative dependent on the concept of narrative prosthesis, illuminating both the ways in which her extraordinary body underwrites Ragueneau’s inscription of Catherine as an alter Christus and the ways in which the Vie itself functions as a medium for restoring Catherine to a regime of tolerable deviance.15 In its first move, my

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argument exposes how the problem of embodied difference both inaugurates the narrative and drives it forward. Like a prosthesis—­broadly understood as an “assistive device . . . ​that ­people use to support what they want to do”—­Catherine’s embattled body, discursively elaborated to almost grotesque proportions, makes pos­si­ble the movement of the hagiographic narrative t­ oward the telos of imitatio Christi.16 In its second move, my argument underscores the prosthetic dimensions of hagiography itself. An assistive device that intends to return her “to an acceptable degree of difference,” the Vie inscribes Catherine within the pantheon of saints, integrating the ambiguous, anomalous Hospitaller visionary within the familiar horizon of the hagiographic tradition.17 ——— Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, born Catherine Symon de Longpré, entered religious life at the precocious age of twelve. Although Catherine had long harbored a desire to suffer for o­ thers (inspired by a chance encounter with a visiting Jesuit priest), her decision to join the Augustinian Hospitaller nuns at the Hôtel-­Dieu in Bayeux had not been entirely unequivocal. She was, by her own testimony, drawn to the t­ hings of this world and had determined to enter conventual life only “to try it out and to see something of how the nuns live.”18 Within months, however, Catherine had more than settled into her new vocation. She was well-­loved by the poor sick and esteemed by her religious ­sisters who admired her “gentleness, modesty, and intention.”19 Catherine would not stay long at the convent in Bayeux. By the time she was fifteen years old, she had resolved to leave France ­behind for the colony in Canada. Like many in seventeenth-­ century France, what Catherine knew about the North American colony she knew through the medium of the Jesuit Relations. The Canada of the mid-­century Relations was a grim place—­frigid in the winter, buggy in the summer, and far removed from the

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comforts and consolations of France. It was, writes Timothy Pearson, “a poor place to be a settler but a splendid place to become a saint.”20 And it was exactly what the spiritually ambitious Catherine was looking for. Having long ago determined to suffer “for the love of God and the salvation of souls,” Catherine recognized in the colony an opportunity to intensify her spiritual commitments.21 Thus, when the Hospitallers of Quebec wrote to request additional ­sisters from France, Catherine was among the first to volunteer. Catherine set sail for New France on May 27, 1648, barely sixteen years old. Her embarkment from the port town of La Rochelle had been hard-­won. Catherine’s f­ ather had vigorously opposed his favorite d­ aughter’s departure for North Amer­i­ca, yielding only when news of Isaac Jogues’ heroic martyrdom at the hands of the Haudenosaunee (in conjunction with pressure applied from Anne of Austria) shamed him into acquiescence. But Catherine, too, had hesitated, reluctant to leave the familiarity of the convent where she lived together with two of her biological ­sisters, her grand­mother, her great-­aunt, and a cousin. Separating from “this dear community” caused Catherine unspeakable pain, the “remedy” for which was “the love of God alone, which [both] caused this wound and dealt the death blow.”22 The passage across the Atlantic proved no less trying for the teenage nun. In the cramped quarters of the ship, Catherine contracted “la peste,” which brought her perilously close to death.23 She “received with joy,” however, “this sickness and all the incon­ve­niences which came with it as a gift from God that was no less precious than health.” Rendering her illness in familiar terms as an opportunity for the cultivation of virtue, Ragueneau wrote in praise of Catherine’s “invincible patience . . . ​constant obedience . . . ​inalterable gentleness . . . ​and steady resignation to the w ­ ill of God.”24 In the end, it was the Virgin Mary who restored Catherine to health with the touch of her sacred fin­ger, filling the young nun’s soul with a sweet contentment and fortifying her to abandon herself entirely to the ­will of God. When Catherine fi­nally arrived in Canada on August 19, 1648, she found a struggling colony of only a few hundred p­ eople, the

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f­ uture of which hung in the balance. That very year, Ragueneau reported, the Haudenosaunee had captured and burned the Indigenous settlement of Saint-­Joseph (where Emery Tchames had been tested by illness just six years before), massacring Christians, seizing captives, and adding yet another Jesuit martyr to the growing pantheon with the slaying of ­Father Antoine Daniel. Relations between the French and Haudenosaunee would worsen before they improved, prompting Ragueneau to won­der at the “invincible courage and extraordinary strength” Catherine must have had “to love Canada in such a deplorable state.”25 For Catherine, however, Canada was a “­little paradise,” its abundant ordeals in no way “diminishing or altering her interior peace”—or so she claimed, for evidence suggests that Catherine never ­really got over the temptation to return home.26 Cloistered within the walls of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, Catherine passed her days alongside her Hospitaller s­ isters, tending the bodies of the poor sick and fortifying their souls. Her nights, however, ­were something e­ lse. For it was usually a­ fter every­one ­else had gone to bed that Catherine experienced her many elaborate mystical visions and wrestled with throngs of demons. Although few knew it at the time (so carefully did Catherine conceal the signs of God’s special f­ avors), it was her vibrant mystical life, thickly populated by figures from the locally known Mère François de Saint-­Ignace to the Blessed Virgin Mary, that set her apart. Only with the publication of Ragueneau’s Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin in 1671, some three years ­after Catherine’s death, ­were her secrets made public. By this time, however, Catherine had already acquired a reputation for holiness in the colony and had begun to accumulate a rec­ord of miraculous interventions. Invoked by a growing body of devotees from as far away as France, Catherine was credited with marvelous deeds that included healing disease, strengthening vocations, and persuading Protestant heretics to return to the Catholic Church. It was within this context of Catherine’s blossoming postmortem ­career that Ragueneau undertook to compose the Vie de la

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Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin. Since 1650, Ragueneau had been Catherine’s spiritual director and confessor, her most intimate and trusted spiritual friend. To Ragueneau alone Catherine revealed (compelled by “blind obedience”) the truth about her stormy interior life.27 Although Pierre Chastelain would fill Ragueneau’s shoes as Catherine’s confessor upon the latter’s return to France in 1662, Catherine would continue to correspond in writing with Ragueneau, sending her erstwhile director annual reports on the pro­gress of her soul in (unconscious?) imitation of the Jesuit Relations. W ­ hether Ragueneau assumed the elephantine task of writing Catherine’s vita out of admiration alone or out of a more complicated constellation of motives, the product was the first stand-­alone hagiography generated by the Canadian experience.28 By his own admission, Ragueneau never intended the Vie for public consumption. It was only u­ nder pressure by “some persons of piety and merit,” including Bishop François de Laval, who determined that it would be of g­ reat benefit to spiritual directors and, indeed, to the public at large for what it revealed about both “the mercy of God” and divine justice, that the Vie was published in 1671.29 Ragueneau’s Vie is based almost entirely on Catherine’s own spiritual journal (which, he is careful to inform his readers, she had been commanded to write by her spiritual directors).30 Throughout the Vie, Ragueneau cites at length from Catherine’s personal writings, giving his reader the impression that Catherine is telling her own story. While most scholars acknowledge that Ragueneau must have edited and reor­ga­nized Catherine’s writings, repurposing them for the sake of the Vie, few, if any, contest Ragueneau’s claim to have exercised only the lightest of editorial influence. Guy Oury, for example, calls the Vie a “loyal work,” suggesting that the author “effaced” himself in ­favor of Catherine’s own testimony.31 Similarly, Jodi Bilinkoff (other­w ise highly attuned to the subtleties of the relationships between holy w ­ omen and their confessors) concludes that Ragueneau’s decision to preserve the more controversial details of Catherine’s life as well as his “tone of excited pride” suggests “showcasing, not suppression.”32

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My own sense is that we ­ought to approach the Vie with considerably more skepticism, given what we know about the dynamic between another well-­known hagiographer (Claude Martin) and his seventeenth-­century Canadian subject (Marie de l’Incarnation) and about the power relations between ­women and their hagiographers more generally.33 Although in the absence of Catherine’s original writings we cannot assess with any degree of certainty the extent of Ragueneau’s editorial interventions, it is reasonable to proceed with more caution than ­either Oury or Bilinkoff allow. Accordingly, in what follows, I treat the Catherine de Saint-­Augustin of Ragueneau’s Vie as Ragueneau’s discursive production. ——— David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse sits at the intersection of disability studies and narrative theory. As a first step t­ oward a methodology that at once acknowledges and at the same time accounts for the proliferation of disability as a feature of narrative, Mitchell and Snyder propose the concept of “narrative prosthesis.” Like a prosthesis, argue Mitchell and Snyder, “disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their repre­sen­ta­tional power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight.”34 Disability at once “inaugurates the act of interpretation” and drives the story forward.35 It is ­toward the ends of solving the mystery of disability (always ­imagined at the margins of ­human experience) and of resolving the prob­lem of disability that narrative moves. In this double sense disability—­persistently marginalized as a social phenomenon—is paradoxically central to narrative repre­sen­ta­tion, effectively functioning as a prosthesis that enables the narrative proj­ect. Keenly sensitive to the social dimensions of both the diagnosis of disability and its prosthetic remediation, Mitchell and Snyder attend to the ways in which narrative imports normative assumptions about aberrance, on the one hand, and “tolerable deviance,” on the other.36

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For better or for worse, both the “judgment that a mechanism is faulty” and the judgment that a faulty mechanism has been fixed are “always already profoundly social.”37 Mitchell and Snyder’s work on narrative prosthesis enables the reading of Ragueneau’s Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin advanced ­here. Ragueneau’s Vie is an illness narrative, albeit one dependent on the master trope of disability, read broadly as embodied difference mediated by the cultural context of the hagiographic tradition. Although familiar impairments easily recognizable as disabilities play a role in the Vie, my argument ­here depends on the looser, more elastic definition of disability proposed by Mitchell and Snyder. A “potentially meaningful materiality,” the disabled body as Mitchell and Snyder conceive it is not just the body whose functional capacities are somehow compromised, but any body “capable of being narrated as ‘outside the norm.’ ”38 Catherine’s extraordinary body—­tormented, abused, chronically ill, always in pain, and unusually receptive to visions both divine and demonic—­ both inaugurates the Vie and drives it forward t­ oward its hagiographic end. The crutch upon which the text leans for its repre­sen­ta­tional power, embodied difference is made meaningful in the Vie as the index of Catherine’s likeness to Christ. Mediated by the cultural context of the hagiographic tradition, Catherine’s extraordinary body is transfigured in the Vie from a site of theological ambivalence to “a site of phenomenological value,” underwriting Ragueneau’s inscription of the Hospitaller visionary as an alter Christus.39 ——— Physical impairments readily identifiable as disabilities are not altogether absent from the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin. On more than one occasion, Catherine suffers from intermittent paralysis inflicted upon her by the devil. Once, prefatory to a graphic vision of hell, she found herself “suddenly immobile,” her body so heavy “she could hardly walk.” Looking up, Catherine was frightened to discover “a horrible phantom, his eyes gleaming”

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and his figure illuminated by fire. “He looked at me,” Catherine recalled, “and taking me by the arm, he said to me in a terrible tone, ‘Come, come and see the place where you ­will be for all eternity.’ ”40 Another time, determined to show the martyred Jesuit the devotion he deserved, Catherine had “acquired a relic of ­Father de Brébeuf” with the intention of publicly embracing it at mass. ­Every time she tried to lift it to her lips, however, the devil, “want[ing] to lead me astray,” forcibly restrained her arm.41 On a third occasion, the devil again rendered Catherine “totally immobile,” this time temporarily preventing her from reaching for the holy w ­ ater that effectively ­stopped demonic visions before they started. Startled by an audible, but unnatural racket that sounded like “chairs being pushed across the floor,” Catherine reached for the holy ­water only to find that her arm had “stiffened and become like lead.” On her third attempt, she was able to touch the ­water, and taking it, rinsed her eyes whereupon “by virtue of this ­water the illusion dis­appeared.” She was left, however, with a burning sensation in her eyes “as if they had been set on fire.”42 Contextualized within the ­whole of the Vie, however, ­these more familiar instances of disability play only bit parts in Ragueneau’s hagiographic drama. Disability as a narrative prosthesis that enables the movement of the Vie ­toward its intended end operates on a broader platform than embodied difference so narrowly conceived. Far more central to Ragueneau’s Vie than Catherine’s intermittent mobility impairments (although connected to them in crucial ways, as I w ­ ill elucidate below) are her wildly extravagant spiritual transports—­transports that w ­ ere felt in and impressed themselves upon her physical body to disabling effect.43 While experiences like t­ hese w ­ ere certainly pos­si­ble in the religious world of seventeenth-­century France, as I have argued, they w ­ ere improbable, unusual, and clearly out of the ordinary. It was this aspect of Catherine’s hidden spiritual life, ­after all, that had generated so much gossip ­after her death, prompting Poncet to write to Marie de l’Incarnation and Ragueneau, eventually, to craft the Vie in her defense.

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Ragueneau’s Vie fairly teems with accounts of Catherine’s visionary encounters with figures as diverse as Ignatius of Loyola, John the Evangelist, Saints Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, Paul le Jeune, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Christ himself, the devil, and (above all) Jean de Brébeuf, the Jesuit missionary who had been roasted alive and hacked to death by his Haudenosaunee captors the year ­after Catherine arrived in New France. Just what Catherine saw in ­those countless visions reported in the Vie ranged widely. Sometimes, she was given insights into the mysteries of the Church; other times into the sins of strangers; still other times into the extent of God’s anger and his disciplinary intentions vis-­à-­vis a sinful Canada. By far, however, the majority of visions recounted in the Vie concerned Catherine’s own spiritual destiny—­a destiny that would as­suredly lead Catherine to heaven, but only by a “marvelously rough road” paved with “crosses . . . ​[some] bigger, rougher, and spikier” than ­others.44 Repeatedly, Catherine is given to understand that a place had been prepared for her in heaven, a place just “­under the feet of Our Lady” and elegantly ornamented with “embellishments, beauties, and riches.” The price, however, was Catherine’s willingness to offer herself as a “victim to Divine Justice,” suffering like Christ for the sins of o­ thers in ways that would prove utterly incapacitating as the vision of 1664 makes vividly clear: Deep in prayer before the holy sacrament Catherine “was shown a big cross, about five or six feet high,” covered on all sides with thorns and readied for a crucifixion, complete with four large nails—­two for the hands and two for the feet. Both at the head of the cross and near its base ­were the letters “C.P.,” which, Brébeuf informed Catherine, stood at once for “perpetual charity” and for “perpetual crosses.” Brébeuf went on to unpack for Catherine the symbolism of the cross and explained that the cross had been prepared for her and that she must stay firmly attached ­there. That, Brébeuf concluded, was the purpose of the iron stake affixed to its center, “which, entering into the back, immobilizes the body and renders it inert.”45 Catherine’s destiny, like Christ’s own, inclined t­ oward considerable suffering—­suffering so acute it was almost paralyzing.

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Repurposed as hagiographic prosthesis, Catherine’s suffering is made meaningful in the Vie as a telltale symptom of sanctity in keeping with centuries of hagiographic narrative.46 Although her chronic poor health was to blame, in part, for her suffering, it was Catherine’s willingness to offer herself as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of ­others that caused the greater part of her pain.47 In June 1663, about an hour a­ fter midnight, Catherine awoke to the sound of a voice crying out in agony. The voice, which Catherine assumed belonged to a soul suffering in purgatory, “begged [her] . . . ​ to relieve the extreme pain that pressed upon its back.” This, Catherine did not hesitate to do. “­Here is my body,” she told God. “If you judge it capable of being able to bear a part of this soul’s punishment, I abandon it to you with all my heart, for all that it pleases you to do.” At that very moment, Catherine recalls, “I felt myself struck in the ­middle of my back as with an ember. The pain was intense, and “it spread so quickly I felt as if I had been laid down atop an open flame.”48 In its basic outline this story could have been, and was, repeated many times over in the Vie. Encouraged by Brébeuf, Catherine presented her own body, time and again, in the stead of sinful o­ thers, ­eager to “suffer diverse ills . . . ​so as to reduce [their] punishments, and the length of [their stay] in Purgatory.”49 It is as a substitutionary sacrifice that Ragueneau finds meaning in Catherine’s tormented spiritual encounters with legions of demons—­encounters that mutilated her flesh and incapacitated her body. The protracted story of Catherine’s intercession on behalf of a recently deceased man guilty of having “abused the graces of Jesus Christ” makes the case. Deeply moved with compassion for the man’s postmortem suffering (well-­deserved, incidentally, for the man was guilty of slander, calumny, disobedience against the Church, and sowing discord among his neighbors), Catherine felt herself inspired to “ask God to send me the demons which ­were intended to trou­ble and torment him.” Immediately, more than three hundred demons impressed themselves upon her. Over the course of the night and all through the following day, the demons tortured Catherine. Although God eventually permitted t­ hese demons to go, Catherine

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would acquiesce a second time to demonic infestation on the man’s behalf, “abandon[ing herself ] to a ­great number of demons who since that time make me suffer in diverse ways, but with ­great vio­lence both in the spirit and in the body.”50 As this story and ­others like it make clear, Catherine had consented to the operation of the demons within her, having sensed “that God want[ed] me to abandon myself to them.”51 Consent notwithstanding, however, Catherine’s encounters with the demons left marks both physical and spiritual. Jealous of her spiritual achievements, her demons beat her black and blue, sometimes causing “illnesses the doctors knew nothing about, and often [treating] her so roughly that her body was bruised all over.”52 They tormented her, too, in ways that cut right to the heart of her religious vocation, grabbing her around the throat to prevent her from swallowing the consecrated host, tempting her to impurity, blasphemy, and disobedience, and inspiring within her a “hatred against God” and a “disgust for spiritual ­things.”53 Although she never lost her powers of reason (that, a­ fter all, was the fate of the possessed, not the obsessed), Catherine admitted to harboring a profound aversion to all t­ hings divine when u­ nder the influence of her demons, preferring to “enter into the hands of the Iroquois” than to “receive Our Lord.”54 None of this, however, was beyond the pale of Catholic orthodoxy. The Church Doctors had confirmed, Ragueneau assured his readers, that in situations of obsession, demons customarily imprinted “feelings of pain on the body . . . ​[giving] sensible marks of their presence . . . ​torturing in the entrails, or in the nerves, causing very painful burdens and obstructions . . . ​in addition to violent impulses ­toward evil.”55 Unusually receptive to visions both divine and demonic, mutilated, disfigured, and in near-­constant pain, Catherine’s body was dif­fer­ent. Against the grain of post-­Tridentine French Catholicism, which had, by the mid-­seventeenth c­ entury, migrated away from models of holiness dependent on dramatic somatic displays (but in keeping with a rich tradition of Christian hagiography at large), Catherine suffered with an intensity that was almost uncanny. But

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not quite, for Catherine’s extraordinary body was, Ragueneau is at pains to make clear, “a site of phenomenological value.”56 Through the medium of the Vie, Ragueneau determined to fix the meaning of Catherine’s ambiguous, anomalous body—­and, especially, her baroque excess of pain—­within the context of a hagiographic tradition umbilically tied to the gospel narrative. What Catherine’s embodied difference meant, for Ragueneau, was clear: Catherine was another Christ, called by God the ­Father like the beloved son himself to extraordinary pain and suffering in order to secure the salvation of sinners. Read as an extended illness narrative, the Vie makes Catherine’s pain meaningful as a symptom of sanctity. As Ragueneau understood it, Catherine’s embodied difference did not distinguish her from Christ, but made her like Christ—an identity underscored in the Vie by the pervasive imagery of the cross, the characterization of Catherine’s suffering as an abandonment both willed and redemptive, and the detailed end-­of-­life scene in which Catherine’s body, so tormented and enfeebled in life, regains the full bloom of health upon death in a power­f ul allusion to the resurrection. The motif of the cross saturates the Vie, serving for Ragueneau as an apt meta­phor that captures the quality of Catherine’s unusual—­and unusually difficult—­life. “It ­will be seen from the history that follows,” he alerts his reader, “that her w ­ hole life was nothing but a chain of crosses, one following another . . . ​such that it can be said that she was always crucified and that she died on the cross.”57 Catherine’s life had not been without its t­ rials from the beginning. As a child, she had suffered a months-­long debilitating illness that caused her excruciating headaches so extreme she wept with pain as the pus oozed from her ears. Her migration to the North American colony had only intensified the “crosses and suffering that accompanied her unto death.”58 The power­ful cold, the innumerable incon­ve­niences, the discomforts, the isolation, and the ever-­present threat of the redoubtable Haudenosaunee combined to make of New France a particularly crucifying place.

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Added to ­these was Catherine’s decision to take up her cross alongside Christ, to attach herself t­ here, to “receive” it, to “cherish” it, to “love” it, never to separate herself from it, to “abandon . . . ​ herself to Divine Justice, as the public victim for the sins of ­others.”59 As Christ had willingly laid down his life for the salvation of humanity, so Catherine consented, over and over again, to offer her own body to redeem “diverse kinds of sinners.”60 In broad strokes, the story of Catherine’s sacrifice of self in the ser­vice of saving ­others was nothing special—­not, at least, within the horizon of Hospitaller spirituality. It was, remember, in “imitation of the mercies of Our Lord” that the nursing ­sisters of the Hôtel-­Dieu tended their patients, body and soul, sometimes exposing themselves to disease and wearing themselves out unto death in the pro­cess.61 In the case of the Vie, however, the theme of imitatio Christi (only lightly impressed upon the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec) is extended and amplified to hagiographic ends. Like her religious ­sisters, Catherine undertook to “suffer so as to procure the conversion of . . . ​souls,” but her sufferings—­supplemented by frequent fasts, all-­night vigils, and discipline delivered by the bloody instruments of penance—­went well beyond the quotidian incon­ve­niences and humiliations of ordinary hospital work. They ­were intense, extreme, and unremitting, such that Catherine could say, together with Paul the Apostle, “Christo Confixus sum cruci.”62 They ­were also powerfully salvific in ways that far surpassed the expected yield of Hospitaller charity, but that laid bare its ultimate ambitions. The charitable ministrations of Hospitaller nuns might—­and did, as the Histoire elucidates—­return health to the infirm while fortifying their souls, persuading Indigenous Americans to convert and Protestants to renounce their heresy. But nowhere in the Constitutions de la Congrégation des Religieuses Hospitalières de la Miséricorde de Jésus or in the Histoire is it suggested, not explic­itly anyway, that nursing s­ isters might, as Catherine did, offer themselves as substitutionary sacrifices for sinners and bear upon themselves “the punishments that had been prepared for ­others.”63 Implicit in the theology that underwrote Hospitaller

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charity, however, was a subtle sense of the expiatory value of the ­labors of the nursing s­ isters. The loose connection between sickness and sin that persisted into the seventeenth ­century and beyond supported an interpretation of Hospitaller work as an act of corporeal self-­giving capable of redeeming sick bodies and sinful souls. Catherine’s par­tic­u­lar kind of charity was charity in the Hospitaller mold, but charity on ste­roids, muscular enough to reach not just patients in the salles des malades at the Hôtel-­Dieu but sinners in the colony at large and even ­after death. In imitatio Christi, Catherine suffered in order to save. Urged by the Holy Spirit to “give up and abandon herself ” on behalf of a w ­ oman who had been unfaithful to her religious vocation, Catherine hesitated, suspended in a “kind of agony.”64 “All I could do,” she confessed in an unambiguous evocation of Christ’s passion, “was to say like Our Lord in the Garden of Olives . . . ​Spirit of love, would that this cup pass from me, but always your ­will be done and not my own.”65 Coupled with the privations specific to the colonial experience, Catherine’s “interior crosses” and exterior infirmities added up, over the long haul, to a kind of martyrdom. Much like her Hospitaller ­sisters Catherine la Cointre de Sainte-­Agnes and Catherine Berthier de Sainte-­Geneviève who had quite literally given their lives in the ser­vice of the sick, Catherine de Saint-­Augustin eventually wore herself down through her perpetual sacrifice on behalf of a sinful Canada. By 1668, she had contracted a fatal illness that began with a spitting up of blood, followed by a fever and acute chest pains. In the throes of this final affliction, Catherine pursued her redemptive vocation to its ultimate end, renewing her spirit of sacrifice on behalf of “the sinners and souls in Purgatory” for whom she suffered to an “astonishing and inconceivable” extent.66 Begging her s­ isters “not to ask a­ fter her own needs and above all not to give her any means of taking relief by her own choice,” Catherine preferred to exploit the opportunity provided by her sickness to cultivate the virtues of “submission . . . ​love . . . ​humility” and the “continual exercise of patience.”67 When it became clear that Catherine was near the end, she was given last sacraments,

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her confessor was called, and the prayers for the d­ ying w ­ ere recited. As her community gathered around to witness her last breath, Catherine suddenly came to. She recovered her senses, uttered an exclamatory prayer, and, turning to her assembled s­ isters, announced with a “cheerful face and renewed strength” that she had been cured and suffered no longer.68 Before the eyes of the astonished spectators, the moribund Catherine gradually regained her full vigor and vitality ­until, in the full bloom of health and with cheeks as “ruddy” as a child, she recovered completely and died.69 Collapsing the resurrection narrative into the temporal frame of Catherine’s deathbed scene, Ragueneau removes from the Vie any lingering ambiguity (if, indeed, any remained) about Catherine’s identity and the meaning of her embodied difference. An alter Christus, Catherine had suffered and died for the salvation of sinners, her tormented and broken body but a variation on Christ’s own, the spiritual payoff of her physical affliction beyond the shadow of doubt. ­There is more ­here, however, than a ­simple hagiographic echo of the passion narrative, for in the background of the Vie, as Emma Anderson has argued, are “the mangled, heartless remains” of Brébeuf who, together with his confrère Gabriel Lalemant, met a grisly end at the hands of the Haudenosaunee some twenty years ­earlier.70 A key piece in Ragueneau’s broader argument that the two had been killed in odium fidei, the Vie forwards an interpretation of Brébeuf as no accidental victim of intertribal warfare but a heroic martyr for the faith (thus, Ragueneau’s elaborate description of Catherine’s vision of Brébeuf “all brilliant with light” and holding the traditional martyr’s palm).71 I want to suggest, however, that as much as the Vie buttresses Ragueneau’s interpretation of Brébeuf as martyr, so the interpretation of Brébeuf as martyr buttresses the Vie’s hagiographic agenda, supplementing and sustaining Ragueneau’s inscription of Catherine as an alter Christus. That is to say, ­these are mutually dependent interpretations, each of which supports and informs the other, and both of which pivot on the ambiguity of embodied difference. Explic­itly oriented

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t­ oward the end of fixing the meaning of Catherine’s unsettling body, the Vie is at the same time implicitly concerned with fixing the meaning of the broken bodies of Brébeuf and Lalemant—­and on both levels, the explicit and the implicit, it is the prob­lem of the disabled body—­the tormented and ambiguous body of Catherine de Saint-­Augustin and the disfigured and dismembered bodies of Brébeuf and Lalemant—­that enables the movement of the Vie, like a prosthesis, ­toward resolution in a Christological key. ——— In his 2006 book Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, Ariel Gluklich takes up the question of the phenomenology of pain. Why, Gluklich asks reflecting on a ritual crucifixion in a small Philippine town, would anyone voluntarily inflict pain upon themselves? And what happens, psychodynamically, when they do? Challenging the customary distinction between pain (the neurological sensation of a somatic event) and suffering (the emotional and evaluative reaction to such a sensation), Gluklich contends that even pain is “a ­mental event” tangled up with social and cultural structures of significance.72 For Gluklich, pain occurs at the boundary between culture and individual experience, illuminating the ways in which physical sensation is not always and everywhere the same. Although, since the nineteenth-­century invention of anesthesia, we have been accustomed to treating pain as a “medical prob­lem with a clinical or phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal solution,” ­there are other ways, Gluklich insists, of reading pain.73 Against Elaine Scarry whose Body in Pain contends powerfully for an apprehension of pain’s overwhelmingly destructive capacities, Gluklich proposes that ­there are two kinds of pain: The first kind is, indeed, disintegrative, “weaken[ing] . . . ​the ego” and “disrupt[ing] the relationship of ego to its lived world.” The second kind of pain, however, is integrative, strengthening both one’s “sense of identity” and one’s sense of belonging “within [the] social and spiritual world.”74 That is, some pain is meaningful. Some pain

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has “value.”75 Some pain acts not to isolate t­ hose who experience it but “as a socially and spiritually integrative force that defines and broadens the individual’s sense of identity within the traditional community.”76 Religiously conceived pain (what Gluklich calls “sacred pain”), in par­tic­u­lar, can “transform destructive or disintegrative suffering into a positive religious-­psychological mechanism for reintegration within a more deeply valued level of real­ity than individual existence.”77 Pain, that is, given meaning and purpose in a religious context can be a good ­thing—­productive, constructive, and constitutive of the ego and the self-­in-­relation. Religious thinking, Gluklich concludes, has the power to transform even the kind of “pain that c­ auses suffering into a pain that leads to insight, meaning, and even salvation.”78 Although Gluklich’s argument is rooted in the discipline of neuropsychology (thus, his methodological focus on the mechanics of the central and peripheral ner­vous systems), his insights into the ways in which sacred pain works to effect a lasting transformation of identity illuminates the ways in which Catherine’s pain functions in Ragueneau’s Vie. Discursively elaborated as suffering in imitation of Christ, her physical and spiritual pain grounds Ragueneau’s repre­sen­ta­t ion of Catherine as another Christ. Heavi­ly freighted with theological and religious meaning, Cath­ erine’s pain underwrites her identity as a suffering savior, an alter Christus whose embodied difference was directed t­ oward redemptive ends. Embodied difference thus conceived, however, does more than just enable Catherine’s identification with Christ in the Vie. Even as it limns her in imitation of Christ, embodied difference qua extraordinary pain likens Catherine to t­ hose diverse holy men and w ­ omen whose lives ­were the stuff of hagiographic legend. As Ragueneau figures it, Catherine’s physical torment at the hands of her demons did not isolate her from the pantheon of saints, but provided the grounds for her integration within it. Ragueneau refers his readers to the example of ­Father Jean de Castille, a Jesuit who had died in the odor of sanctity in Spain at the end of the sixteenth ­century: “One day he felt compelled interiorly to suffer

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extraordinary t­ hings for God and the thought came to him that he ­couldn’t suffer any more than by delivering himself into the hands of demons to be tormented.”79 Similarly, God had “permitted demons to persecute and torment” Teresa of Ávila. Sometimes Teresa’s demons appeared to her as angels of light, but at other times they assumed “monstrous forms . . . ​vomit[ing] fire from their infernal mouths” and terrifying the Carmelite nun with the threat of possession. Once, her demons raged against her for five ­whole hours, causing Teresa “horrible pains and troubling her body and soul” in retribution for her intercession on behalf of certain sinful souls (for Teresa’s suffering, like Catherine’s, had been purposed to redemptive ends). Odd as it sounded, extraordinary as it was, this “is exactly what happened to our Catherine de Saint-­Augustin.”80 A key discursive strategy in the Vie, comparison functions to relativize the fact of Catherine’s extraordinary embodiment against a broader hagiographic background with the prosthetic effect not of “eras[ing Catherine’s] difference altogether,” but of returning her “to an acceptable degree of difference.”81 Extending Gluklich’s argument beyond the local context of pain to the more global context of embodied difference, I want to suggest that embodied difference, like pain, is made meaningful in the Vie as an index of both meaning and belonging. A “culturally-­mediated [variance] that lends group identity and phenomenological perspective,” embodied difference functions in the Vie not just to underwrite Ragueneau’s inscription of Catherine in imitatio Christi, but also as an integrative mechanism that discursively locates Catherine within the pantheon of saints.82 In the com­pany of holy ­women and men like Christina the Astonishing and Francis de Sales, Catherine is transfigured from strange anomaly to familiar type, her embodied differences assimilated into the lexicon of the hagiographic tradition. “­There are,” Ragueneau acknowledges at the outset of the Vie, “a number of t­ hings [about Catherine’s story] that ­will seem extraordinary and surprising to t­ hose less familiar with the lives of the saints.”83 The intensity of Catherine’s spiritual inclinations and the

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precocity of her religious ambitions, for instance, ­were sure to raise eyebrows among the Vie’s more skeptical readers. Ragueneau’s claim that, even as a child, Catherine had “a vehement desire to suffer to better do the ­will of God,” strained the imagination. Yet, “one ­ought not to be astonished that at such a young age she had such ardent desires to suffer,” for t­ here was pre­ce­dent for it in the memory of a three-­year-­old child from Toledo “who was martyred, whipped, crowned, and crucified like Jesus Christ, with a Christian courage.”84 Neither ­ought one to be astonished by Catherine’s wildly outrageous spiritual transports, as uncommon as they ­were within the context of a post-­Tridentine Catholicism that tended in less sensational directions, for t­ here was pre­ce­dent for ­these, too. Experiences like Catherine’s, Ragueneau cautions, are “too easily condemn[ed]” or rejected as “illusions” by ­those to whom they ­haven’t happened or who ­haven’t read “anything similar in the lives of the saints.”85 Hagiographic history, however, testifies to a w ­ hole host of holy ­women and men blessed with the gift of direct divine communication. “It is thus,” Ragueneau explains, “that God took plea­sure in sharing of himself through apparitions, extraordinary visions, and frequent revelations to Saint Gertrude, Saint Bridgit, Saint Mechthild, Saints Catherine of Siena, de Genoa, and Bologna, and in recent centuries, to Teresa and to many ­others of the same sex.”86 Armed with no shortage of examples culled from the lives of the saints, Ragueneau determines to normalize Catherine’s extraordinary spiritual life against the background of the hagiographic tradition. Catherine had seen visions of heaven (and hell, too), but “[n]ote,” Ragueneau reminds his readers, “that God gave the same grace . . . ​to many holy souls: to Saint Anuphe, Saint Joseph, Saint Christina the Astonishing, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Teresa and many ­others, as well as Saint Paul.”87 The many ­favors bestowed upon Catherine by her heavenly patrons w ­ ere unusual to be sure, but they ­were not unheard of. Much as Catherine, in the com­pany of “our Lord, his holy ­mother, Saint Joseph, Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Catherine, and many

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o­ thers saints,” was bathed in a sacred oil by Christ himself, so the Dutch mystic Lidwina had “received extreme unction from the same hand of Jesus Christ on Easter day.”88 Much as Catherine was gifted with the experience of cradling baby Jesus in her arms, so “similar f­ avors w ­ ere often given to diverse saints, to Saint Dominic, to Saint Francis, to the Blessed Angela of Foligno, to blessed Francis of Borgia, to Blessed Stanislaus de Kostka.”89 And much as the Virgin Mary presented Catherine to the Holy Spirit in marriage, so Catherine of Siena and Saint Laurent Justinian ­were likewise “given Eternal Wisdom for a spouse.”90 Even Catherine’s jarring vision of “a big dragon” whose gaping jaws threatened to close upon her (a vision that tran­spired in the course of her illness while in transit across the Atlantic) was not, Ragueneau insists, unique. Something similar had happened to de Kostka when he, too, was “dangerously sick,” the devil appearing “in the shape of a dog of hell as if to devour him,” which prompted the Virgin Mary to intervene.91 In par­tic­u­lar, Ragueneau’s efforts to justify ­those many ­favors bestowed upon Catherine by Brébeuf do double duty within the context of the Vie, at once situating Catherine within the com­pany of saints and at the same time confirming Brébeuf ’s status as a martyr dead in odium fidei. That Catherine had been given lessons on how to pray from a super­natural source made her like the martyred Jesuit Marcel Mastrilly whom Francis Xavier inspired, “word for word,” to vow to become a missionary in Japan.92 That she had received the Eucharist from the hands of the holy dead made her like Saint John Chrysostom who was offered the host by “the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul.”93 That she had been given insights into the symbolism of the newly consecrated church in Quebec made her like Francis de Sales to whom the Holy Trinity had explained the meaning of certain “holy ceremonies in the presence of the glorious Virgin and the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul.”94 But that it had been Brébeuf who had given the lessons—­Brébeuf who had distributed the Eucharist, Brébeuf who had revealed the meanings hidden in the interior design of the

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church—­signified something about Brébeuf, too: that he had earned a place in heaven by the merit of his martyrdom in the Canadian mission field. Perhaps Ragueneau’s most challenging editorial task was weaving the warp of Catherine’s experience of demonic infestation into the weft of the hagiographic tradition—­for it was h­ ere that Catherine’s anomalous and richly embodied spiritual life was sure to raise the most eyebrows. Ragueneau knew that skeptical readers would move to condemn Catherine for her susceptibility to ­those demons who violently abused her body and cruelly tormented her soul. Although by the seventeenth ­century the logical connection between moral fault and demonic possession was not absolute, it was still reasonable to presume, as Augustinian b­ rother Sanson Birette did, that demons “have extensive jurisdiction over [­people] infected by sin.”95 Not all cases of demonic possession, however, ­were well deserved. “One s­ houldn’t be surprised,” Ragueneau assures his readers, “that God sometimes permits very holy souls to be delivered into the power of demons, who, wanting to harm them, [actually] aid in their sanctity.” ­After all, Christ himself had endured the torments of the devil, setting the standard for millennia of holy ­women and men who had submitted to demonic infestation. “On this subject,” Ragueneau adds, “Saint John Chrysostom wrote three books . . . ​for the consolation of a very virtuous monk named Stagyrus . . . ​who, by the permission of God, was possessed by the devil.” Chrysostom had assured the monk that possession by the devil was not inimical to sanctity, but “that, to the contrary, it would be very advantageous for him” as an opportunity to practice saintly virtue.96 Catherine’s confession to a profound and intractable sinfulness notwithstanding, she, like Stagyrus, had not deserved her own demons. “It is thus,” Ragueneau explains, “that God directs the saints; they consider themselves the biggest sinners in the world, although they are filled with sanctity.”97 Relativizing Catherine’s experiences against the background of the hagiographic tradition, Ragueneau summons the example of Saint Francis of Assisi,

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who had been so certain that he was ­going to hell that he spent nearly two years overwhelmed by grief and fright, oppressed by “temptations . . . ​so power­f ul that they deprived him of all the sweetness of his spirit and made him believe that he had been totally abandoned by God.”98 Blessed Angela of Foligno, similarly, “was tempted so horribly with impurity for three years that she had no doubt she was a criminal,” even though she had “effectively not committed a single fault.”99 Stories like t­ hese w ­ ere so common in the lives of the saints, that “one should not be astonished that our Catherine had often had similar sentiments herself although she had always lived in ­great innocence.”100 Read alongside the vitae of holy w ­ omen and men like Teresa of Ávila and Francis of Assisi, Catherine’s strange and unsettling life faded into the familiar hues of sanctity. Ragueneau’s aim in the Vie was not to deny the fact of Catherine’s extraordinary body—­ tormented, abused, chronically ill, always in pain, blessed by visions, and beset by demons—­but only to normalize it within the context of the hagiographic tradition. Although “normal,” of course, “has a history” connected to the invention of statistics and the advent of eugenics in the nineteenth c­ entury, the concept is helpful for thinking about what hagiography does and the ways in which the genre mediates between the extraordinary and the ordinary, the ideal and the average, the exception and the rule.101 As narrative prosthesis, hagiography closes the distance between ideal and norm in the person of Christ.102 At once the ideal of which ordinary ­people fall short, Christ is at the same time the norm to which extraordinary saints conform—or w ­ ere, with more or less rhetorical finesse, made to conform by their determined hagiographers. The persuasive power of hagiography, a­ fter all, depended on just how closely the holy protagonist hewed to the ideal of Christ. From the earliest martyrs whose bloody deaths mimicked Christ’s passion, to the desert monastics whose rigorous asceticism registered as a continual corporeal sacrifice, to the mendicant saints of high medieval Eu­rope whose active apostolate echoed Christ’s embodied works of mercy, the saints w ­ ere saints

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b­ ecause they ­were like Christ, their bodies marked in imitation of Christ’s own. Fitting Catherine to the standard of Christ, Ragueneau rehabilitates the Hospitaller visionary “within a regime of tolerable deviance,” converting her ambiguous embodied difference from spiritual liability to hagiographic advantage.103 ——— Within the cultural context of an early modern Catholicism suspicious of visionaries and alive to the dangers of the dev­il’s play, Catherine de Saint-­Augustin’s extraordinary embodied experience as the double victim of both demonic obsession and divine justice was a prob­lem. And Ragueneau’s Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin was the solution. Leaning on analytical tools borrowed from Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, I have argued that Catherine’s embattled body enables, like a prosthesis, the pro­gress of Ragueneau’s hagiographic narrative ­toward its Christological end and that Ragueneau’s hagiographic narrative, in turn, functions prosthetically as a medium for returning Catherine to “an acceptable degree of difference.”104 An extended illness narrative, the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin makes embodied difference meaningful as an index of sanctity. The hermeneutic key that underwrites Ragueneau’s inscription of Catherine at once in imitatio Christi and at the same time in imitatio sanctorum, her embodied difference functions within the context of the Vie to integrate Catherine both socially and spiritually within the double horizon of the gospel story and the hagiographic tradition. Like a master craftsman, Ragueneau molds Catherine, carving h­ ere and shaping ­there, ­until she emerges at the end of the Vie as both alter Christus and alter sanctus, a suffering savior dedicated to the salvation of a sinful Canada in the model of Christ and his saints. ­There are reasons to won­der, however, ­whether Ragueneau’s Vie ­really did solve the prob­lem posed by Catherine’s ambiguous, anomalous (and deeply embodied) spiritual extravagance. Although Ragueneau’s intention had been to “edify the public and console

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good souls by the example of a life and a death . . . ​pure and . . . ​ precious before God,” evidence suggests that the Vie was received unevenly upon its publication in France in 1671.105 Some readers, to be sure, did “find something to admire . . . ​and something to imitate” in the Vie, as Ragueneau had hoped.106 The “idle young man” whose chance encounter with the Vie is described in the Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Quebec was moved, for instance, to join the Jesuits in New France a­ fter reading about “the excessive suffering that [Catherine] endured and the ­great crosses that she bore in Canada.”107 ­Others, however, scoffed at the baroque excesses of the Vie. As early as 1691, the Recollect missionary and historian Chrestien Le Clercq lampooned Ragueneau (albeit indirectly) for introducing “hyperbole and . . . ​similar fictions” into Catherine’s vita. Florid descriptions of “visions, apparitions, revelations, raptures, and ecstasies . . . ​miracles and prodigies . . . ​fasts . . . ​alms . . . ​ prayers . . . ​fervors . . . ​[and other] holy follies,” Le Clercq opined, are forgivable when the subject is a secular one, but not when the subject is sacred, for “they tend to undermine belief in true historical facts.”108 While some writers would go so far as to “place seven dev­ils in a girl’s tooth to prove her sanctity,” Le Clercq himself preferred “truth and the fidelity of the historian.”109 Nearly two hundred years ­later, the editor of the Annuaire du Département de la Manche would make much the same point in an editorial addition to a published article on Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, accusing Ragueneau of having “inserted pious lies into the history of this saint of a girl, lies such as have been in­ven­ted by so many writers of his order.”110 Perhaps Ragueneau ­hadn’t succeeded in restoring Catherine to a regime of tolerable deviance, a­ fter all. In his multi-­volume epic Histoire du Canada, published between 1845 and 1848, Canadian historian François-­Xavier Garneau could repeat the rumor that the Hospitaller visionary had been mixed up with Quietism. The movement, Garneau insisted, had infected many in seventeenth-­century France, causing “numerous, singular, frightening” apparitions and the multiplication of prophecies. ­Women ­were particularly susceptible

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to the “delirium of the devotion,” and Catherine most of all.111 The per­sis­tence of skepticism—­nearly two centuries ­after Catherine’s death—­about the meaning of her extraordinary body suggests that perhaps, in the end, the Vie had “failed in its primary objective: to return the incomplete body to the invisible status of a normative essence.”112 It ­wasn’t ­until 1923 that the Sacred Congregation for Rites took up Catherine’s cause for canonization together with the cause of the eight Jesuits martyred in the mid-­seventeenth ­century. The Jesuits—­Brébeuf and Lalemant among them—­were officially canonized in 1930, but Catherine’s pro­cess dragged on, delayed in part by the events of World War II. Fi­nally, on April 23, 1989, Catherine was beatified, her exemplary Christian virtue acknowledged and the authenticity of her extravagant visionary transports confirmed.113 Catherine, affirmed John Paul II, had “comported herself by the example of the Divine Teacher for the glory of God and for the salvation of humankind.”114 ­Today, nearly three hundred and fifty years ­after the publication of the Vie, only a single miracle stands between Catherine and canonization. Her cause remains “a precious and passionate collective proj­ect” among her Augustinian Hospitaller ­sisters.115

4 Divine Presence in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier

in the final pages of the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin, Ragueneau tells the story of “a good ­woman, very ­simple and a good servant of God” who suffered an attack of “renal colic that caused her terrible pain.” Finding no relief from the vari­ous remedies she tried, the ­woman turned to prayer, appealing first to Jesus, then to the Virgin Mary, and fi­nally to the recently deceased Catherine de Saint-­Augustin. The ailing w ­ oman begged the defunct Hospitaller nun to help her “as soon as pos­si­ble in my acute illness,” buoyed by the memory of how sensitively and capably Catherine, in life, had cared for her “when I was sick in your hospital.” No sooner had the ­woman uttered t­ hese incantatory words than she was “all of a sudden entirely cured and freed of all discomfort . . . ​in a single moment.”1 This story, one of two instances of physical healing attributed to Catherine’s postmortem intercession in the Vie, takes its place alongside a handful of other marvels marshalled by Ragueneau ­under the heading of “some knowledges it pleased God to give us concerning her eternal happiness.”2 Although Ragueneau was careful not to claim too much, assiduously avoiding the terminology of the miraculous in deference to papal authority, the implications ­were clear: Catherine’s accessibility as a medium of divine power on earth gave definitive—­and 119

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essential—­proof of the nursing s­ ister’s sanctity in keeping with the demands of the hagiographic genre. By the early eigh­teenth ­century, ­others would join Catherine as members of the growing Canadian coterie of holy men and ­women possessed (or so their devotees claimed) of thaumaturgic powers.3 Among ­these was a h­ umble Recollect carpenter named Didace Pelletier who had died in the odor of sanctity in 1699. Within a few short years of his death, Frère Didace had earned renown as a wonder-­worker capable of restoring health to the sick and vigor to the infirm. By 1719 when his confrère and erstwhile confessor Joseph Denis personally delivered his dossier to Donatien Larceneux, procurer general of the Recollects in Rome, Frère Didace stood poised to become French Canada’s first native-­ born saint, credited with more posthumous miracles than anyone in all of New France, save Saint Anne, the m ­ other of the Virgin Mary herself.4 The Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier, a copy of the dossier sent to Rome and itself a kind of narrative prosthesis in support of the Recollect b­ rother’s canonization, is preserved in the archives of the Seminary of Quebec.5 Addressed to Claude Cliche via “Monsieur Morin of the lower town,” the extant copy of the Actes, likely transcribed between 1720 and 1744, details twenty-­two acts of miraculous intercession attributed to Frère Didace.6 All but one of ­these miracles involve physical healings of one sort or another—­ seventeen of which are carefully described in sworn testimony delivered in the context of the nine official procès-­verbaux undertaken between 1699 and 1717, the remaining four attested to by supplementary letters and written certifications.7 ­These twenty-­ one stories of miraculous healing, the collective and collaborative product of lay witnesses and their clerical interlocutors, offer a valuable counterpoint to the Relations, the Histoire, and the Vie, giving a glimpse of the ways in which ordinary settlers interpreted their encounters with sickness and disability in early modern Canada.8 Artifacts of experience, ­these collected narratives of healing testify to the ways in which everyday men and ­women, both lay

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and religious, could—­and sometimes did—­make meaning of embodied difference in colonial New France. In what follows, I train my lens on the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing reported in the Actes, asking as I have of the Relations, the Histoire, and the Vie ­after the meanings made of embodied difference in this narrative sample. Why is it that ­these twenty-­one stories of miraculous intercession lean so heavi­ly on the impaired body? What does embodied difference signify in these stories? Why? And for whom? It would be easy to read ­these twenty-­one stories of miraculous intercession as early modern antecedents to the restitution narrative, the kinds of stories that feature embodied difference only to erase it. ­After all, ­every one of ­these stories begins with a (usually detailed) description of an (often obdurate) physical infirmity and ends with its removal and the restoration of the miraculé to perfect health. I want to argue, however, that the real point of t­ hese miracle stories is not that embodied difference dis­appears, but that God appears—­through and in the midst of the mundane world, dependent upon the infirm bodies of the miraculés, their complex social networks, and the range and diversity of their devotional practices. I want to argue, in other words, that t­ hese are stories essentially concerned with making God real and only incidentally with embodied difference, whose function in the text is first to summon and then to signify God’s presence through the medium of its own effacement.9 ——— Frère Didace was born Claude Pelletier in June 1657 on the Beaupré coast, about twenty miles east of Quebec along the Saint Lawrence River.10 The eldest son of Catherine Vanier and Georges Pelletier, one of the region’s first habitants who had migrated from Rouen around 1652, Claude grew up in the shadow of the church of Saint-­Anne-­du-­Petit-­Cap. A year a­ fter Claude’s birth, Étienne Lessard, who lived just five plots to the northeast of the Pelletier ­family, ceded an area of land mea­sur­ing two frontal arpents by one

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and one half lieues for a church where he and his neighbors “could assist in the divine ser­v ice and participate in the holy sacraments.”11 Construction on the church began shortly a­ fter, and almost immediately a miracle occurred on site. Louis Guimond, like his neighbors a native of France and a Norman by birth, “was suddenly cured of a ­great back pain while placing, with devotion, three stones on the foundation of the Church of Sainte Anne, which was beginning to be built.”12 Local inhabitants ­were quick to attribute Guimond’s miraculous cure to the intercession of Saint Anne, ­mother of the Virgin Mary and a favorite of seventeenth-­ century French Catholics, and by 1665 the church at Petit-­Cap was renowned as a place “where paralytics walk, the blind see, and the sick, what­ever their illness, recover their health.”13 It was within this heady atmosphere saturated with the real­ity of the miraculous, that Claude Pelletier grew up, fully alive to the possibility that God could (­because he sometimes did) intervene dramatically to change the course of h­ uman affairs. By 1686, twenty-­three years ­after Claude’s ­mother appeared in the parish register for her contribution of one livre, fifteen sols, Thomas Morel, the itinerant curé who served the Beaupré coast, had compiled an account of thirty-­one well-­substantiated reports of miraculous intercession attributed to Saint Anne at Petit-­Cap.14 Among the miraculés included in Morel’s account was Georges Pelletier, Claude’s own f­ ather and longtime churchwarden at Petit-­ Cap, who testified in 1664 to having been saved from certain death by Saint Anne at the very moment his boat nearly ran aground on an underwater sandbar. By drawing attention to the entanglement between Claude Pelletier’s biographical history and the prehistory of Saint-­Anne-­ de-­Beaupré, I ­don’t mean to suggest a relationship of causation, that the miracles at Petit-­Cap somehow prefigured and determined Frère Didace’s own thaumaturgic interventions. But I do mean to suggest something more than mere coincidence. It is worth considering the extent to which Claude’s identity as a native son of the parish of Petit-­Cap, born around the same time as the

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famous church itself, might have facilitated his reception as a holy man capable of working won­ders. Could it be that his association with the church at Petit-­Cap, particularly in its formative years, rendered him in the eyes of his devotees the natu­ral heir to its legacy? That his proximity to t­ hose incredible events on the Beaupré coast made it more likely that they would pin their hopes for recovery from what ailed them on him in par­tic­ul­ar? Or could it be simply that the miraculous phenomena at Petit-­Cap had so primed the pump of belief among Claude’s friends and neighbors that it ­didn’t take much to convince them that the stories t­ hey’d heard of his own postmortem miracles ­were true? What­ever the case, in 1678, two years ­after he was paid for carpentry work on the church at Petit-­Cap, Claude entered among the Recollects as a novice at the convent of Notre Dame des Anges in Quebec. A reformed branch of the Franciscans that had taken root in France as part of the post-­Tridentine Catholic revival in the late sixteenth c­ entury, the Recollects arrived in Canada in 1615, funded by the Société des Marchands de Rouen et de Saint-­Malo and attached to the expedition of Samuel de Champlain. For a variety of reasons (underfunding and understaffing among them) the mission failed to bear much fruit in the colony and in 1629, following David Kirke’s bloodless victory over Quebec, the Recollects along with their Jesuit counter­parts ­were forced to retreat to France.15 Although the Jesuits returned to the colony ­after it reverted to the French crown in 1632, having been granted exclusive rights over the Canadian mission by Cardinal Richelieu, the Recollects would not come back u­ ntil 1670. On February 3, 1680, Claude (now Didace, likely in memory of Saint Didace d’Alcala, the fifteenth-­century Spanish Franciscan lay ­brother renowned for his humility, virtue, and success as a missionary on the Canary Islands) pronounced his final vows, becoming the first Canadian lay ­brother. Within two years, Frère Didace had found himself a confessor in Joseph Denis. Père Joseph, the second of twelve ­children born to Pierre Denis de la Ronde and Catherine le Neuf de la Poterie in 1657 in Trois-­Rivières, about

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eighty miles upriver from Quebec, had entered religious life only eigh­teen months before his confrère. Yet he was destined for status and prestige in ways that would never belong to Frère Didace, ultimately accepting appointments as the director of the Recollects in Quebec and Commissaire Provincial for the Recollect mission in Canada, as well as serving as the spiritual director of the Ursulines in Trois-­Rivières. Recently returned from France where he had spent four years studying theology, Père Joseph quickly took Frère Didace u­ nder his wing. For the next several years ­until Frère Didace’s death in 1699, the two Recollects w ­ ere constant companions. Together, they traveled the length and breadth of the colony, Père Joseph determined to establish Recollect missions in settlements as widespread as l’Ile Percé, Plaisance, Montreal, and Trois-­ Rivières, dependent all the while on his confrère’s gifted carpentry skills and unrelenting work ethic. The two Recollects arrived at Trois-­Rivières in the winter of 1696–1697. A modest agricultural community at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Saint Maurice Rivers, Trois-­Rivières had played host to the Recollects before. As early as 1617, the Recollects had established a mission in Trois-­R ivières in ser­v ice to French traders who w ­ ere beginning to s­ ettle the area.16 Now, almost thirty years ­after the order’s return to the colony, Père Joseph and Frère Didace had come back, intending to build the conventual church that would replace the temporary chapel hastily constructed several years before. Throughout the brutal winter of 1698–1699, Frère Didace labored vigorously, preparing the wood for the frame that, come spring, would be erected to shape the edifice. But he w ­ ouldn’t survive the season. By February Frère Didace was “dead of a pleurisy that he contracted while working on the . . . ​church in the City of Trois-­Rivères,” his final hours passed in the hospital run by the local Ursulines.17 He was only forty-­one. Almost immediately, rumors of miracles worked by the defunct Recollect started to circulate. Even as Jean Salois, crippled from an accidental ax blow to his leg, was restored to ­wholeness through

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the intervention of Saint Anne at Petit-­Cap, two Ursulines from Quebec—­the first a choir nun and (not incidentally) Père Joseph’s niece, the second a converse ­sister and (again, not incidentally) Père Joseph’s first cousin on his ­mother’s side—­were suddenly healed of their own disabling impairments through the mediating power of Frère Didace. Without wasting any time, Père Joseph launched official inquests into the two claims of miraculous intervention. With the approval of Bishop Saint-­Vallier and supported by testimony from ­Sisters Marie des Anges, Marie Anne de Sainte-­Agnès, Marie de Saint Joseph, de Saint Jean, Jeanne de Saint François Xavier, Agnès de la Nativité, and Marie de Saint Paul, Père Joseph concluded on October 24, 1699 the first of nine procès-­verbaux that he would ultimately forward to Rome ­under the care of procurer general Larceneux in support of Frère Didace’s cause for canonization. Over the course of the next twenty years, Père Joseph would commit himself to collecting witness testimony and supporting evidence for a total of twenty-­two miracles attributed to the intervention of the deceased Recollect carpenter.18 By 1718, Père Joseph had resigned from his position as superior of the Canadian Recollects to dedicate himself full-­time to promoting Frère Didace’s cause. Both through formal channels proper to the canonization pro­cess in place since the early seventeenth c­ entury and more informally via kinship and collegial networks, Père Joseph worked tirelessly to tell the world about the ­humble Recollect carpenter whose heroic virtue and thaumaturgic capacity attested, in no uncertain terms, to his sanctity. With his ­family, friends, and acquaintances back in France, Père Joseph shared his confrère’s story, distributing Frère Didace’s relics (and, eventually, copies of the Actes) and encouraging the faithful to invoke his intercession. Although in life, Frère Didace’s well-­earned reputation for holiness had convinced ­those who knew him of his sanctity (such that when ­people began to whisper about his postmortem interventions at least one observer quipped that “he would have been more astonished if [Didace] h­ adn’t worked miracles”), by the

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early eigh­teenth ­century his renown extended all the way to France, prompting the Recollects in Paris to commission an engraving of Frère Didace with the caption “dead in the odor of sanctity.”19 It’s impossible to know why, exactly, Père Joseph pursued his confrère’s cause with such vigor. No doubt he was convinced that Frère Didace had been an exceptionally holy man. But amplifying the sincerity of his intentions must also have been, if not an interest in self-­promotion (for confessors had long reaped the rewards of their penitents’ celebrity), then at least an awareness of the ways in which his confrère’s canonization would redound to the benefit of the Recollects in Canada. In the shadow of the Jesuits whose status in the colony had been cemented by the blood of the eight mid-­century martyrs, the Recollects had strug­gled since their return to New France in 1670 to carve out a place for themselves. The success of Frère Didace’s cause would surely help. With a saint of their own (and one, moreover, born and bred on North American soil), the Recollects would fi­nally belong, once and for all, to Canada—­and Canada to them. Nothing, however, came of Père Joseph’s years of ­labor. By the time he died in 1736, Frère Didace’s cause had stagnated, gridlocked somewhere along the official Roman route that led ­toward canonization. Likely a casualty of the Jansenist controversy that had beleaguered Catholic France since the mid-­seventeenth ­century and that had even, the reader ­w ill recall, touched the Hospitaller nuns cloistered within Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, Frère Didace’s cause was simply dropped.20 Named for Cornelius Jansen, the Dutch theologian whose posthumously published Augustinus articulated the severe theology of sin and grace that undergirded the movement, Jansenism took shape over the latter half of the seventeenth c­ entury as a revival of a certain kind of Augustinian rigor.21 Although Urban VIII had attempted to suppress the movement (deemed too close to Calvinism for comfort), Jansenism continued to thrive in certain circles, persisting throughout the seventeenth and into the eigh­teenth ­century. Fi­nally, in 1713, just six years before Père Joseph hand-­delivered Frère Didace’s dossier

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to his superior in Rome, Clement XI published the apostolic constitution Unigenitus dealing the death blow to the Jansenist movement. In this climate, Clement XI might have thought it politic to ignore Frère Didace’s cause—­not ­because Frère Didace himself harbored Jansenist sympathies but simply out of a sensitivity to giving even the imprimatur of support to the Jansenists’ falling star, for the Recollects and the Jansenists had at least this in common: a shared antagonism ­toward their Jesuit foes.22 By the mid-­eighteenth ­century, the crusade to canonize Frère Didace had been abandoned. But then in 1859, another miracle happened, out of the blue. ­Father Hospice-­A nthelme-­Jean-­ Baptiste Verreau, then the principal of the École Normale Jacques-­ Cartier in Montreal, had solicited Frère Didace’s intercession on behalf of a boy suffering from epilepsy. In an academic riff on the more traditional devotional promise, ­Father Verreau vowed to undertake research on Frère Didace if the boy was cured. Immediately, “the child’s condition improved.”23 It was this miracle, in conjunction with noted Canadian historian Henri-­R aymond Casgrain’s discovery of a copy of the Vray portrait du très religieux Frère Didace—­ the engraving commissioned by the French Recollects shortly ­after Frère Didace’s death—at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, that contributed to the revival of interest in Frère Didace during the latter half of the nineteenth c­ entury. Copies of the photographed portrait circulated around Quebec, making their way to the archbishop, the Redemptorists at Sainte-­Anne-­de-­Beaupré, and the Ursulines of Trois-­Rivières who did more than anyone ­else to reinvigorate the memory of the defunct Recollect. Much as Père Joseph had done nearly two hundred years before, the Ursulines drew on their social networks to stimulate devotion to Frère Didace, distributing his image to their friends both near and far.24 In 1891 the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier ­were transcribed from the manuscript belonging to F ­ ather Verreau and published in their entirety in Le Canada Français “for the edification of our readers.”25 Just a few years l­ ater, Frédéric de Ghyvelde (the French Franciscan credited with reviving the Order of Friars

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Minor in Canada) completed his full-­length hagiography of the Recollect lay b­ rother, the Vie du Frère Didace, Récollet, and by 1910 Odoric Jouve, commissioned by his Franciscan superiors to reanimate the cause for Frère Didace’s canonization, published the first of several closely researched histories.26 By 1925, however, Frère Didace’s cause had once again been dropped, largely fading ­after this point from the historical rec­ord, although, at least among a small circle of devotees, it has never been entirely abandoned.27 ——— The nine procès-­verbaux and additional documentation compiled by Père Joseph and faithfully transcribed in the Actes include testimony of twenty-­two claims of miraculous intercession. An essential ingredient in the canonization pro­cess, evidence of miraculous intercession proved that the deceased holy person was in the com­pany of God in heaven, capable of serving as a medium of divine power on earth.28 By the time Père Joseph brought Frère Didace’s cause to the attention of procurer general Larceneux, the canonization pro­cess had been centralized ­under the authority of the Holy See and the evidentiary procedures for authenticating claims of miraculous intercession tightened.29 Hence, the highly legalistic formality of the stories told in the Actes, stories that feature a cast of characters that includes public officials and corroborating witnesses, the most con­spic­uo­ us of which are the ever-­present physicians whose testimony was indispensable for showing that the impairment had been obdurate, the remedies ineffectual, and the cure complete and absolute.30 In this—­and, indeed, in most other re­spects—­there is nothing exceptional about the miracle stories in the Actes as far as miracle stories go. Unremarkably conventional in terms of both narrative structure and content, the twenty-­two stories of miraculous intercession compiled by Père Joseph bear few traces of their genesis in a North American context. ­There are, of course, distinctive references to place (to Quebec, to Trois-­Rivières, to Bécancour), but

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no meaningful allusion to the specificity of life in New France, to the presence of Indigenous ­people, to the challenges of Canadian geography, to the difficulties of surviving on the colonial frontier, to the specificity of New World illnesses and infirmities. In broad strokes, the twenty-­two stories of miraculous intercession contained in the Actes resemble their French counter­parts—­miracles recorded at sites like Verdelais and Auray at the height of the contagious enthusiasm for the miraculous that swept France in the seventeenth c­ entury. Curiously, however, it was precisely at the moment when the tide of miracles began to recede in France that Frère Didace’s cult gathered steam in Canada. By the end of the seventeenth c­ entury, the number of miracles attested to at holy sites in France had slowed almost to a trickle. Across the ocean in Canada, however, miraculés like Louise Lanaudière and Marie-­ Anne Geneviève Angélique Robineau de Bécancour ­were sounding the first notes in what would become a rising chorus in defense of Frère Didace’s thaumaturgic powers—­almost as if the defunct Recollect picked up in Canada where the Virgin Mary, Anne, and ­others had left off in France.31 In both form and content, the twenty-­two stories of miraculous intercession included in the Actes conform to French pre­ce­dent. Each story begins with an identification of the miraculé and a description of the illness or impairment. Following the invocation of Frère Didace’s intercessory aid and a description of the means employed to solicit such aid (from prayer to relics to pilgrimage), each story climaxes with the miraculé’s usually sudden and always complete restoration to perfect health. ­There is ­little deviation in the collected stories of the Actes from this basic form, although considerable room for improvisation within its bounds. The twenty-­two stories range from the terse certificate of Adrienne Barbier in which the narrative ele­ments are compressed within a single sentence to the more prolix testimony of Louis-­Hyacinthe Dumesnil, the young Recollect novice whose own rather florid description of his swollen knee, the mea­sures taken to solicit the intervention of Frère Didace, and his subsequent disbelief upon

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his restoration to health was supplemented by letters submitted by the two physicians who attended him. Like their mid-­century French counter­parts, the miracles attributed to Frère Didace suggest an equitable distribution across demographic lines. Of the twenty-­two miraculés whose stories are told in the Actes, eleven ­were female and ten male. Five ­were members of religious o­ rders (including two Ursulines, two Suplicians, and one Recollect b­ rother); the rest w ­ ere lay p­ eople. Although the Actes give the age of the miraculés only in five cases, baptismal rec­ ords indicate that the age of miraculés ranged from eleven to sixty-­ six years, and that the mean age of miraculés (at least at the time of testimony) was just over thirty-­five. Among Frère Didace’s supplicants, as among the miraculés of mid-­seventeenth-­century France in general, “[t]­here are no privileged p­ eople of miracle. The rich are not more favored than the poor, men not more than ­women, old not more than young.”32 Strikingly, however, all but two of the miraculés ­were Canadian-­born, and most came from Trois-­Rivières or its immediate environs.33 Although Père Joseph had done his best to promote Frère Didace to colleagues back in France, devotion to the Recollect carpenter seems to have been a mostly local phenomenon in the early eigh­teenth ­century, its fringes reaching no farther than Montreal to the west and Quebec to the east.34 Like their mid-­century French counter­parts, moreover, the overwhelming majority of miracles attributed to Frère Didace in the Actes are miracles of physical healing.35 The balance of miracles reported in the Actes in ­favor of bodily cures at a rate of 96% replicates the distribution of miracles in seventeenth-­century France more generally. 107 of the 115 miracles recorded at Notre-­Dame-­ de-­Verdelais, for example, ­were miracles of physical healing.36 Of the afflicted healed through the intercession of the Virgin Mary at Verdelais, t­ hose whom Jean le Viguerie identifies as “the helpless,” including paralytics and the handicapped, make up the greatest number.37 Other miraculous cures involved recoveries from blindness, muteness, deafness, ner­vous­ness, skin diseases, fevers, blood

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abnormalities, tumors, and colics. The situation at the shrine of Sainte-­Anne d’Auray in the same period was similar. Of 577 miracles recorded at the shrine between 1636 and 1645, no fewer than 372 w ­ ere miracles of healing. The remaining 185 included a handful of w ­ ater rescues, reflective of Auray’s geo­graph­i­cal location on the western coast of France. Among the infirmities treated by the intervention of Frère Didace ­were, similarly, mobility impairments of one kind or another (including, interestingly, five cases of knee trauma, as well as one case of sciatic gout, one hernia, one partial paralysis of the arm, and one case of a severe pain that began in the miraculé’s side before spreading up the backs of her legs and into her kidneys), skin infections, chest pain, obdurate illnesses, a breast infection, an esophageal tumor, and “a dangerous malady in a place that cannot be decently named.”38 Although it is not my intention h­ ere to argue definitively for the utility of the Actes to the reconstruction of disability history, it is worth noting that in seven of the twenty-­ one stories of miraculous healing told in the Actes, the impairment that initiates the narrative is described not only in terms of its physical features but also in terms of its disabling effects. Marthe Fréchet’s breast pain, for instance, “prevented her from nursing her child;” François Lefebvre’s hernia “greatly prevented him from employing himself in his manual ­labors;” the lump in ­little Charles Antoine de Tonnancour’s throat “troubled his breathing and impeded his speech.”39 In ­these stories, the removal of the impairment returns the miraculé to the social world from which her handicap excluded her, empowering her (as in the case of Marie-­ Anne Geneviève Angélique Robineau de Bécancour) to “do her duties like usual.”40 In stories like ­these, it is not the bare facts of biological impairment that constitute the narrative’s initiating action, but their social implications, their effects within specific “physical and architectural environments” and their interface with “social arrangements and cultural values.”41 It can hardly escape the reader’s notice that the stories of miraculous intercession attributed to Frère Didace resonate richly

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not just with t­ hose attributed to his thaumaturgic contemporaries at Verdelais and Auray, but with Christ’s New Testament miracles. Like the won­ders worked by Frère Didace, the majority of New Testament miracles are miracles of healing—­healing from mobility impairments, skin diseases, and sensory disabilities, among ­others—­echoes of which reverberate in and give shape to the stories told in the Actes. That the miracles of Frère Didace resonate with biblical antecedents is not coincidental, nor even incidental, to the broader significance of the stories told in the Actes. Rather, the meaning attached to the stories in the Actes, like the stories collected at Verdelais, Auray, and Beaupré, was in dialogue with the biblical tradition and its proliferating hagiographic progeny. So many early modern analogues to the paralytics and lepers of scripture, crippled miraculés like ­Brother Louis and o­ thers witnessed to Frère Didace’s likeness to Christ—­which was, a­ fter all, Père Joseph’s ambition in assembling and forwarding the dossier to Rome in the first place. The stories of miraculous healing told in the Actes would have seemed familiar to a devotional community well-­versed in scripture and the hagiographic tradition. Rigidly styled to conform to a conventional tripartite narrative structure (impairment-­ invocation-­cure), the stories of healing told in the Actes ­were not original even in content. ­Here are the same stock characters (the sick, the disabled, their doctors, the saint), ­here the same range of physical infirmities (paralyses, skin infections, inveterate fevers), ­here the same kind of cure (perfect and permanent and always unexpected). To be sure, the stories bear marks of verisimilitude (names and details have been changed), but the general impression they make upon the reader is “of something known, of something we have seen before.”42 It would be easy, therefore, given modern evidentiary standards to dismiss ­these stories as falsifications, even w ­ holesale fabrications. I want to suggest, however, that the truth value of ­these twenty-­one stories is not compromised by their fidelity to type. The stories told by miraculés like Michelle Godefroy and Pierre

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L’Oiseau, Bishop Saint-­Vallier and Marguerite Aubuchon—in collaboration with Père Joseph and his clerical cohorts—­are no less true for having reproduced patterns and plotlines gleaned from the Christian past. They may, in fact and in the eyes of Frère Didace’s emerging devotional community, have been even more true for all that, the resonance between won­ders worked by the Recollect and Christ’s own power­ful proof that the former ­really had happened. When miraculés like Louise Lanaudière and Antoine Brûlé testified u­ nder oath before the ad hoc tribunal, they knitted together their memories of what happened from the skeins of their own experience, selecting some details over o­ thers and shaping the ­whole into narrative garments that fit. They might, of course, have told their stories other­wise. That they d­ idn’t, however, speaks less to some inalienable quality of the experience itself and more to the familiarity of the template of the miraculous for making sense of it. They, like us, perceived and interpreted what happened to them through the prism of available narrative forms.43 Once told, however, the miracle stories recounted in the Actes (like all stories) acquired the veneer of truth. When Marie-­Anne Geneviève Angélique Robineau de Bécancour testified that her crippling knee pain resolved as soon as S­ ister de Saint-­Paul placed a book that had belonged to Frère Didace where it hurt the most, she represented the experience as miracle, connecting the dots between her impairment, her invocation of the defunct Recollect, and her recovery in ways that foreclosed other interpretations. The episode, once equivocal and uncertain, now sedimented as the fact of miraculous intercession. Testified to publicly and ­under oath, inscribed in the dossier and l­ ater transcribed in the Actes, the story of Marie-­Anne’s miraculous cure at once reflected inherited narrative patterns and at the same time asserted them, inviting o­ thers like Antoine Brûlé and ­Brother Louis-­Hyacinthe Dumesnil, Jean Leclerc and Marguerite Aubuchon to tell their own stories of impairment, invocation, and recovery as stories of miraculous intercession, too. In this way, the stories told in the Actes (like all stories) did not just reflect real­ity (although they did that, too). They

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generated a par­tic­u­lar sense of real­ity and, by facilitating some interpretations and foreclosing ­others, created the conditions ­under which ­people like Adrienne Barbier and Jean Fafard could both experience and remember their encounters with sickness and disability in the grammar of miraculous intervention. Through the alchemy of narrative, the dross of ambiguous ­human experience was converted into the gold of spectacular miracle. In collaboration with their corroborating witnesses and their clerical inquisitors, Frère Didace’s miraculés “rearrange[d] and transform[ed]” their experiences of loss and misfortune into stories of grace, even privilege.44 Working through their encounters with illness and impairment in community with o­ thers, Frère Didace’s miraculés played with the memories of what had befallen them, reconstituting them in ways that Michael Jackson argues change experience “by symbolically restructuring” it.45 Unlike the subjects of Jackson’s study, however, the miraculés of the Actes fabricated their stories of sickness and disability in ways designed not to return agency to themselves but to God through the medium of Frère Didace. Subtly “alter[ing] the balance between actor and acted upon,” the stories collected by Père Joseph and reproduced in the Actes brought God into being as narrative subject, not just representing the idiosyncratic experiences of miraculés as events of miraculous intercession, but representing God as an actor in the midst of the mundane world.46 ——— Robert Orsi’s 2016 History and Presence, the yield of de­cades of reflection on both American Catholicism and the discipline of religious studies, is a proj­ect in two registers. At once a serious engagement with religious data (with Marian visionaries, Catholic print culture, clerical sexual abuse, inter alia) and at the same time a bold methodological intervention in religious studies, History and Presence levies a compelling critique against a normative modernity that leaves no room for the real­ity of the gods, the saints,

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the dead, and other invisible agencies. More prescriptive than descriptive, the “normative modern” is grounded in a regime of absence that Orsi traces to the sixteenth-­century Eucharistic debates and the Protestant repudiation of the doctrine of real presence.47 Eucharistic theologies that reduced the host to a symbol, Orsi contends, laid the foundations of the normative modern, setting the trajectory for the con­temporary study of religion. In ways indebted to Reformers like Zwingli who denied the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, con­temporary scholarship on religion reckons with the gods, the saints, the dead, and other invisible agencies “as symbols, signs, meta­phors, functions, and abstractions,” as “repre­sen­ta­tions of social or psychological facts, symbols of something e­ lse, but nothing in themselves.”48 The prob­lem, however, is that we have never been modern in this way. One of the governing assumptions of History and Presence is that, Protestant legacies notwithstanding, “presence is the norm of ­human existence, including in religion, and absence is an authoritative imposition.”49 ­Humans have long cultivated relationships with the gods, the saints, the dead, and o­ ther invisible agencies. Both before and—­against the grain of the normative modern—­after the theological upheavals of the sixteenth c­ entury, the gods have lived alongside us as companions and intimates, both for the better and for the worse. “The unseeing of the gods was an achievement,” writes Orsi, “the challenge is to see them again.”50 It is this challenge, a challenge that pre­sents itself with par­tic­ul­ar urgency to scholars of religion determined to understand religious worlds, to which History and Presence responds. Urging his readers to “withhold from absence the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual prestige modernity gives it, and to approach history and culture with the gods fully pre­sent to ­humans,” Orsi at once prescribes and at the same time enacts a method for the study of religion suited to the apprehension of divine presence.51 History and Presence, however, does not herald a return to theology—at least not theology in its Protestant iteration. Orsi’s methodological approach to the data is one washed in the color of a Catholic theology of real

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presence. As Orsi construes them, the gods, the saints, the dead, and other invisible agencies are not super­natural, above or beyond and absent from the world, but interleaved with “the material and po­liti­cal circumstances of everyday life,” ­really pre­sent in the “density of relationships . . . ​at the core” of religious events, in the abundance of objects shared, and the proliferation of stories exchanged.52 Real presence abides, writes Orsi, “where p­ eople’s bodies press close together, with their breath on each other’s skin and the smells of their skin in each other’s nostrils, [where] the bound­aries of single subjectivities dissolve in fluid environments of desire, need, and hope, conscious and unconscious.”53 Attending to “communal narratives of hope and anguish” traded at holy sites like Lourdes in France and the Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico, to the “global web of connections and stories, of devotional objects and images exchanged, [to] the circulation of souvenirs, postcards, e-­mails, websites, texts, and instant messages,” to the sheer excess that saturates religious experience, Orsi renders the gods, the saints, the dead, and other invisible agencies the subjects of empirical analy­sis.54 Read within a regime of absence, the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier have all the trappings of the con­temporary restitution narrative—­the kind of story that begins with embodied difference but ends with restoration and recovery. Without exception, embodied difference initiates narrative action in the Actes, the desire for solving the prob­lem posed by sickness or disability prompting the invocation of Frère Didace in e­ very case. It is the drama created by the gap between the yearning for w ­ holeness and the fact of impairment that drives each story forward and t­ oward the inevitable climax of the miraculé’s return to perfect health. Subordinated to the demands of the normative modern, the stories of healing contained in the Actes are stories of the ways in which early modern Canadians in extremis negotiated the circumstances of embodied difference in dialogue with their given worlds. Stripped of the real presences of God and Frère Didace, t­ hese are stories of value to generating

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a history of disability, to understanding the dimensions of early modern health care, even to reconstructing religious practices of the past, but they are not—­they c­ an’t be—­stories about “the transcendent break[ing] into time.”55 It is my contention, however, that to read t­ hese stories in ways that occlude the real presence of Frère Didace as a medium of divine agency is to misread them. The Actes, to be sure, provide a win­dow into the experience of impairment as disabling within the context of early modern French Canada (alluding to the ways in which their compromised bodies impeded Frère Didace’s mira­ culés from fulfilling their vari­ous occupational duties) as well as suggestive clues about the limitations of colonial healthcare (the repeated, palpable anxiety about being “opened up” giving strong indication of the risks of surgery in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century colony).56 Restricting our analy­sis, however, to what can be seen through the matrix of absence generates, at best, a partial understanding of the narrative data and, at worst, distorts the stories told in ways that entirely miss the point. To get at the kind of history preserved in the Actes, “what is necessary is not writing, certainly not overwriting, but a kind of un-­writing, to allow what is denied to break through.”57 Read against the grain of the normative modern, ­these twenty-­ one stories of miraculous healing are stories not just (and not primarily) about sick and disabled Canadians struggling to solve the prob­lems posed by their compromised bodies in the idiom of religion, but stories about God ­really pre­sent through the medium of Frère Didace in the midst and the mess of the mundane world. This is not to deny that the initiating event in ­every one of ­these twenty-­one stories is bodily impairment of one sort or another and that the narrative climax, without exception, comes at the moment of physical cure. My argument is rather that the restoration of the impaired body is not the most impor­tant ­thing about ­these stories. My argument, grounded in a hermeneutic of presence, is that ­these are stories essentially about making God real and only incidentally about solving the prob­lem posed by embodied

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difference. Abundant events of the sort that provide the raw data in History and Presence, the stories of miraculous healing in the Actes are distinguished by an aesthetic of baroque excess—­too much pain, too many ­people, too many prayers, too many devotional practices—­that accumulates over the course of the narrative to gesture ­toward experiences of real presence. Summoned by the exaggerated facts of embodied difference, real presence gradually accretes in t­ hese stories of healing ­until, in the end, sickness and disability yield to the curative power of God in a final and compelling witness to divine agency. To most of the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing in the Actes, t­ here is an overplus, a quantitative and qualitative excess that characterizes the narrative treatment of the inaugural impairment. In ­these stories, embodied difference weighs heavi­ly on the miraculé, causing not just mild incon­ve­nience but excruciating, almost unbearable suffering, the condition not just difficult to treat, but impossible, the miraculé’s case not just unlikely, but hopeless. In a number of cases, it is the longevity of the infirmity that gestures ­toward its intractability. Before turning to Frère Didace, Pierre L’Oiseau had been afflicted by sciatic gout for “the space of three or so years,” Michelle Godefroy had languished with an “acute sickness” for four, and Jean Fafard had endured “­great chest pains” for five.58 Worst of all was Marie Boubert’s ­daughter who had suffered from a “horrible mange” on her scalp that had lasted for ten years without yielding even a bit to the many remedies that ­were applied to it.59 In other cases, it is not so much the duration of the impairment, but its intensity that deserves notice. Take, for example, Sulpician ­father François Chèze’s elaborate description of the “long and dangerous sickness that God sent me two years ago.” It began with a “mild indisposition in the beginning of October,” only to take a turn for the worse when a “stich in [his] side of the most violent sort” wrested him from his slumber and kept him awake all night, tossing and turning. Ultimately diagnosed with cholera morbus, Chèze suffered “many mortal accidents . . . ​too long to explain,”

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including a spreading jaundice that began at his waistline, continual vomiting, and a double tertian fever that worsened over the course of twenty-­four hours. The attending physician M. Benoist “did his best,” but Chèze’s situation deteriorated u­ ntil fi­nally he could only “despair and wait for death.”60 In ten of the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing, physicians take their place among the cast of characters, ­whether as expert witnesses or as foils to Frère Didace, in each instance functioning within the context of the narrative to underscore the severity of the illness or impairment at stake and its re­sis­tance to medical treatment.61 Included in the Actes as expert testimony in support of the miraculous cure of ­Brother Louis are two letters submitted by colonial physicians. Both, the first written by Jean Coustard and the second by Jordan Lajus, offer medical opinions about what ailed B ­ rother Louis (a “cold humor in the right knee”) and how to treat it (surgery), the net effect of which is to limn what happened next—­Brother Louis’ spontaneous and perfect cure— as impossible in the order of nature. In other cases, physicians in the Actes play foils to Frère Didace, their inadequate medical knowledge and in­effec­tive treatments providing supporting evidence for the hopelessness of the mira­ culé’s case. It was only a­ fter “the doctors . . . ​declared his illness incurable” that Jean Fafard turned to Frère Didace, “promising to pray to him his w ­ hole life long and pledging to have his portrait done.”62 Physicians in the Actes regularly “abandon” their patients, as in the story of Antoine Brûlé, crippled by a “pain in his knee that caused him . . . ​excessive suffering.”63 Told by a surgeon from Batiscan that his condition was “too inveterate” to be cured and that his money would be wasted in treatment, Antoine sought a second opinion from Jacques Duguay (resident surgeon in Trois-­Rivières) who applied poultices and compresses to the aching knee without effect.64 In at least one case, it was not the futility of attempted treatments that limned the infirmity as hopeless, but palpable concern about the safety of the treatment proposed. When Charles Antoine de Tonnancour’s m ­ other sought medical advice regarding

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the tumor in his throat that had ballooned to the size of a pigeon’s egg, she was advised that “it would be necessary to cut” it out. “Unable to consent for fear that her son would die in this operation,” she appealed to the intercession of Frère Didace “upon the advice of several persons of piety.”65 Marked by “an abundant or hyperrealism,” miraculés’ descriptions of their “­great pains” and “extraordinary affliction[s],” “acute suffering” and “violent” fevers work on two levels, at once distinguishing the illness or impairment as beyond the reach of ­human remedies and at the same time authenticating the subsequent cure (its perfection and permanence the exaggerated inverse of the initiating impairment) as the certain effect of divine intervention.66 But the “overly pre­sent, abundantly embodied” difference that inaugurates ­these miracle stories does something e­ lse, too.67 It issues a summons to the divine, the first in a series of narrative moves that accrete, layer upon layer, to gesture t­ oward the experience of real presence. Over the course of the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing, real presence, summoned by the facts of exaggerated embodied difference, accrues through the accumulation of an excess of social relationships and devotional practices u­ ntil it is fully actualized in the climactic event of the cure. With few exceptions, each of the stories forwarded in the Actes is distinguished by intersubjective excess—by, as Orsi puts it of religious events more generally, a “density of relationships” at its core.68 ­These are crowded narratives, dramatic encounters not just between Frère Didace (as the medium of divine power) and his miraculés, but between Frère Didace, his miraculés, their kin, neighbors, superiors, caregivers, physicians, and o­ thers. In a host of cases, t­ hese narrative o­ thers serve as intermediaries between miraculés and Frère Didace, advising and encouraging miraculés (­whether directly or indirectly) to invoke the defunct Recollect. It was at the suggestion of ­Sister de Saint-­Paul, for example, that Louise Lanaudière turned to Frère Didace. Increasingly troubled by discomfort in her right arm, which she had injured years ago in a childhood accident upon the

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ice, Louise consulted Quebec’s leading physician, Michel de Sarrazin who opined that such an inveterate impairment was unlikely to “heal by natu­ral means.” It was then that ­Sister de Saint-­Paul advised the young nun “to have recourse to the prayers and intercession” of Frère Didace, “recounting to her several cures said to have been operated since [his death] by the invocation of this worthy religious.”69 Other miraculés, too, sought the intercession of Frère Didace upon the counsel of neighbors and friends. It was, for instance, with the help of Recollect ­father Alexis that Madeleine Beaudoin “offered a novena to Frère Didace” in the hopes of finding some relief from her chest pain, and at the suggestion of Madeleine Beaudoin herself that Marie Boubert de­cided to invoke “the good ­brother Didace.”70 Sometimes, kin, neighbors, and o­ thers do more than play matchmaker between miraculés and Frère Didace, recommending and assisting with devotional practices intended to solicit the Recollect’s intercession. Take, for example, Père Joseph’s intervention in the story of Louise Lanaudière’s miraculous recovery. When Louise hesitated to invoke Frère Didace upon S­ ister Saint-­Paul’s suggestion (placing her “confidence only in saints who ­were canonized”), her arm took a turn for the worse. Regarding “this as punishment for her disbelief,” Louise sought the counsel of her ­uncle Père Joseph who “inspired her to say” the Obsecro in honor of the Virgin Mary, a favorite of Frère Didace. For fifteen days, Louise recited the prayer, during which time her pain and discomfort “diminished notably.” Père Joseph then brought Louise a rosary that had belonged to Frère Didace, advising her to place the relic on her arm where it hurt the most. This Louise did for an additional fifteen days ­until, fi­nally, at the end of a month’s time she found herself “so perfectly cured” that she not only felt no more discomfort but, what’s more, experienced such strength and vigor that she immediately undertook the “most painful [kind of work], like ­doing the laundry and other similar tasks.”71 Examples like t­ hese—­examples in which kin, neighbors, and ­others mediate in vari­ous ways between miraculés and Frère

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Didace—­could be multiplied many times over. Restricting our analy­sis, however, to the kinds of connections made vis­i­ble by the Actes overlooks the density of relationships that occupy the narrative space between miraculés and the holy Recollect in more invisible ways. Beneath the explicit surface of the text, a complicated tangle of connections—­many forged by kinship, ­others by association—­ links miraculés to Frère Didace, Père Joseph, and each other in ways that threaten to overwhelm the narrative by their sheer abundance. Kinship ties, typically not acknowledged by the text, bind together a number of miraculés, including Marie Boubert (whose painful infirmity had brought Madeleine Beaudoin ­running) and her d­ aughter (with the inveterate mange on her scalp), Michelle Godefroy and her ­mother Perrine Picoté de Bélestre, Julien Constantineau and his u­ ncle Francois Lefebvre, Jean Leclerc and his brother-­in-­law Pierre L’Oiseau, and Charles Antoine de Tonnancour and his grand­mother Madeleine Beaudoin.72 Kinship ties, too, illuminate connections between certain of Frère Didace’s miraculés and Père Joseph, his most ardent supporter. Not only ­were the Actes’ first two miraculés—­both Ursulines from Quebec—­ blood relatives of Père Joseph, but Marguerite Aubuchon (healed of a swollen knee that had troubled her for two-­and-­a-­half years) was related to Père Joseph by marriage through her husband who, like Père Joseph, descended from the Le Neufs. Kinship ties, however, are not the only kind perceptible in the Actes. ­There are other, looser ties, too—­ties that circulate in the understory of the text and illuminate lines of connection between miraculés and ­others. A number of characters in the Actes figure in multiple capacities. Jean-­Baptiste Pottier, notary and court clerk for the town of Trois-­Rivières, for instance, appears as signatory in the procès-­verbaux of 1703 and 1704 as well as principal witness more than a de­cade l­ater to his wife’s miraculous recovery from an unknown illness that “held her so rigid she felt as if her nerves ­were being twisted;”73 Bishop Saint-­Vallier as signatory to the procès-­verbaux of 1699 and 1717 and as a miraculé himself, healed of “an extremely per­sis­tent fever;”74 René Godefroy de

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Tonnancour, procurer of the King and ­legal representative to the Recollects in Trois-­Rivières, on the board of inquiry in the procès-­ verbaux of 1703 and 1704 and ­later as ­father of Charles Antoine whose tumor spontaneously dis­appeared through the intercession of Frère Didace. My point in gesturing to the number and range of relational ties that bind together the characters in the Actes is not to affirm Peter Brown’s insight that miracles depend on networks of “friendship and patronage” (although they certainly do).75 Nor is my point to demonstrate the ways in which Frère Didace’s reputation as a power­ful thaumaturge spread along the Saint Lawrence river valley by word-­of-­mouth (although it certainly did), nor even to suggest the ways in which devotion to Frère Didace and shared experiences of illness, impairment, and sometimes recovery contributed to the cohesion of the early eighteenth-­century colonial community at Trois-­Rivières (although this seems reasonable, too). Rather, my intention in attending to the messy tangle of relationships beneath the surface of the Actes is to illuminate the complex social circuitry that powers real presence in the text. The narrative equivalent to holy places like Lourdes and Chimayo where “[p]resence is realized in the synchronous movement of bodies in relation to each other; in the mutual speaking of stories, one’s own and o­ thers’; and in shared distress,” the stories of miraculous healing in the Actes are marked by an intersubjective excess, a relational oversupply, a too-­muchness that spills over the borders of the text.76 Real presence accretes in the Actes not only through the layering of relationships—­relationships that bind miraculés to narrative ­others in vari­ous and sometimes redundant ways—­but also through the accumulation of devotional practices such as prayer, pilgrimage, and recourse to relics. Not a single one among the twenty-­one stories of miraculous intercession gives an account of healing effected by a ­simple petitionary prayer alone. In ­every case, the story is more complicated, the narrative space between the miraculé and Frère Didace, invocation and cure, thick with devotional practices and material media. Even in the sparest of stories,

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miraculés appeal to Frère Didace’s intercession not once, but repeatedly, in the majority of cases reciting a series of prayers that stretches the moment of invocation to nine days, or as in the case of Adrienne Barbier (relieved of an extreme stomachache that had lasted for five years) as long as fifteen. By 1714, miraculés had begun to ­couple their novenas with pilgrimage to Frère Didace’s tomb, adding to the nine-­day prayer a commitment to “­going during [­those] nine days to [the] church where his body reposes.”77 Once ­there, miraculés like Marie Boubert would “pre­sent to [Frère Didace their] vows and . . . ​have a mass said in his honor.”78 No longer content merely to appeal to Frère Didace in the abstract, within twenty years of the Recollect’s death miraculés sought proximity to his physical remains, too. Even Bishop Saint-­Vallier saw fit to come all the way from Quebec to Trois-­Rivières to perform his novena at “the place where his corpse resides.”79 ­Father Chèze, for his part, having “vowed to go visit the tomb of Frère Didace if I recovered my health,” took the first opportunity of his renewed strength to travel downriver from Montreal, ultimately saying four masses at the defunct Recollect’s tomb.80 In a number of cases, miraculés supplemented their verbal petitions not with pilgrimage, but with recourse to Frère Didace’s material relics, which they applied as so many supercharged salves to their aching body parts. Counselled by ­Sister de Saint-­Paul to recite three paters and three aves ­every day for nine days straight (“to thank God for the graces he had given to [Frère Didace] . . . ​ and with the intention also of obtaining by his intercession a cure for her illness”), Marie-­Anne Geneviève Angélique Robineau de Bécancour spied between her superior’s hands a copy of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ that had once belonged to Frère Didace and “begged [­Sister de Saint-­Paul] to apply it to her knee.”81 Catherine Le Pelé, in the hopes of finding some relief from a skin infection (“which the surgeons ­hadn’t been able to remedy”) invoked Frère Didace and wrapped her infected leg in the same ban­ dage that “had been used to treat him during his fatal illness.”82 Marie Boubert, at her wit’s end on account of the inveterate mange

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on her ­daughter’s scalp, complemented her invocation of Frère Didace by placing an image of the defunct Recollect inside the girl’s bonnet.83 Other miraculés, including ­Brother Louis and Antoine Brûlé (both suffering from inflamed knees), applied pieces of Frère Didace’s cassock to their swollen joints. If t­ here is a too-­muchness to the descriptions of impairment as well as to the relationships and practices that mediate between miraculés and Frère Didace, repre­sen­ta­tions of the moment of cure are no less extravagant in the Actes. Sometimes, miraculés experienced immediate relief upon invoking Frère Didace. Other times healing came more gradually, often over the course of a nine-­day novena or, more rarely, longer. For François Chèze, “it took all winter and all spring to recuperate” from cholera morbus.84 Sooner or l­ ater, however, touched by God through the medium of Frère Didace, miraculés ­were restored to ­wholeness, put back together exactly as they had been before their bodies gave out—­ sometimes at risk to themselves. When Julien Constantineau awoke, having slept soundly for the first time in the weeks since he’d been laid low by fever, he “found himself perfectly cured, and with a very good appetite,” so much so that his parents (who had invoked Frère Didace on his behalf) had to restrain him “for fear that he would make himself sick with overeating.”85 Accounts of the kind of healing experienced by Frère Didace’s miraculés are exaggerated, excessive, hyperbolic even. A full fifteen of the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing end with miraculés’ almost formulaic attestations to having been “perfectly cured”—­ attestations followed, in many cases, by testimony about the duration of the cure. At the time of deposition, Jean Fafard had been relieved of acute chest pains “for more than six months,” Pierre L’Oiseau of sciatic gout for a full three years, and Marie Boubert’s ­daughter of the mange on her scalp for four.86 To ­those of us with experience (personal or other­wise) with the kinds of conditions described in the Actes, recovery of this sort—­perfect and permanent—­ seems too good to be true. B ­ rother Louis, who awoke to discover himself “perfectly cured, with no pain at all, no swelling, and no sign

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of disfigurement,” thought so. “He was so astonished” at what had happened that to prove it to himself, “he walked around the dormitory, ­going into [every­one’s] bedroom . . . ​and then into the choir where he knelt for a half hour so freely as if he had never been injured at all.”87 It is hard, of course, to imagine a story of miraculous healing with a dif­fer­ent narrative ending. How e­ lse could such a story conclude other than with the event of the cure? But why the insistence in the Actes upon the perfection of the cure (and, relatedly, upon its longevity)? What narrative work is the addition of the adverbial “perfectly” ­doing to “cured,” which participle already carries with it implications of totality? To insist upon the perfection of a cure would seem to be to insist upon redundancy. Is ­there, ­after all, any other way to be cured? I want to suggest, however, that this discursive oversupply, which mirrors the extravagance of the original infirmity, is precisely the point. The twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing in the Actes are abundant narrative events, gorged with pain, suffering, hopelessness, impossibility, prayer, neighbors, kin, images, relics, pilgrimages, masses, and—­fi­nally—­overwrought affirmations of physical healing that gesture t­ oward experiences of real presence. Summoned by the extravagant facts of physical impairment and conjured by the accumulation of social relationships and devotional practices, God (through the medium of Frère Didace) fi­nally bursts onto the narrative stage at the moment of perfect, permanent, hyperrealistic healing. In t­ hese final narrative scenes exaggerated infirmity gives way to exaggerated recovery, embodied difference to real presence, its effacement the condition and sign of divine irruption in the midst of the everyday.88 The coincidence of the two—­impairment’s disappearance and God’s appearance, cure and theophany—­ought not to obscure the ways in which the former is subordinated to the latter within the narrative context of the Actes. The final step in a narrative progression that begins with the facts of embodied difference and builds with the abundant layering of social relationships and devotional acts, the phenomenon of

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the cure creates a void that makes way for the real presence of God. The crucial “modality” of God’s existence, the sudden and unexpected absence of an infirmity of extravagant proportions gestures powerfully to an agency that exceeds the limits of the natu­ral world.89 I want to suggest, however, not just that the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing gesture t­ oward experiences of real presence but also that, taken together and collected in the Actes, they generate experiences of real presence—or did for the devout readers for whom they ­were intended. Much as social relationships and devotional practices accrete in each of the stories, so the twenty-­one stories themselves accumulate over the w ­ hole of the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier into a kind of narrative excess. Even to the Actes themselves t­ here is a too-­muchness. Why so many stories of miraculous intercession when just a few would have sufficed to make the point? The Actes, however, aimed not just to remind readers of how Frère Didace had intervened in the past, but to create for readers the experience of Frère Didace’s availability in the pre­sent. Read against the grain of the normative modern, the handwritten manuscript (copies of which circulated among the growing community of Frère Didace’s devotees) was “not simply a vehicle of ideas in this world; it was itself a medium of presence.”90 To be sure, the experience of reading or hearing the Actes would have reminded his devotees of Frère Didace’s availability and efficacy as a miracle-­worker, prompting the sick and disabled of early eighteenth-­century France and New France to appeal to the Recollect ­brother in search of impossible cures. But the alchemic magic worked by the Actes was more power­ful than that. Much as in ancient times, “the passio brought the past into the pre­sent . . . ​ [giving] a vivid, momentary face to the invisible praesentia of the saint,” so the Actes invited readers to step out of time and place and into the presence of the miracle-­working Recollect.91 Saturated with story ­after story of miraculous intercession, story ­after story of swollen joints, infected skin, and inveterate fevers, the Actes represented God in the midst of the everyday as an effect of narrative

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abundance. Stories of miraculous intercession accumulated in the Actes in ways that dissolved the bound­aries between what had happened then and what was pos­si­ble now, between miraculé and reader, narrative and real­ity. The Actes made God real, accessible not just to t­ hose miraculés whose stories w ­ ere inscribed in the text but to its readers who ­were made to feel the presence of God and to know in their bones the potential for divine action in the world. ——— Reading the stories collected in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier as stories that gesture t­ oward experiences of God’s real presence demands a shift in interpretive perspective, one that refuses a hermeneutic of absence to recognize God as narrative subject. ­These are not stories that feature embodied difference only to erase it in the mold of the restitution narrative, but stories that feature embodied difference—­obdurate illness, disabling impairment, immoderate suffering, inarticulate pain—as the initiating action that makes pos­si­ble the narrative climax of divine irruption. In t­ hese stories, real presence accumulates through the gradual accretion of intractable infirmity, a density of social relationships, and an excess of devotional practices. When embodied differences dis­appear, as they do without exception at the end of each of the twenty-­one stories of miraculous healing, the effect is to signal the appearance of God in the midst of the mundane world. Embodied difference in the Actes functions first to summon and then to signify God’s presence through the medium of its own effacement. ­These are stories, I have argued, essentially about making God real and only incidentally about the restoration of the impaired body to ­wholeness. I have argued that embodied difference in the Actes is meaningful not (at least not primarily) as a narrative prob­ lem in need of solution, but as a narrative possibility that precipitates divine action. ­After all this, though, I won­der if I have put the point too strongly. Read within the matrix of presence, t­ hese are indeed stories about God’s accessibility and agency through the

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medium of Frère Didace. But perhaps they are at the same time, and just as essentially, stories about the recovery of health to the sick and functionality to the disabled. Maybe, as it is rendered in the Actes, embodied difference is both—­and equally—­prob­lem and possibility. Nearly three hundred years a­ fter Père Joseph put the finishing touches on his confrère’s dossier, Oliver Sacks wrote this: “[D]isease is never a mere loss or excess . . . ​­there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.”92 Both loss and gain. Both damage and compensation. Both prob­lem and possibility. This sounds right to me.

C onc lu s ion

since 2016, the New York Times has published a series of short essays contributed by or about ­people living with disabilities. One recent essay, written by Kenny Fries and published on January 8, 2020, brings us back to where this book began—on Tiergartenstrasse and with the memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia program. Fries’ piece, entitled “Before the ‘Final Solution’ Th ­ ere Was a ‘Test Killing,’ ” bears “vicarious witness” to the crimes attached to the Aktion T4 initiative.1 Fries locates the proximate cause of the systematic extermination of the nearly three hundred thousand men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren with disability in the “disvaluing of disabled lives.” Reduced to their diagnoses, to their patient identification numbers, and fi­nally to the generic institutional clothing they wore when they w ­ ere gassed, t­ hese victims of the test killing that preceded the mass murder of so many millions of ­others ­were progressively dehumanized ­until it became pos­si­ble for chemists like Albert Widmann and August Becker to forget that they ­were ­people, too. It’s easy to condemn this historical evil and tempting to think we share nothing of the homogenizing ambition that inspired the Aktion T4 program and its aftermath. The impulse, however, to eradicate, to correct, to remediate, and rehabilitate lingers and we would do well to attend to the ways in which “our own era replicates an ideology of extinction disguised beneath rhe­torics of 150

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assistance, support, and cure.”2 ­There is, perhaps, no better check on the excesses of such rhe­toric than the personal and par­tic­ul­ar stories of the sick and disabled themselves. Counterpoints to the medical narrative that would render embodied difference a pro­ b­lem in need of solution alone, the kinds of stories told in the Times are stories that rehumanize, that return color and texture to the lives of ­people living with embodied difference. ­These are stories about lupus and autism and multiple sclerosis, about divorce and dating, about eating dessert, about riding the subway, about signing the National Anthem at Super Bowl LIV. ­These are stories that do not discount the very real challenges of managing disability and chronic illness in a world designed by and for the able-­bodied but testify to the possibility and potential for living well with embodied difference. Th ­ ese are just the kinds of stories we need, and this is the kind of story I have tried to tell ­here. ——— This proj­ect began in response to an urgent need to make my own encounters with embodied difference, both sickness and disability, ­matter—­and to ­matter in ways that exceeded the limits of available cultural narratives. Against the weight of the ubiquitous restitution narrative that renders embodied difference as a prob­lem in need of resolution alone, a mechanical malfunctioning of the body that can and should surrender to medicine’s remedies, I have labored to carve out space for a dif­fer­ent kind of story in this book. I chafed against the prospect of Aggie’s conscription into a narrative that was not of her own making, and I chafed against my own. Although both of us have profited in priceless and lifegiving ways from medicine’s technologies—­Aggie from the accumulated skills of her vari­ous therapists and me from the expertise of my oncological team—­the mea­sures of our lived experiences with sickness and disability could not and cannot be captured by the meanings made within the therapeutic treatment rooms of the modern hospital.

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In search of the semantic architecture to allow my own encounters with embodied difference both as a m ­ other and as a patient a broader range of pos­si­ble resonances, I undertook this historical proj­ect. Equipped with the tools of my trade, I turned to the French Catholic past, listening carefully to the meanings made of sickness and disability in the Jesuit Relations, the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­ Dieu de Quebec, the Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin, and the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier. I have done this, let me be clear, not with the ambition of harvesting or recovering the meanings made of sickness and disability in another time and place (I am too much of a historicist for that), but rather to expose our own cultural certainties about what embodied difference means as mere contingencies and to make room for the creative apperception of sickness and disability beyond the mea­sure of the norm. If my readers have gleaned nothing ­else from this book, I hope they have at least gathered that t­ here is more than one way to tell a true story. The meanings made of sickness and disability are historical accidents, dependent on the particularities of discrete lifeworlds, the idiosyncrasies of genre, the intentions of authors, the dispositions of audiences. This is not to say, of course, that bodies are infinitely malleable, that sickness is merely discursive, that disability is just constructed—­but only that t­ hese durable material facts of embodiment can always be made to signify other­wise. This book has been one long, sustained argument in defense of narrative as a medium of meaning-­making. My argument, refracted through the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes, as well as through my self-­conscious engagement with the discipline of historiography at large, has been that it is only by converting meaningless events into meaningful stories with beginnings, ­middles, and ends that we—­Jesuits, nursing s­ isters, hagiographers, miraculés, patients, physicians, and, yes, historians—­make the facts ­matter. That we are narrative beings, incorrigible storytellers, has been well established by now.3 It is at the edge of the known world—at borderlands both literal and figurative where “life

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experiences . . . ​threaten to engulf, undermine, or nullify” us—­that we are most aware of the power of narrative to bring order to chaos, form to the formless.4 For all their Eu­ro­pean hubris and Christian chauvinism, the Jesuit ­fathers, Hospitaller ­sisters, and ordinary Catholic men and ­women on the Canadian frontier ­were strangers in a foreign land. Struggling to make sense of an unfamiliar landscape populated by an unfamiliar p­ eople so far from the comforts of home and the com­pany of neighbors and kin, they crafted narratives of coherence in ways designed to render the strange familiar and to reduce the unknown “to the category of the known and the knowable.”5 It makes sense—­could it be other­wise?—­that the Jesuits of seventeenth-­century New France told the stories of sickness and disability as opportunities for conversion, the cultivation of virtue, and dramatic displays of divine power. From where they stood and what they could see as religious men formed in the collèges of post-­Tridentine Catholic France, the pervasive facts of embodied difference mattered for what they meant within the context of the North American mission, just as for the nursing ­sisters of the Hôtel-­Dieu, refracted through the prism of the Hospitaller vocation, illness was made meaningful as a medium of the salvation of ­others and the sanctification of the self. Historians, both then and now, leave signs of themselves in the histories they write (even when, in keeping with the standards of modern historiography, we intend to occlude ourselves through a “systematic absence of any” personal referent).6 Each of the primary sources that have furnished the foundation for my analy­sis ­here bears the imprint of its author or authors. In the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes, discourse has been revised, modified, and arranged in ways that reveal the presence, as Roland Barthes puts it, of the writer or “the sender . . . ​[who] gradually fills himself with vari­ous predicates intended to establish him as a person, provided with psychological plenitude, with a countenance.”7 We are t­ here, always and already, in the histories we write. The stories told about sickness and disability in both ­those texts

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and in this one are stories that refigure the facts in response to questions about what it all means in the here-­and-­now. Much as Paul Ragueneau made sense of Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin’s outrageous spiritual transports in the familiar idioms of the hagiographic tradition, so I have made sense of my early modern sources in all their weird and wild otherness with the aid of theories and methods, categories and values native to my world. In a historiographical move that would have been at least intuitively familiar to the Jesuit ­fathers, Hospitaller ­sisters, and Recollect ­brothers of early modern New France, I have refigured the facts to fashion my own narrative of coherence at the intersection of the historical past and the scholarly pre­sent. Like my early modern interlocutors, I am, in a very real sense, a stranger among the artifacts of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century French Catholic Canada. Historians, especially historians of religion (and especially historians of religion in the secular acad­emy), always are. But the strangeness to which this book responds is a strangeness that belongs both to the past and to my par­tic­u­lar and personal pre­ sent. With this proj­ect, I have attempted at once to declare both the alien early modern past and my own alienating encounters with sickness and disability “instances of something . . . ​[I] have seen before.”8 Juxtaposing the two within a single narrative proj­ ect, I have sought to make sense of both. Although my own experiences of alienation have played out on registers more intellectual and emotional than geographic and cultural, I share with my early modern interlocutors the live sense of disorientation that becomes the foreigner in an unfamiliar land. ­There is an existential threat to life on the edge—­a risk of tumbling into the abyss, of falling apart, of unraveling, of dissolving. At the borderlands between the unknown and the known, storytelling is a survival strategy—­perhaps even the survival strategy—­a technique for making chaos comprehensible and for mastering what other­wise would surely undo us. The Jesuits—­including Paul Ragueneau—­the Hospitaller nuns and the twenty-­one miraculés whose testimony constitutes the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier understood this, at least

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implicitly. I have tried to be explicit about it, buttressed by the theoretical framework of narrative medicine, which affirms that storytelling can work to “make over a wild, disordered natu­ral occurrence into a more or less domesticated, mythologized, ritually controlled, therefore cultural experience.”9 ­There is a therapeutic payout to storytelling thus conceived. The richest yield of narrative medicine, however, is not the data collected by ­those prac­ti­ tion­ers willing to listen (although this m ­ atters, too), but the recovery of agency against the weight of a biomedical Leviathan that would reduce the experience of embodied difference to a prob­lem in need of resolution alone. Personal illness narratives—­narratives that work to integrate embodied difference into the arc of an individual life—do not, Kleinman reminds us, “merely reflect . . . ​experience,” but work actively to transfigure experience. In the best of cases, personal illness narratives reverberate through the body, ameliorating “symptoms and suffering” and changing the way sickness and disability feel.10 This book is, in no small part, my own personal illness narrative. Through the medium of my métier as a historian of early modern Catholicism, I have labored to make sickness and disability meaningful on my own terms, weaving ­those stray threads into the tapestry of my life in ways that preserve the integrity of the w ­ hole. I have done this not for the sake of artistry or for the sake of scholarship alone, but to clear space for flourishing and thriving in the midst of sickness and disability. That I needed this book “in order to live” ( Joan Didion) is obvious. That the book responds to a universal existential imperative is less so, perhaps, but equally true and prob­ably more immediately apparent to my readers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Although I have ­every reason to hope that by the time this book goes to press the pandemic ­w ill have abated, the lessons learned w ­ ill linger. The pandemic has exposed what modern medicine’s triumphs can easily obscure: that we are fragile and finite and inevitably bound for embodied difference of some kind or another, that “death itself [is] not a chance at all, but a certainty,” and that this is true no ­matter who

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you are or where you come from or how many diplomas you have on your wall.11 Sickness and disability are not exceptions to life, but part of life, not ­matters of “if ” but “when,” not maybes but givens. The question, then, is not ­whether we ­will experience sickness and disability, but how. Even as it is a personal illness narrative, this book is also (and equally) a historical study. With this proj­ect, I have reframed my own encounters with sickness and disability as goads to historical inquiry, transforming embodied difference from a prob­lem in need of solution to the generative grounds of intellectual creativity. I have told a story about sickness and disability h­ ere—­one that brings the Jesuit ­fathers, Hospitaller ­sisters, Recollect ­brothers, and ordinary lay Catholics of early modern New France into dialogue with con­temporary biomedicine and my own embodied experience. I have tried to understand the early modern Catholic past on its own terms, wielding tools conducive to close and careful apprehension of the sources within the thick contexts of meaningful worlds alien to my own. But I have not pretended to abstract myself from the historiographical pro­cess. I have insisted on accounting for my presence ­here among my subjects, among the ailing and infirm Indigenous Americans on the Jesuit mission field, among the sick and d­ ying of Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu, among Frère Didace’s miraculés clustered in settlements along the Saint Lawrence River, for I am convinced that we historians share the field with our subjects (even if we ­don’t always admit it). More importantly, I am convinced that genuine understanding of the sort anticipated by the ideal of verstehen depends on attending to the presence of the historian alongside the subject of study. Genuine understanding requires “empathic and vicarious understanding,” something other than intellectual assent, something more like existential empathy, something pos­si­ble only when we abandon our pretenses to objectivity and omniscience and recognize ourselves as co-­subjects of the histories we write.12 Critics w ­ ill say that historiography undertaken as a presentist exercise forged at the juncture of worlds risks distorting the past

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in light of the pre­sent; taken too far, scholarly theories and values brought to bear on the subject risk transforming the latter into simulacra of the former, transposing the strange so totally in the register of the familiar that the strange is no longer strange at all. The risk, however, of misreading the strange in light of the familiar—­the subject in light of the scholar, the past in light of the pre­sent—is one that belongs to all historians, even (and maybe especially) t­ hose who pursue historiography as if they themselves had nothing to do with it. ­There is something deeply ironic about the discipline’s reluctance to historicize historiography itself, by which I mean the general refusal to acknowledge the scholar’s shadowy presence alongside the subject. The histories we write are not themselves ahistorical but, belying the discipline’s aspirations to objectivity, are instead indelibly marked by time, place, and our own social and cultural network of assumptions. Depending on who tells them, in what context, and to which audience, stories represent the facts differently—­and always in ways that are incommensurate with real­ity itself. Stories, historiographical stories included, “do not follow the real, but merely signif[y] it.”13 We stand not above our subjects like gods out of time and place but with them, our apprehension of them conditioned by our own immediate perspectives and our own vital questions. The real risk is that we forget this, misapprehending our interpretations as defigured repre­sen­ta­tions of what ­really happened instead of refigured, contingent, even ironic (as White argues) translations of the past. But that’s not all. The risk of historiography pursued from on high is not only that we might ­mistake our provisional interpretations as timeless truths, but also that, fixing the past in an interpretative mold imposed from the pre­sent (but willfully ignorant of its own contingency and contextuality), we might succeed in bringing the past to heel, stripping it of its power to challenge and to question the certainties of the pre­sent. “Constraints on the scholar’s imagination become . . . ​constraints on the imaginations of ­others, specifically ­those whose lives the scholar aims to represent and understand,” Orsi warns. “­There is a double intellectual

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tragedy h­ ere, for once their real­ity is constrained by ours, they no longer have the capacity to enlarge our understanding or our imaginations. This,” he concludes, “is the price of ontological safety.”14 It’s hard to ignore the resonance between history pursued as scholarly monologue and healthcare as it’s typically practiced in institutions of con­temporary biomedicine. In both cases, the dynamic is one of an imposition of meaning from above. In both cases, the effect is the constraint of interpretative possibilities. But what would we—­historians and physicians alike—­get if we treated our subjects not “as . . . ​inert object[s] to be scrutinized” but phenomena “to be engaged?”15 What would we get if we recognized the writing of history and the practice of medicine as pro­cesses of co-­production, forms of “making rather than unmaking” that “leaves neither party unchanged?”16 I am thinking h­ ere with Rita Felski whose provocative, almost joyful, Limits of Critique contends powerfully that reading with suspicion (in the tradition of Freud, Marx, Nietz­sche) is but one way of reading. Although Felski’s argument focuses on the prob­lem of critique in par­tic­ul­ ar as it plays out in the field of literary studies, the invitation to stand not just ­behind the text, but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes pos­si­ble” is an invitation that, with some modification, extends (or should extend) to historians and physicians, too.17 Our subjects of study, w ­ hether textual artifacts or living, breathing patients, “are more than the sum of our projections: they can surprise or startle us, nudge us into unexpected moods or states of mind, cause us to do ­things we had not anticipated.”18 In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks tells the story of Mrs. O’C, an eighty-­eight-­year-­old ­woman who had been referred to his neurology practice a­ fter she complained of spontaneously hearing the repetitive drone of Irish folk songs. An electroencephalogram revealed that Mrs. O’C’s musical hallucinations w ­ ere the result of temporal lobe seizures caused by a stroke. Within a few months, the seizures had s­ topped and Mrs. O’C no longer heard m ­ usic. She confessed to Sacks, however, that she did “ ‘miss the old songs a ­little.’ ” At the end of life, “ ‘[i]t was like being

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given back a forgotten bit of my childhood again. And some of the songs w ­ ere r­ eally lovely.’ ”19 To Mrs. O’C, the auditory hallucinations had been prob­lems (she had, ­after all, sought medical attention), but they had been gifts, too, stimulants to memories that had been long since buried. “ ‘I’m glad it happened,’ ” she told Sacks, “ ‘It was the healthiest, happiest experience of my life . . . ​­There’s a sort of completeness I never had before.’ ”20 The restitution narrative would confine the meanings made of embodied difference to the domain of loss: for all kinds of differences, we have “privative words of e­ very sort,” writes Sacks, “Aphonia, Aphemia, Aphasia, Alexia, Apraxia, Agnosia, Amnesia, Ataxia.”21 That sickness and disability are experiences of loss, of deficit, of injury, of deprivation is often, of course, true and needs to be said. But that sickness and disability might sometimes be experiences of plenitude and possibility is also true; this, too, needs to be said. What Felski suggests about the limits of critique as a mode of literary interpretation is easily transposed onto the register of embodied difference: “We shortchange the significance of a work of art,” writes Felski, “by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.”22 At the foundation of this book is the conviction that we shortchange the significance of sickness and disability in similar ways. Constrained by available cultural narratives that frame embodied difference as a mechanical breakdown of the body, we tend to perceive both sickness and disability as prob­lems that need to be fixed. Face-­to-­face with the very nice speech therapist who explained Aggie’s statistical deviation from the developmental norm across a spectrum of evaluative categories, it was almost impossible not to make sense of her ge­ne­tic difference as anything other than an aberration in need of remediation. Perched on the edge of the blood draw chair, my forearm offered like a supplicatory sacrifice to the phlebotomist whose harvest would reveal in parts per milliliter how well or how poorly I was d­ oing, it was almost impossible not to make cancer m ­ atter only for what it had cost me.

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In “confusing a part of thought with the w ­ hole of thought,” however, “we are scanting a range of intellectual and expressive possibilities,” and a range of experiential possibilities, too.23 Sometimes, of course, the restitution narrative fits. At some moments and in some contexts, sickness and disability ­really are prob­lems in need of solution and ­little e­ lse. But when restitution is impossible—­ when disability is chronic, when sickness is terminal, when recovery is imperfect and impermanent—we need a richer reservoir of narrative alternatives upon which we might lean like so many prostheses to make the g­ oing easier. With this historical proj­ect, I have aimed to make room for such alternatives. I have done this, or tried to, by engineering the encounter between two sets of incommensurate narratives, the one culled from the context of early modern Catholic New France and the other from the con­temporary modern West. My purpose has not been to privilege one narrative type over another, but only to “play them . . . ​off against” each other in ways that conduce to a loosening of interpretative ties.24 In the liminal space between two t­ hings (past and pre­sent, subject and scholar), historiography pursued as an exercise in encounter widens the possibilities for the creative apperception of given worlds—­for interpreting the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes in ways that stretch t­ hese texts beyond authorial intentions and for experiencing our own lives differently, more profoundly, and orthogonally to the plotlines of available cultural narratives. Scholarship, writes Saba Mahmood, “is most power­ful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the pro­cess of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn ­things we did not already know before we undertook the engagement. This requires that we occasionally turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, to leave open the possibility that we may be remade through an encounter with the other.”25 Like medicine pursued as a collaboration between practitioner and patient, history undertaken as the disciplined encounter between scholar and subject puts both at stake. What, then, is the existential and epistemological yield of the encounter with the Jesuit f­ athers, the

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nursing ­sisters, and the Recollect b­ rothers I’ve so deliberately engineered in this book? What difference has it made—to me, to you, to the kinds of stories we find ourselves able to tell about our inevitable experiences of sickness and disability? At a minimum, my early modern sources offer relief from the suffocating hegemony of the restitution narrative, opening up space for counternarratives of the sort envisioned by Mitchell and Snyder. “Poetical and narrative efforts that expand options for depicting . . . ​experiences” of embodied difference, counternarratives enact alternatives to the relentless repre­sen­ta­tion of sickness and disability as prob­lems in need of resolution.26 The stories told in the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes—­stories of miracles and virtue, conversion and redemption, suffering and sanctity—­are power­ful reminders that all narrative repre­sen­ta­ tions of embodied difference, even ours, are historically-­contingent and culturally-­conditioned. At a minimum, ­these early modern sources invite us to imagine sickness and disability other­wise, recalling us to the freedom to play creatively with the meanings we make of our inevitable encounters with embodied difference. Read maximally, however, the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes offer narrative templates that reframe sickness and disability in the religious idioms of the early modern Catholic past. Read maximally, my early modern sources do not simply remind us that ­there are other ways of telling the stories of embodied difference, but recommend par­tic­u­lar ways of telling ­those stories that butt right up against our own moral, epistemological, and po­ liti­cal assumptions.27 I ­don’t want to summarize ­here the yield of my analyses in the preceding four chapters, in part ­because the detail and specificity of the analy­sis in each chapter resists such summarization. I do, however, want to gesture to some broad features that distinguish early modern Catholic stories of sickness and disability—­features like the profoundly social dimensions of experiencing embodied difference, the universal presumption of divine presence and agency, the repre­sen­ta­tion of sickness and disability as phenomena impacting not just bodies alone, and the

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rendering of such experiences as other than prob­lems in need of resolution—as a means of probing the narrative possibilities generated by this historical proj­ect. Sickness and disability are made to ­matter in the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes in the thick of relationships with diverse ­others. For all their variety, the protagonists of the stories told in ­these early modern sources are not severed from their communities, left to ­battle their uncooperative bodies in isolation or incommunicability (as Elaine Scarry supposed), but always in the meaningful com­pany of diverse o­ thers—­whether kin, neighbors, physicians, priests, nuns, the communion of saints, or God himself whose providential support and purposeful direction is never in doubt. U ­ nder t­ hese conditions, sickness and disability are not—­cannot be—­mere breakdowns of the body in need of repair as the restitution narrative would have it. Rather, as the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes each in dif­fer­ent ways make clear, sickness and disability pre­sent opportunities—­for conversion, for the cultivation of virtue, for salvation, for miraculous intervention, for summoning the palpable presence of God. I have insisted, repeatedly and in ways I hope I have made sufficiently clear, that in bringing the early modern world of my Catholic interlocutors into conversation with my own I have only tried to dramatize how meaning (the meaning of illness, the meaning of disability, the meaning of history) is never made but, instead, always in the making. My argument has been not that t­ here is a better way to tell the stories of sickness and disability—­that the meanings made of embodied difference in the early modern Catholic past are somehow more sustaining than the meanings made in the medicalized modern West—­but rather that ­there is something lifegiving about the infinite malleability of narrative. At the very least, it is this, this most elementary of history’s lessons, that I hope I have impressed upon my readers. This is, in the end, not a proj­ect in ressourcement. But what if it was? What would we want to take from the early modern past and apply to the pre­sent? I, for one, have no interest in reviving the

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connections between sickness and virtue, no desire to breathe new life into ­those tenuous ties between embodied difference and moral fault. I’d much rather cede my treatment and Aggie’s therapies to professional prac­ti­tion­ers and the modern biomedical system than to the Hospitaller nuns of early modern Quebec (well-­intentioned as they w ­ ere) or a holy man dead in the odor of sanctity (although I ­don’t deny the power of prayer). If, however, ­there is anything worth adopting from ­these early modern stories, it is this: that embodied difference is not only or always a prob­lem in need of solution, that we need not wait for a cure or a treatment or a vaccine to go on living, that we can find ways of giving meaning to and making sense of our encounters with sickness and disability, ways of flourishing and thriving not in spite of but with sickness and disability.

no t e s

Introduction 1. Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 570. 2. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6. 3. Rosemarie Garland-­Thompson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 2. 4. Ibid., 1. 5. On the emergence of the category of the “normal” as it relates to the history of disability, see Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso Books, 1995), 23–49. See also Davis, “Crips Strike Back: the Rise of Disability Studies,” in Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 33–46; Jan Branson and Don Miller, Damned for their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf ­People as Disabled (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet, 2002), 36–56; and Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of In­equality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, eds. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33–57. 6. Garland-­Thompson, Freakery, 4. 7. Or, as Henri-­Jacques Stiker has compellingly argued, erased. Critical of the modern West’s compulsive desire for sameness, Stiker argues that the history of disability in the Western world is one marked by the per­sis­tent effort to eradicate difference. But difference, writes Stiker, is not the exception. It is, rather, “something that happens in the natu­ral course of ­things . . . ​[D]isability happens to humanity and . . . ​­there are no grounds for conceiving of it as an aberration.” Henri-­Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 12. 8. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy; Frank Kermode, The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 9. See Leonard Kriegel, “Disability as Meta­phor in Lit­er­a­ture,” in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, eds. A. Gartner and T. Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987), 165

166  N o t e s t o I n t r o du c t i on 31–46; and Paul Longmore, “Screening Ste­reo­types: Images of Disabled P ­ eople in Tele­vi­sion and Motion Pictures,” in Images of the Disabled, 31–38. Rosemarie Garland Thompson argues that categories of normal and abnormal or­ga­nize repre­sen­ta­tions of disability in photography, too. See Garland Thompson, “Seeing the Disabled,” in New Disability History, 335–374. 10. For a critique of the overcomer narrative and its entanglement with the Horatio Alger masterplot endemic to American culture, see Kim Nielsen, “Helen Keller and the Politics of Civic Fitness,” New Disability History, 268–290. 11. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 164. 12. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), x. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 13. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin, “Disability,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015): 7. 14. Irina Metzler directly confronts the question of disability’s fitness as a category for understanding the past in her work on embodied difference in medieval Eu­rope. Wary of importing con­temporary conceptions of disability uncritically into the context of the medieval past, Metzler prefers the terminology of impairment. Unlike that of disability, “which implies certain social and cultural connotations that medieval impaired persons may not have shared with modern impaired p­ eople,” the terminology of impairment refers simply to embodied difference as a biological and transcultural fact. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Eu­rope: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High M ­ iddle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (New York: Routledge, 2006). ­Others, too, have interrogated the utility of disability as a conceptual category appropriate to distant times and places. See, for example, Edward Wheatley, “Monsters, Saints, and Sinners: Disability in Medieval Lit­er­a­ture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lit­er­a­ture and Disability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 17–31; Jeffrey R. Wilson, “The Trou­ble with Disability in Shakespeare Studies,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2017); Julie Orlemanski, “Literary Genre, Medieval Studies, and the Prosthesis of Disability,” Textual Practice 30, no. 7 (2016); Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora, Repre­sen­ta­tions of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Lit­er­a­ture (New York: T&T Clark, 2008); and Lois Bragg, Oedipus Borealis: The Aberrant Body in Old Icelandic Myth and Saga (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004). 15. Paul Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2003), 1, 2. 16. G. Thomas Couser, “Illness,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, 107. 17. Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 18. Ibid., 75. ­There are, Frank acknowledges, other available narratives. The chaos narrative, for example, ends not with recovery but death. Given its intolerability in

N o t e s t o I n t r o du c t i o n   167 the medical context and its pressing immediacy (an immediacy that denies its protagonists the luxury of reflection), the chaos narrative “cannot literally be told but can only be lived.” Ibid., 98. As an alternative to both the restitution narrative and the chaos narrative, Frank proposes the quest narrative. The quest narrative privileges illness as an opportunity for personal growth and the occasion for teaching ­others. 19. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1980), 65. 20. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 25. 21. Ibid., 35. 22. Ibid., 46. 23. For recent English-­language scholarship on the Relations, see Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-­Century Quebec (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2015); Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-­Century North Amer­ic­ a (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). 24. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15. 25. Howard Clark Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical Method (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), vii. 26. Ibid., 2. 27. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 11. 28. Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World, 3, vii. 29. Ibid., 57. 30. Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds ­People Make and the Scholars who Study Them (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 174. 31. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the ­Human Sciences (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991). 32. Hayden White, “The Real, the True, and the Figurative in the ­Human Sciences,” Profession (1992), 92. 33. Ibid. 34. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Eu­rope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); “The Value of Narrativity in the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Real­ity,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 5–27; and “The Question of Narrative in Con­temporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23, no. 1 (Feb. 1984): 1–33. 35. White, “Value of Narrativity,” 10. 36. I owe this phrase to Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London: Routledge, 1989). 37. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 351.

168  N o t e s t o I n t r o du c t i on 38. White, Metahistory, xxvi. 39. White argues that historians prefigure the field by adopting one of four pos­ si­ble modes of consciousness (or “tropes”) that color the way they make sense of the past. “In the poetic act which precedes the formal analy­sis of the field,” writes White, “the historian both creates his object of analy­sis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he w ­ ill use to explain it.” Through pro­cesses of prefiguration, the historian determines in advance the actors, relationships, and concepts that ­will, in the course of the history produced, constitute the prob­lem to be solved by historical analy­sis. Thus, the historian “characterize[s] the field and its ele­ments in his [sic] own terms . . . ​and . . . ​prepare[s] them for the explanation and repre­sen­ta­ tion he ­will subsequently offer them.” White, Metahistory, 30. 40. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi. 41. Ibid; Gill, “No Place to Stand: Jonathan Z. Smith as Homo Ludens, The Academic Study of Religion Sub Specie Ludi,” Journal of the American Acad­emy of Religion 66, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 305. 42. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 275. 43. Smith, Imagining Religion, xi. 44. At least, the kinds of truths produced by a certain kind of historical writing are ironic. Alternatives to irony as a mode of historical consciousness, as White conceives it, are meta­phor, metonymy, and synecdoche. See White, Metahistory, 31–38. 45. Abbott, Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 153. White defends the “truth-­ value” of narrative history as of a “dif­fer­ent order from ­those of its social-­scientific counterpart.” White, “The Question of Narrativity,” 21. 46. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the H ­ uman Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988), xiv. 47. Kleinman, Illness Narratives, 3. Kleinman also distinguishes between illness and sickness, defined as “the understanding of a disorder in its generic sense across a population in relation to macrosocial forces.” Ibid., 6. 48. Kleinman defines disease as “what the practitioner creates in the recasting of illness in terms of theories of disorder.” Ibid., 5. 49. Ibid., 49. 50. See, for example, Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Frank, “Rhe­toric of Self-­ Change: Illness Experience as Narrative,” So­cio­log­i­cal Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1993): 39–52; Frank, At the ­Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991); Fitzhugh Mullan, Ellen Ficklen, and Kyna Rubin, eds., Narrative ­Matters: The Power of the Personal Essay in Health Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); and Shlomith Rimmon-­Kenan, “The Story of ‘I’: Illness and Narrative Identity,” Narrative 10, no.1 ( January 2002): 9–27. In tandem with the rise

N o t e s t o I n t r o du c t i o n   169 of narrative medicine, works focusing on the phenomenology of illness have also multiplied in recent years. See, for example, Havi Carel, Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008); and James Aho and Kevin Aho, Body ­Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease, and Illness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008). Vari­ ous scholars have successfully brought narrative medicine into non-­Western and premodern contexts, demonstrating the yield of thinking about illness through the medium of storytelling across cultures and historical periods. See, for example, Ron Barrett, Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Anthony Cerulli, Somatic Lessons: Narrating Patienthood and Illness in Indian Medical Lit­er­a­ture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012); and Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Eu­rope (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2011). 51. Frank, Wounded Storyteller, 13, 9. 52. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67. 53. Charon, Narrative Medicine, 9. 54. “To get medicine’s help,” writes Frank, “I had to cede the territory of my body to the investigation of doctors who ­were as yet anonymous. I had to be colonized.” Frank, At the ­Will of the Body, 51. 55. Charon, Narrative Medicine, 181. 56. Frank, Wounded Storyteller, 13. 57. Lit­er­a­ture on the suffering body within early modern Catholic contexts is extensive. See, for instance, Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); Stephen Greenblatt, “Mutilation and Meaning,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Eu­rope, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 221–242; Stephanie Kirk, “Pain, Knowledge, and the Female Body in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 61, no. 1 ( June 2008): 37–53; and Jan Fransvan Dijkhuizen and Karl Enenkel, “Introduction,” in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1–18. For a compelling treatment of the ambiguity of the suffering body in the modern American Catholic imagination, see Robert Orsi, “Mildred, Is it Fun to be a Cripple?,” in Catholic Lives, Con­temporary Amer­i­ca, ed. Thomas J. Ferraro (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 19–64. 58. In the background h­ ere, lending a loose thematic unity to the four sources taken together, is the passion narrative, the paradigmatic Christian story that made the link between Christ’s bloody death on the cross and the salvation of humankind. I ­don’t mean to suggest that the assorted (and sometimes incommensurate) stories told about embodied difference in the Relations, the Histoire, the Vie, and the Actes are but mimetic variations on Christ’s own, but only that the very possibility that

170  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 sickness and disability might be more than physical prob­lems to be solved (or, given the limitations of premodern medicine, endured) owes a debt to the gospel template. That sickness and disability might pre­sent opportunities for spiritual growth, potentially redeemable if not always redemptive, distinguishes t­ hese stories as deeply Christian—­and fundamentally at odds with the narrative pattern generated within the secular framework of modern biomedicine. 59. H. Porter Abbott, Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10. 60. See, for example, Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Lit­er­a­ture,” in Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Philosophical Analy­sis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–74. 61. Jackson, Politics of Storytelling, 35. 62. Joan Didion, The White A ­ lbum (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 11. 63. Jackson, Politics of Storytelling, 23. 64. Ibid., 34. 65. Ibid., 23.

Chapter 1. Bedside Manners My gratitude to the American Studies group at St. Louis University who read and critiqued an ­earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 22 (Cleveland, OH: Burrows, 1896–1901), 223–225. Although uncertain, Emery’s “precious stone” may have been invested with spiritual presence, a tangible manitou of ambiguous power. In the absence of a critical edition of the full range of Jesuit Relations from 1632 to 1673, I have chosen to rely on the more widely available Thwaites edition (its shortcomings notwithstanding) in lieu of the Lucien Campeau’s incomplete Monumenta Novae Franciae. For a thorough discussion of the two collections, see Micah True, “Is it Time for a New Edition of the Jesuit Relations from New France? Campeau vs. Thwaites,” Papers of the Biographical Society of Canada 51, no. 2 (2013): 261–279. 2. Population estimates from the period range widely. See Karl Schlesier, “Epidemics and Indian Middlemen: Rethinking the Wars of the Iroquois, 1609–1653,” Ethnohistory 23, no. 2 (Spring 1976): 137; Gary Warrick, “Eu­ro­pean Infectious Disease and Depopulation of the Wendat-­Tionontate (Huron-­Petun),” World Archeology 35, no. 2 (October 2003): 258–275; Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-­Petun, A.D. 500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Eric E. Jones, “Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Population trends in Northeastern North Amer­i­c a,” Journal of Field Archeology 35, no. 1 (March 2010): 5–18. On disease and depopulation in the Amer­i­cas more generally, see Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   171 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); and Eric E. Jones, “Spatiotemporal Analy­sis of Old World Diseases in North Amer­i­ca, 1519–1807,” American Antiquity 79, no. 3 ( July 2014): 487–506. 3. Jesuit F ­ ather Claude Chauchetière’s Vie of Kateri Tekakwitha explic­itly situates the life of the Haudenosaunee holy w ­ oman within the context of a late seventeenth-­ century smallpox epidemic, supplementing what the Relations describe about the effects of the disease on Indigenous populations. See Claude Chauchetière’s La Vie de la B. Catherine Tegakouita dite à présent la Saincte Sauvagesse, translated and printed in The Positio of the Historical Section of the Sacred Congregation of Rites on the Introduction of the Cause for Beatification and Canonization and on the Virtues of the Servant of God, Katharine Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks (New York: Fordham University Press, 1940). 4. I am not the first to argue that disease facilitated Jesuit success in the Amer­i­cas. A number of scholars have pointed to the demographic devastations wrought by germs imported from Eu­rope as a leading f­ actor in stimulating Indigenous conversions to Chris­tian­ity. Rebecca Crocker, for example, building on the work of Margarita Kay and Daniel Reff, argues that the Jesuits’ relative immunity to imported diseases and the comparative efficacy of Eu­ro­pean remedies against familiar microbes, as well as a missionary willingness to fill the power vacuum left by mass Indigenous deaths, contributed to the success of the Jesuit mission in Sonora. See Rebecca Crocker, “Healing on the Edge: The Construction of Medicine on the Jesuit Frontier of Northern New Spain,” Journal of the Southwest 56, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 293–318. My argument, however, is slightly dif­fer­ent than Crocker’s. I am less interested in the ways in which the demographic effects of disease paved the way for missionary victories and more interested in the ways in which Jesuits mobilized sickness and disease in ser­vice of the mission. 5. For a good overview of the history of the Jesuits in New France, see Jacques Monet, “The Jesuits in New France,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 186–198. See also Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les Fils de Cain: Jésuites et Amérindiens Nomades en Nouvelle France, 1632–1642 (Quebec: Nuit Blanche Editeur, 1990); Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North Amer­i­ca, 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2000); Nicholas P. Cushner, Soldiers of God: The Jesuits in Colonial Amer­i­ca, 1565–1767 (Buffalo, NY: Language Communications, 2002); Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 14–53; Takao Abé, The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in Light of the ­Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden; Brill, 2011); and Bronwen McShea, Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019).

172  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 6. Beaulieu, Convertir les Fils, 89–94. See also Emma Anderson, Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7. Also aiding the pro­gress of the mission w ­ ere the practical advantages of alliance (often cemented through baptism) with the French, and the growing military and economic dependence of native ­peoples on the French. 8. By 1648, a full ten ­percent of the Wendat population had embraced the Christian faith. Cushner, Soldiers of God, 271. 9. Lawrence C. Wroth, “The Jesuit Relations from New France,” The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of Amer­ic­ a 30 (1936): 118. 10. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 10, 183. 11. Ibid., vol. 19, 15. 12. Ibid., vol. 31, 197. 13. François Lebrun, Médecins, saints, et sorciers aux 17e et 18e siècles: se soigner autrefois (Paris: Temps Actuels, 1983), 17. 14. Claude Joly, Les devoirs du Chrestien, dressez en forme de catechisme (Paris, 1677). 15. Antoine Blanchard, Essay d’exhortations pour les états différens des malades (Paris, 1742), 323, 12. Blaise Pascal’s “Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies” and the 1689 Nantes catechism make similar arguments about the spiritual utility of illness and infirmity. For a good overview of early modern French perspectives on sickness, disease, and disability, see Lebrun, Médecins, saints, et sorciers. See also Rénald Lessard, Se soigner au Canada aux VIIe and VIIIe siècles (Quebec: Musée Canadien des Civilisations, 1989); Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press 2004); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Gary Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 16. Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 78. 17. Ibid., 79. 18. Secondary scholarship on Indigenous medicine in early modern North Amer­ i­ca is l­ imited. Resources include Bruce Tigger, ­Children of Aataensic: A History of the Huron ­People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 1976), 75–89; Virgil J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 36–110; and Nancy J. Turner, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous P ­ eoples of Northwestern North Amer­ i­ca (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2014). 19. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 6, 189. Although the Relations are largely ­silent on Indigenous attitudes t­ oward disability in par­tic­u­lar, the following story speaks (perhaps tongue-­in-­cheek) to approaches ­toward sensory impairment: “­Here is an invention which has not yet been discovered in France. A man who had lost one of his eyes, through inflammation, cured himself in this way. He tore out that eye, and

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   173 put the eye of an Ea­gle in its place. But, as it did not quite fill the cavity, he changed it for the eye of a Turtle. As the latter was dim, and made him see objects imperfectly, he threw it away and used the eye of a Loon (this is a River bird). This eye was so keen that it enabled him to see the bottom of the lakes and rivers over which he paddled, and showed him all the fishes, both g­ reat and small, that ­were in them. When he passed over the ­great depths of ­water, the frightful distance from his ­little canoe to the bottom of t­ hose depths inspired him with such terror that he was obliged to discard that bird’s eye, and to take the eye of his Dog, which suited him so well that he used it for the rest of his days, with, as much ease as his own natu­ral eye. It was a blind w ­ oman who related this story of her Grand­father. She is not more credible regarding eyes than she is concerning colors.” Ibid., vol. 22, 291–293. 20. Ibid., vol. 33, 197. 21. Ibid., vol. 53, 285–287. 22. Ibid., vol. 1, 257. 23. Ibid., vol. 43, 267; vol. 15, 179. 24. Ibid., vol. 1, 211. 25. Ibid., vol. 3, 117; vol. 16, 49. 26. Ibid., vol. 8, 123. 27. The essential role played by the imagination in the work of historical scholarship does not, White insists, impugn historiography’s truth claims. How e­ lse “can any ‘past,’ which is by definition comprised of events, pro­cesses, structures, and so forth that are considered to be no longer perceivable, be represented in ­either consciousness or discourse except in an ‘imaginary’ way?” Hayden White, “The Question of Narrative in Con­temporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23, no. 1 (Feb. 1984): 33. 28. Eloise A. Brière, “Ventriloquizing the Native: Whose Voice is it?” The French Review 84, no. 6 (May 2011): 1200–1212. 29. Kleinman, Illness Narratives, 6. In general, I have tried to hew closely to the terminology of “illness” when discussing the phenomenological experience of the more neutral event of “sickness.” For examples of scholarship that directly addresses sickness and healing in the context of Jesuit missions, see Crocker, “Healing on the Edge;” Steven J. Harris, “Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions,” Isis 96, no. 1 (March 2005): 71–79; and Allan Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-­Century North Amer­i­ca (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 70–93. On early modern Jesuit perspectives on sickness and disease, see A. Lynn Martin, Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth C ­ entury (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth ­Century Journal Publishers, 1996) and Thomas Worcester, “Plague as Spiritual Medicine and Medicine as Spiritual Meta­phor: Three Treatises by Étienne Binet, S.J. (1569–1639),” in Piety and Plague: from Byzantium to the Baroque, eds. Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2007), 224–236.

174  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 30. Thomas Worcester, “A Defensive Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-­ Century New France,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 1–15. For an analy­sis of deathbed scenes in the Jesuit Relations, see Erik R. Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes: Ethnohistorical and Repre­sen­ta­tional Approaches,” Journal of American History 88, no. 1 ( June 2001): 17–47. 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Many have wrestled with the reliability of the Jesuit Relations as objective history, particularly as a source of ethnohistory. See, for example, Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-­Century New France (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2015); Seeman, “Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes;” and Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 3–18. 33. Ibid., vol. 22, 101. 34. Deathbed baptisms are a well-­noted feature of the early Jesuit mission in New France. See, for example, Erik R. Seeman, The Huron-­Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-­European Encounters in Early North Amer­i­ca (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 52–58; Emma Anderson, The Betrayal of Faith: the Tragic Journey of a Colonial Native Convert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 154–155; and Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les Fils de Cain: Jésuites et Amérindiens nomades en Nouvelle-­France, 1632–1642 (Quebec: Nuit Blanche Éditeur, 1990), 89–132. 35. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 15, 67; vol. 35, 131. 36. Ibid., vol. 13, 111. 37. Ibid., 58, 215–217. See also vol. 11, 137. 38. Ibid., vol. 54, 55–57. See also vol. 15, 67–69 where the Jesuits are accused of caring “for only the sick and the dead.” 39. Ibid., vol. 17, 189. See also vol. 58, 217–219. 40. Ibid., vol. 64, 163. 41. On disease in early Canada, see Warrick, “Eu­ro­pean Infectious Disease;” Dean R. Snow and William A. Starna, “Sixteenth-­Century Depopulation: A View from Mohawk Valley,” American Anthropologist 91, no. 1 (March 1989): 142–149; Bruce Trigger, “Ontario Native ­People and the Epidemics of 1634–40,” in Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game, ed. Shepard Krech III (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 19–38; and Allan Greer, The ­People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 18–26. 42. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 8, 147. 43. Ibid., vol. 35, 127–137. 44. Ibid., vol. 62, 93. 45. Ibid., vol. 51, 227. 46. Ibid., 227–229. 47. Jesuits in Sonora, like Jesuits in New France, accused native Americans of abandoning their sick. Crocker suggests that the Sonoran Jesuits may have

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   175 misapprehended native intentions, interpreting an unwillingness to usurp the healing authority of the shaman for indifference ­toward the sick and the ­dying. Crocker, “Healing on the Edge,” 306. 48. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 16, 23. It is easy (if perhaps overly skeptical) to dismiss Jesuit repre­sen­ta­tion of Indigenous practices as exaggerated, biased, or other­wise skewed t­ oward the unflattering. The inclusion in the Relation of 1642 of a letter dictated by an Indigenous convert that contrasts the native habits of abandoning the sick with the charity of the newly arrived Hospitaller nuns, however, suggests that in this case at least, Jesuit reports can be trusted. We are very glad that they have compassion for the sick, for we ­others, Nimirwerindamin Ka chawerimawatch eakousirittii Ketna mirawint we have not that custom, We forsake one another, we ­people; sometimes we nitichiriniwakisimin Nipakiritimin nirawint Nanikoutounouz strangle the sick. It was thus formerly we ­were wont to do: nipiskitounebirenanak eakousitiik mi taouch echiriniwakisiang that is why we are very glad that they have arrived ­here who mi ka ountchi mirwerindamang ka michagawatch oundoire ka are robed in white. Since they have arrived, it is since that time Wabakoretiik ki akou michagawatch mi akou that they have compassion on us. We won­der that they have left Chawerimiiomintwa Nimakaterindamin ka nagatahunt their own country. Ibid., vol. 24, 37–41. 49. Ibid., vol. 61, 183. The charity practiced by the nuns of the Hôtel-­Dieu had much the same effect. See vol. 22, 167, vol. 25, 119–121, and vol. 41, 229–231. 50. Ibid., vol. 11, 107–109. 51. Ibid., vol. 14, 151. 52. Ibid., vol. 57, 81; vol. 24, 55. 53. Ibid., vol. 41, 193. 54. Ibid., vol. 51, 23. See also vol. 23, 207 on how Algonquin parents, having perceived so many cures following baptism, brought their ­children to be baptized by the Jesuits as soon as they fell ill. 55. Ibid., vol. 11, 83. 56. Ibid., vol. 11, 109. Like le Jeune, a Wendat convert also tried to disabuse his countrymen of the notion that baptism brought restoration of physical health. “ ‘Do not think,’ ” he cautioned at the bedside of his ­dying compatriot, “ ‘that the w ­ ater of Baptism is poured out to heal thy body: it is to purify thy soul, and to give thee a life which cannot die. Baptism was not instituted for a ­thing so low as our life.’ ” Ibid., vol. 20, 201.

176  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 57. Ibid., vol. 50, 55. 58. Ibid., vol. 6, 137. 59. Ibid., vol. 55, 79–93. 60. Ibid., vol. 19, 13–15. 61. Ibid., vol. 25, 213. 62. Ibid., vol. 20, 293–295. 63. Ibid., vol. 40, 233–239. 64. Ibid., vol. 29, 191. 65. Ibid., vol. 20, 265. The distinction between a shaman and medicine man is unclear in the Relations. In general, shamans ­were called upon to mediate when super­natural forces ­were presumed at play. 66. Ibid., vol. 44, 259–265. 67. Ibid., vol. 25, 205. 68. Ibid., vol. 20, 167–169. 69. Ibid., vol. 26, 85. 70. Ibid., vol. 32, 235. 71. Ibid., vol. 45, 53–55. 72. Ibid., vol. 58, 59. 73. Ibid., vol. 22, 163. 74. Ibid., vol. 30, 79. For similar sentiments, see vol. 32, 251, vol. 39, 139–141, and vol. 48, 67–69. 75. Ibid., vol. 36, 203. For other instances of converts expressing a distaste for the world and an eagerness for life ­after death, see vol. 22, 161 and vol. 14, 167. 76. Ibid., vol. 32, 227. 77. Ibid., vol. 48, 123. 78. Ibid., vol. 32, 197. 79. Ibid., vol. 55, 115–125. 80. Take, for example, the prayer offered by a man on behalf of his son Isaac. ­After Isaac fell ill shortly a­ fter his baptism, his f­ ather “took him into his arms, brought him to the Church, made on his forehead the sign of the Cross with holy ­water, and presented him to God with ­these words: ‘He is thine; take him, or give him back to me. Thou didst give him to me; do what thou wilt. Thou canst heal him; I believe in thee; have mercy on me.’ ” Much to the ­father’s ­great plea­sure, “no other medicine was needed for the healing of that child: he brought him back, full of life, into his cabin.” Ibid., vol. 35, 243. For other prayers hewing to a similar formula, see vol. 32, 273–275 and vol. 22, 79. 81. Ibid., vol. 60, 221–223. 82. Ibid., vol. 31, 261–265. 83. Ibid., vol. 32, 277. Another time, the Relations report, it was the reception of the Eucharist that cured an ailing Algonquin who had been “overtaken by a sort of

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   177 paralysis accompanied by extraordinary convulsions and ner­vous contortions.” Ibid., vol. 45, 49–51. 84. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 40, 243. 85. Ibid., vol. 56, 101. 86. Ibid., vol. 20, 21–23. For another holy ­water cure, see vol. 32, 259–261. 87. Ibid., vol. 52, 19. 88. Ibid., vol. 15, 83. For reports of other cures through the medium of saints, see vol. 50, 119–121, vol. 51, 37, vol. 27, 47–49, and vol. 29, 167–169. 89. Ibid., vol. 22, 225. 90. Ibid., 31, 265.

Chapter 2. Recovery and Redemption in the Histoire de l’Hôtel Dieu de Quebec 1. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 6, 139–141. 2. Ibid., vol. 7, 287–289. 3. Ibid., 287–293. 4. Ibid., vol. 9, 97–99. 5. Ibid., 255–261. 6. For a biographical treatment of the Duchess, see Alfred Bonneau-­Avenant, La duchesse d’Aiguillon, nièce du cardinal de Richelieu, sa vie et ses oeuvres charitables (Paris, 1879). For a discussion of early modern French reading practices, see Roger Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1987). 7. For extended discussion of dévotes like the Duchess and their impact on charitable enterprise in seventeenth-­century France, see Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: ­Women and Church in Seventeenth-­Century France (Kingston, Ont.: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1990); Jean-­Pierre Gutton, Dévotes et société au XVIIe siècle. Construire le Ciel sur la Terre (Paris: Belin, 2004); Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious W ­ omen and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Susan Dinan, ­Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-­Century France: the Early History of the ­Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 8. See Henri-­R aymond Casgrain, Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec (Québec, Léger Brousseau, 1878), 39–41, for a brief discussion of the relationship between the Duchess and Vincent de Paul. 9. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 8, 233. 10. Ibid., 233–235. 11. Having recently under­gone a rigorous reform, the Hospitaller nuns of Dieppe ­were, by and large, a zealous group and only too e­ ager to give up the comforts and security of France for the chance to save souls in the new world. See François

178  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 Rousseau, La Croix et le Scapel: Histoire des Augustines et de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec (1639–1989), vol. 1 (Sillery, Quebec: Éditions du Septenrion, 1989), 22. 12. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 16, 19. 13. Les Annales de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, 1636–1716, ed. Albert Jamet (Quebec: l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec, 1939), 16. 14. For a classic discussion of the impetus ­behind Sillery, see James P. Ronda, “The Sillery Experiment: A Jesuit-­Indian Village in New France, 1637–1663,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3, no. 1 (1979): 1–18. 15. Annales, 16. 16. Ibid., 18–19. 17. Ibid., 20. 18. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 16, 17–23. 19. Constitutions de la Congregation des Religieuses Hospitalières de la Misericorde de Jesus de l’Ordre de Sainct Augustin, 1666, part I, chapter 1. 20. Ibid. 21. Despite its anachronism, I have opted to use the term “patient” to refer to the poor sick who sought and received treatment at Quebec’s Hôtel-­Dieu. I have made this decision as an accommodation to my reader and the conventions of con­ temporary language. For a discussion of the etymology of the term “patient,” see Rousseau, La Croix et le Scalpel, 22. 22. “Aux Religieuses Hospitalieres de la Misericorde de Jésus de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec présentes et a venir,” Annales. 23. For a helpful background to the Histoire and the circumstances of its production and ­later publication, see Jamet’s introduction to the Annales, xxxi-­xlvii. 24. Joan E. DeJean, Tender Geographies: ­Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 43. For further discussion of the phenomenon of collaborative authorship in early modern France, see DeJean, 71–93. 25. Its title notwithstanding, the Histoire likely ­wouldn’t qualify as “history” in Hayden White’s estimation. To count as history, argues White, events “must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, which they do not possess as mere sequence.” Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 9. 26. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 126. For more on the genre beyond its monastic context, see Edward Roberts, Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth ­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Sarah Foot, “Finding the Meaning of Form: Narrative in Annals and Chronicles,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 88–108; François Louis Ganshof, “L’historiographie dans la monarchie franque sous les Merovingiens et les

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   179 Carolingiens,” Settimane 17 (1970): 631–685, 660–684; and Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For more on convent writing, in par­tic­u­lar, see Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 27. Breisach, Historiography, 127. 28. Ibid., 127. 29. Ibid., 130. 30. Alternatives to the Histoire, François du Creux’s Historiae Canadensis (Paris: Cramoisy, 1664) and François-­Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (Paris: Chez la veuve Ganeau, 1714) aimed at g­ rand narratives of the history of French Canada in contrast to the par­tic­u­lar history told by the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec. For extended discussions of the par­tic­u­lar kind of historiography represented by the histoire de cabinet, see Faith Evelyn Beasley, Revising Memory: ­Women’s Fiction and Memoirs in Seventeenth-­Century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Publishing ­Women’s Life Stories in France, 1647–1770: from Voice to Print (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 1–11. 31. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gender and Genre: W ­ omen as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in Beyond their Sex: Learned ­Women of the Eu­ro­pean Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Pres, 1980), 164, citing Margaret Lucas, Duchess of Newcastle, The Life of William Cavendish Duke of Newcastle. For more on “par­tic­u­lar” histories, see Gianna Pomata, “History, Par­tic­u­lar and Universal: On Reading Some Recent ­Women’s History Textbooks,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 6–50. 32. For readers wanting a general background to the history of New France, see Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique Française (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). For a good English-­language history, see William Eccles, France in Amer­i­ca (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1990). 33. Annales, 128. 34. Ibid., 180. 35. Ibid., 290. 36. Early modern female authorship has received a fair amount of scholarly attention in recent years. See Beasley, Revising Memory; Goldsmith, Publishing ­Women’s Life Stories; James Daybell, ed., Early Modern W ­ omen’s Letter Writing (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Lit­er­a­ture (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989); Domna Stanton, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France: ­Women Writ, ­Women Writing (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, eds., ­Going Public: ­Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Katherine Anne Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, W ­ omen, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995).

180  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 37. See, for example, Catherine M. Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 38. Archives du Monastère des Augustines, HDQ-­F1-­A5, 1/1:1. 39. For a brief account of the early seventeenth-­century reformation of the Hôtel-­ Dieu of Dieppe, see Annales, xxii-­x xiii. The reformers’ insistence on enclaustration prompted all but four nuns to leave the community. Following the reform, the reconstituted community maintained its commitment to the Augustinian rule but was other­wise entirely changed. 40. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 249. For a background on healthcare in early Chris­tian­ity, see Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Healthcare in Early Chris­ tian­ity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). For studies of hospitals in medieval Eu­rope, see James William Brodman, Charity and Religion in Medieval Eu­rope (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2009); Jean Imbert, Histoire des Hôpitaux en France (Toulouse, France: Privat, 1982); and Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster, The En­glish Hospital 1070–1570 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 41. For more on hospitals and poor relief in the context of early modern Eu­rope and the Reformation, see Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, with Jon Arrizabalaga, eds., Healthcare and Poor Relief in ­Counter Reformation Eu­rope, (London: Routledge, 1999); Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London: Routledge, 1989); Marie-­Claude Dinet-­Lecomte, Les Soeurs Hospitalières en France au XVIIe—­XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Honoré-­Champion, 2005). For work on hospitals in early modern French Canada, see Catherine Fino, l’Hospitalité, figure sociale de la charité: deux fondations hospitalières à Québec (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010); François Rousseau, La Croix et le Scapel: Histoire des Augustines et de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec (1639–1989), vol. 1 (Sillery, Quebec: Éditions du Septenrion, 1989); Rousseau, La Passion de Servir: les fondatrices de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec (Quebec: Les Augustinians de la Miséricorde de Jésus du Monastère de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec, 2014); Andre Lachance, Les Marginaux, Les Exclus at l’Autre au Canada aux 17e et 18e siècles (Quebec: Fides, 1996); Jacques Bernier, La medicine au Quebec (Quebec: PUL, 1989); Micheline D’Allaire, L‘hôpital-­ General de Quebec (Montreal: Fides, 1971); Sylvio Leblond, Medecine and medecins d’autrefois (Quebec: PUL, 1986); and Lessard, Se Soigner au Canada. 42. Concepts of disease, social disorder, and spiritual corruption w ­ ere tightly knotted together, underwriting the early modern hospital as one of the principal sites of moral reform attendant to the Catholic Reformation. Hôpitaux-­Généraux give particularly eloquent testimony to this post-­Tridentine tangle of charity, corporeal caregiving, spiritual salvation, and social reform. ­These general hospitals (the first one, founded in Paris in 1656) served a motley crew of undesirables, from paupers to foundlings, gypsies, witches, prostitutes, the disabled, the mentally ill, and ­those

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   181 with chronic and incurable diseases. They combatted the prob­lems of disease, social disorder, and spiritual corruption through a combination of medical care, manual ­labor, and religious instruction. For a classic treatment of the Hôpitaux-­Généraux, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). See also Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 671–687. For a discussion of hospitals in the context of the Catholic Reformation, see Brian Pullan, “The C ­ ounter Reformation, Medical Care, and Poor Relief,” in Healthcare and Poor Relief, 17–38. For a history of the Hôpital-­ Général in Quebec, see Micheline d’Allaire, L’Hôpital-­Général de Québec, 1692–1764 (Montreal: Fides, 1971). 43. The shift in emphasis from hospitality to corporeal care was particularly pronounced in the context of the Hôtels-­Dieu which, by the latter half of the seventeenth-­ century had distinguished themselves from the Hôpitaux-­Généraux as institutions dedicated to the care of the sick, in par­tic­u­lar. 44. Constitutions, part I, tract 4, chapter 6. For a discussion of the broader early modern emphasis on care for the body among Catholic religious and lay dévots, see Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 255–272. 45. See Rousseau, La Croix et le Scalpel, 55–154. See also François Lebrun, Se Soigner Autrefois. Médecins, saints, et sorciers aux 17e et 18e siècles (Paris: Temps Actuels, 1983), 83. The tradition of Christus medicus, or Christ the physician, dates to at least the fourth ­century. See Rudolph Arbesmann, “The Concept of ‘Christus Medicus’ in St. Augustine,” Tradition vol. 10 (1954): 1–28; and David Knipp, Christus Medicus in der früchristlichen Sarkophagskulptur (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 46. Constitutions, part I, tract 4, chapter 1. 47. Ibid., part I, tract 1, chapter 1. 48. The Constitutions required that the sick be visited at least once a day by the local physician. By all accounts, this rule was followed faithfully at the Hôtel-­Dieu in Quebec. Physicians’ responsibilities included setting bone fractures, opening abscesses, and performing amputations. For much of the Hôtel-­Dieu’s early history, however, surgeons (somewhat lower in the social and professional hierarchy than physicians) executed t­ hese tasks given the shortage of physicians in the colony. Medical care in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century France and its colonial outposts was based largely in humoral science and the theories of the second-­century Roman physician, Galen. For a thorough introduction to early modern Galenism and medical practice, see Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France. 49. Ibid, part I, tract 2, chapter 1. 50. Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 71. 51. The contrast between the austere salle des malades and the more extravagant chapel was intended to evoke the passage from the earthly “valley of tears” to paradise, that “ultimate stage of life [and] the end for which to yearn and aspire.”

182  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 Rousseau, La Croix et le Scalpel, 86–7. See also John D. Thompson and Grace Goldin, The Hospital: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), xxvii, 22. 52. Refigured through the wisdom of the gospels, sickness possessed tremendous spiritual potential. First, sickness could, if properly deployed, confer upon the infirm the privilege of suffering in the model of Christus crucifixus. At the same time, sickness could invite the charity of ­those called to tend to the ill in the model of Christus medicus. 53. See Rousseau, La Croix et le Scalpel, 90–92. 54. Constitutions, part I, tract 4, chapter 6. Nursing ­sisters ­were expected to have a command of Christian doctrine and a fa­cil­i­ty with the catechism. 55. Somewhere around ninety p­ ercent of patients left the Hôtel-­Dieu recovered. See Rousseau, La Croix et le Scalpel; and Jones, Charitable Imperative, 10. 56. Casgrain, Histoire, 39–41. For a study of w ­ omen’s active apostolates in New France in relation to Tridentine norms, see Leslie Choquette, “ ‘Ces Amazones du ­Grand Dieu’: ­Women and Mission in Seventeenth-­Century Canada,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 627–655. That early modern ­women pursued active apostolates even a­ fter Trent’s imposition of the cloister is not a particularly novel claim to make. Many historians, ­after all, have attended to the ways in which ­women (often in collaboration with their male patrons) found ways around the letter of the Tridentine law. See Alison Weber, ed., Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016); Dinan, ­Women and Poor Relief; Laurence Lux-­Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and En­glish Ladies in Seventeenth-­ Century Catholicism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); Rapley, The Dévotes; and Leslie Choquette, “ ‘Ces Amazones du ­Grand Dieu.’ ” Fewer scholars, however, have attended to the ways in which ­women religious ­after Trent pursued missionary work even from ­behind the cloister wall. One scholar who does make this argument convincingly with regard to Saint Teresa of Ávila is Jodi Bilinkoff. See Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in the Sixteenth-­Century City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 134–137. See also Mary Dunn, From ­Mother to Son: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 24–25, where I argue similarly for an interpretation of Marie de l’Incarnation as missionary despite the rule of the cloister. 57. Annales, 12. At the same time that she boldly celebrated the missionary dimensions of the Hospitaller vocation, Juchereau acknowledged the fact of the cloister: the nuns, she wrote, found “plea­sure in living hidden, unknown to the world, deprived of all the consolations of the earth, in a general separation and in a perfect destitution of all ­things, entirely abandoned to the care of Providence.” Ibid. 58. Ibid., 8 59. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, vol. 20, 251. 60. Annales, 132.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   183 61. Ibid., 343, 161. 62. Ibid., 336–337. 63. For a statistical analy­sis of the registers of the sick at the Hotel-­Dieu from 1689 to 1699, see François Rousseau, “L’Hôpital et la société en la Nouvelle-­France: l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec à la fin du XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 31 (1977): 29–47. 64. Ibid., 148. The story of another Huguenot who made an abjuration of his Protestant faith while aboard ship on the way to the colony follows. Among the number of sick brought to the Hôtel-­Dieu upon the ship’s arrival in Quebec, this second Huguenot “died with sentiments of a very rare devotion, tenderly kissing the crucifix and conversing with our Lord ­until his final breath.” Ibid., 148–149. 65. Ibid., 341. 66. “Every­thing that goes on t­ here [at the Hotel-­Dieu],” the governor confirmed, “points to heavenly ­things.” Ibid., 342–343. 67. Ibid., 342–343. 68. Ibid., 343. 69. Fewer historians still have drawn attention to the role of ­women, particularly ­women religious, in the promotion of Eu­ro­pean colonial interests. One exception is Sarah Ann Curtis whose Civilizing Habits: ­Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) argues that nineteenth-­ century French w ­ omen missionaries helped to restore France’s global empire ­after the fall of Napoleon. See also Thomas Carr, “Writing the Convent in New France: The Colonialist Rhe­toric of Canadian Nuns,” Quebec Studies 47 (Spring/Summer 2009): 3–23. Bronwen McShea’s recent Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019) gives a thorough and persuasive analy­sis of the Jesuits’ investment in the extension of French imperial interests in North Amer­i­ca. 70. Ibid., 404–408. 71. Constitutions, part I, tract 4, chapter 1. 72. Ibid. 73. Pullan, “­Counter Reformation,” 23. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 32. 76. Constitutions, part I, tract 1, chapter 7. 77. Ibid. 78. Annales, 56. 79. Ibid., 58. 80. Ibid., 353. 81. Ibid., 232, 358. The Histoire makes the link between ser­vice at the Hôtel-­Dieu and martyrdom more explicit in the case of Jacques Pominville, a male nurse who had worked at the hospital for twenty-­eight years and fatally contracted the malady

184  N o t e t o C h a p t e r 3 of Siam while tending a sick man. “It was doubtless,” the Histoire explained, “in recompense for the hospitality that he practiced for such a long time that God ended his life by an illness that he acquired in the ser­vice of the poor—­which he himself regarded as a grace, since indeed, it was a true martyrdom.” Ibid., 351–2. While the nuns w ­ ere enjoined to recognize Jesus Christ in the person of the poor sick, their Constitutions also encouraged them to understand their charitable work as performed through and in imitation of Christ: “The holy practice of the functions of our vocation is an effective recognition and excellent imitation of the mercies of Our Lord in the very holy sacrament.” The Constitutions continue, explaining that it is Christ himself who works through the Hospitaller nun, a phenomenon made pos­si­ble through the real presence in the sacramental species. Constitutions, part 1, tract 4, chapter 1. 82. Ibid., 186. De la Nativité had become para­lyzed ­after a blow to the head from a falling stone while she was occupied with the repair of the altar in the l­ ittle chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié. “She fainted immediately, lost consciousness, and from that moment on was always sick.” 83. Ibid., 388. Similarly, not even a feverish delirium could distract Marie-­ Françoise le Duc de Sainte-­Barbe, in an eloquent testimony to constancy, from preparing for death “by a general confession and several other holy practices which disposed her to appear before God.” Even though “she ­wasn’t in a condition to profit from ­these final moments,” her Hospitaller ­sisters ­were confident in the fate of her soul, for “she had prepared for a long time for this passage.” Ibid., 324. 84. Ibid., 387, 294. 85. Ibid., 116. 86. Ibid., 156–58. 87. Ibid., 267–269. 88. Arthur Kleinman, The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor (New York: Viking, 2019), 249. 89. Ibid., 167. 90. Ibid., 243. 91. Ibid., 244–45. 92. Ibid., 249. 93. Ibid., 244.

Chapter 3. Hagiographic Prosthetics in the Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin 1. For a discussion of the difference between obsession and possession, see Paul Ragueneau, Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin (Paris: Florentin Lambert, 1671), 165–175. See also Michel de Certeau, Possession at Loudun, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 38. In general, possession deprived the victim of her reason, while obsession did not.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   185 2. Marie de l’Incarnation, Lettre CCLXIII, Guy Oury, ed., Marie de l’Incarnation: Correspondence (Solesmes, France, 1971), 886–889, my translation. 3. Ragueneau, Vie, 33. 4. For an excellent discussion of the new spirituality, see Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not ­Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially 97–165. For a thorough discussion of mysticism in seventeenth-­century France, see Henri Bremond, L’Invasion Mystique, 1590–1620, Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France, vol. II (Paris: A. Colin, 1967) and Bremond, La Conquête Mystique, Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France, vol. IV (Paris: A. Colin, 1967). See also Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Sophie Houdard, Les Invasions Mystiques: Spiritualités, Hétérodoxies, et Censure au Début de l’Époque Moderne (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2008). 5. For a study of the epistemology of demonic encounters in early modern France, see de Certeau, Possession at Loudun. De Certeau’s analy­sis of the case of possession at the Ursuline convent in Loudun positions seventeenth-­century Catholic France at a crossroads between two competing epistemological models—­one that admitted the agency of demons and the other that excluded it. See also Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Eu­rope,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 93–124. 6. As interpreted by their hagiographers, the demonic encounters endured by the likes of Teresa and John did not detract from their sanctity but added to it. God, it was understood, permitted demons to tempt the faithful; it was their re­sis­tance to such temptations that proved their saintly virtue. The Book of her Life: Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2008). The Life of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kathleen Pond (New York: Harper, 1958). For an argument about the ways in which demonic encounters could work in ­favor of claims to sanctity, see Renata Blumenfeld-­Kosinski, The Strange Case of ­Ermine de Reims: A Medieval ­Woman Between Demons and Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 7. In addition to Teresa, among the many holy ­women who testified to having experienced demonic visions are Alpais of Cudot, Christina of Stommeln, and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. 8. Sluhovsky, Believe Not ­Every Spirit, 14. 9. Ibid., 140–143. 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. Ibid., 15, 52, 58. 13. Ibid., 280, 334. 14. See, for example, Peter Burke, “How to be a Counter-­Reformation Saint,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Eu­rope, 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz

186  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 45–55; Simon Ditchfield, “Tridentine Worship and the Cult of the Saints,” in Cambridge History of Chris­tian­ity, Vol. VI: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1600, ed. R. Po-­Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201–24, 640–43; Nicholas D. Paige, Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradiction of Modernity in Seventeenth-­Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 93–95; Gabriella Zarri, “Living Saints: a Typology of Female Saints in the Early Sixteenth C ­ entury,” in ­Women and Religion in Medieval and Re­nais­sance Italy, eds. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, and trans., Margery J. Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 219–304; and Timothy Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Modern Canada (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2014), 16–34. 15. Ragueneau, Vie, 282. 16. Katherine Ott, “Prosthetics,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 140–142. 17. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6. While not as widely treated as her colonial contemporaries like Marie de l’Incarnation, Paul le Jeune, or even Kateri Tekakwitha, Catherine de Saint-­Augustin has not escaped scholarly attention altogether. The few book-­length analyses dedicated to understanding Catherine have tended to focus on her mystical experiences and the theological dimensions of her interior spiritual life. See, for example, Guy-­Marie Oury, L’itineraire Mystique de Catherine de Saint-­Augustin (Chambray-­lès-­tours, France: Editions  C.L.D., 1985); L’experience de Dieu Avec Catherine de Saint-­Augustin (Quebec: Editions Fides, 1999); Ghislaine Boucher, Dieu et Satan dans la Vie de Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, 1632–1668 (Tournai, Belgium: Desclée, 1979); and Léonidas Hudon, Une Fleur Mystique de la Nouvelle France: Vie de la Mère Marie-­Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, religieuse de l’Hôtel Dieu du Précieux-­sang de Québec, 1632–1668 (Montreal: Bureau du Messager Canadien, 1907). Other studies have approached Catherine, often alongside her better-­ known peers in New France, with attention to her more active and public contributions to the nascent seventeenth-­century colony. See, for example, Timothy Pearson, “ ‘I Willingly Speak to You About Her Virtues’: Catherine de Saint-­Augustine and the Public Role of Female Holiness in Early New France,” Church History 79, no. 2 ( June 2010): 314; Thomas M. Carr, Jr., “Writing the Convent in New France: the Colonialist Rhe­toric of Canadian Nuns,” Quebec Studies 47 (Spring/Summer 2009): 3–23; Dominique Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Repre­sen­ta­tions of Female Holiness in New France,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Amer­ i­cas, 1500–1800, eds. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Leslie Choquette, “ ‘Ces Amazones du G ­ rand Dieu’: W ­ omen and Missions in Seventeenth-­Century Canada,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 3 (Spring 1992): 627–655. Eschewing both extremes (the intensely private and the resolutely public), still other scholars have subjected Catherine to analy­sis within the bonds of her relationships—­both with her confessor Paul Ragueneau and with her spiritual

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   187 intimate Jean de Brébeuf. Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 54–97; Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 70–75. 18. Ragueneau, Vie, 32. 19. Ibid., 34. 20. Pearson, “ ‘I Willingly Speak to You,’ ” 314. 21. Ragueneau, Vie, 39. 22. Ibid., 44. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. Ibid., 50. 25. Ibid., 55. 26. Ibid., 55, 57. 27. Ragueneau, Vie, 334. 28. It’s reasonable to assume that like ­others of his kind, Ragueneau set about to eulogize Catherine in part ­because of an altruistic desire to provide edification for a reading public. Hagiography’s principal purpose, ­after all, was to instruct the faithful on Christian virtues by profiling exemplars of holy conduct. Like o­ thers of his kind, Ragueneau surely harbored other motivations, too, not the least of which had to do with the potential for a well-­received vita to bolster his personal prestige. For a thorough discussion of the vari­ous motivations that might have inspired hagiographers to dedicate themselves to the composition of vitae in honor of holy ­women, see Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 32–45. Emma Anderson suggests that t­ here was something more at stake in the Vie than the usual hagiographic agenda, situating the Vie as a narrative buttress that supported Ragueneau’s argument in defense of the martyrdoms of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. See Emma Anderson, “ ‘My Spirit Found a Unity with this Holy Man’: A Nun’s Visions and Negotiations of Pain and Power in Seventeenth-­Century New France,” in Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Anne Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 185–204. 29. Ragueneau, Vie, 1–2. 30. Guy-­Marie Oury estimates that more than seventy p­ ercent of the Vie is culled directly from Catherine’s own writings. Guy-­Marie Oury, L’Itineraire Mystique de Catherine de Saint-­Augustin (Chambray-­lès-­Tours, France: Editions C.L.D., 1985), 22. The structure of the Vie as, in a sense, a composition in two voices anticipates Claude Martin’s 1677 Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation. Claude’s Vie of his ­mother, like Ragueneau’s life of Catherine, relies heavi­ly on Marie’s own writings and, like Ragueneau’s Vie, claims to have deliberately privileged the subject’s own voice to the exclusion of the hagiographer’s. 31. Oury, L’Itineraire Mystique, 23. 32. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 73.

188  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 33. Much like Ragueneau, Martin admits to having been persuaded by “learned and pious ­people” to let his ­mother tell her own story, relying on her Relations of 1633 and 1654. Accordingly, he claims to have only lightly edited her prose, his own voice in the Vie “but an echo” of his ­mother’s. Claude Martin, La Vie de la Vénénerable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation (Solesmes, France, 1981), ii, xvii. A close comparison between Marie’s original Relations and Martin’s Vie, however, reveals considerably more editorial interference. See Mary Dunn, “ ‘But an Echo’: Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth-­Century New France,” Catholic Historical Review 100, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 459–485. See also Catherine M. Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) for analyses of the subtle ways in which male hagiographers’ repre­sen­ta­t ions of holy ­women diverged from holy ­women’s self-­representations. 34. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 49. 35. Ibid., 6. The classic c­ hildren’s story of The Steadfast Tin Soldier exemplifies the way narrative prosthesis works. The story begins with a child opening a box of twenty-­five tin soldiers only to discover that one of the soldiers is missing a leg. “The incomplete leg,” explain Mitchell and Snyder, “becomes a locus for attention, and from this imperfection a story issues forth . . . ​Narrative interest solidifies only in the identification and pursuit of an anomaly that inaugurates the exceptional tale or the tale of exception.” Ibid., 54. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Ibid. 38. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 10. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 49. 39. Mitchell and Snyder, Cultural Locations, 6. 40. Ragueneau, Vie, 89. 41. Ibid., 187. 42. Ibid., 295. ­W hether Ragueneau intended it or not, this par­tic­u­lar episode resonates in telling ways with his description of the murders of Brébeuf and Lalemant at the hands of the Haudenosaunee in the Relation of 1649. Th ­ ere, Ragueneau relates how his confrères’ captors applied “red-­hot hatchets” ­under their armpits, upon their loins, and around their necks, adding about their waists “­belts of bark, filled with pitch and resin, to which they set fire, which scorched the w ­ hole of their bodies.” Eventually, before dismembering, roasting, and eating the Jesuits’ bodies bit by bit, the Haudenosaunee plucked out Lalemant’s eyeballs and thrust “burning coals” into the empty sockets. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 34 (Cleveland, OH: Burrows, 1896–1901), 27, 141–145. Elsewhere in the Vie, the marks of disability are apparent not on Catherine’s own body,

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   189 but on the bodies of supporting characters. In a vision of October, 1662, for example, Catherine was shown to a dark prison “where I was told that souls w ­ ere purged ­after death.” Th ­ ere, among o­ thers, she recognized a nun she had once known, now afflicted with an ulcerated mouth as punishment for having neglected to confess and correct a minor fault. Ragueneau, Vie, 322. It is worth noting, too, that Ragueneau’s Catherine is chronically ill, afflicted with “continual” maladies, and “never without pain, which was often excruciating.” Although the Vie gives no indication that Catherine’s constant illness prevented her from executing her responsibilities as a nursing s­ ister at the Hôtel-­Dieu, it is difficult to imagine circumstances u­ nder which such chronic illness would not be disabling. Ibid., 368, 58. See also ibid., 359 citing from a letter written by M ­ other Marie de Saint Bonaventure to the Bayeux nuns on the occasion of Catherine’s death. “I ­don’t believe,” writes ­Mother de Saint Bonaventure, “that in the twenty years she was in this country she experienced a month or even a week,” perhaps not even a single day, of good health. Although t­ here are dangers to conflating sickness and disability (primary among them the danger of reducing disability to physical pathology), the phenomenology of sickness and the phenomenology of disability do overlap at vari­ous points, as disability studies scholars have argued in recent years. See, for example, G. Thomas Couser, “Illness,” Keywords for Disability Studies, 107. See also Diana Herndl, “Disease Versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and Disability Studies,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 593–998. 43. It is worth asking w ­ hether Ragueneau exaggerated the embodied effects of Catherine’s spiritual transports in ways Catherine herself might not have acknowledged. In the absence of Catherine’s own writings, we can only speculate. It has been shown, however, in t­ hose cases where it is pos­si­ble to compare w ­ omen’s autobiographical writings with men’s writings about ­women, that men tended to somatize female spiritual experience. See, for instance, Amy Hollywood, “Inside Out: Beatrice of Nazareth and her Hagiographer,” in Gendered Voices, 78–98. I would simply remind the reader to keep in mind that the Catherine of this chapter is Ragueneau’s discursive creation. 44. Ragueneau, Vie, 117. 45. Ibid., 114. 46. Intense suffering, both chronic and acute, is a common theme in the lives of the saints, particularly in the lives of female saints, and particularly in the lives of female saints dedicated to charitable ser­vice of o­ thers like Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Siena, Lidwina of Scheidam, Margaret of Cortona, and Angela of Foligno. For a classic and impor­tant analy­sis of somatic spirituality in the lives of holy ­women, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval ­Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). For a critique of the gendered prejudices of repre­sen­ta­tions of ­women’s somatic spirituality, see Mooney, Gendered Voices.

190  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 47. In this, too, Ragueneau’s Vie echoes themes characteristic of t­ hose lives of holy ­ omen like Marguerite d’Oignt, Juana de la Cruz, and Lidwina of Scheidam that w reframe pain as not just symptomatic of sanctity but as Christ-­like substitutionary self-­sacrifice oriented ­toward the salvation of ­others. 48. Ibid., 307–308. 49. Ibid., 243. 50. Ibid., 254–62. 51. Ibid., 264. Ragueneau provides a thorough explanation of the difference between possession and obsession midway through the Vie. Whereas Satan takes steps to harm a person suffering from demonic obsession, Satan has actually become master over a person’s ­will in cases of possession. The possessed person loses control over his powers of reflection, freedom, and even speech. Not so, however, in situations of obsession. Ibid., 171–172. 52. Ibid., 334. 53. Ibid., 223, 289. 54. Ibid., 201. Ragueneau’s pointed reference to the Haudenosaunee ­here is surely no accident. Emma Anderson notes that Catherine’s demons function in the Vie as analogs to the martyrs’ Haudenosaunee captors. Anderson, Death and Afterlife, 84. 55. Ragueneau, Vie, 173. 56. Mitchell and Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability, 6. 57. Ragueneau, Vie, 58. 58. Ibid., 53. 59. Ibid., 156, 237. 60. Ibid., 254, 262, 271. 61. Constitutions de la Congregation des Religieuses Hospitalières de la Misericorde de Jesus de l’Ordre de Sainct Augustin, 1666, part I, tract 4, chapter 1. 62. Ibid., 58. 63. Ibid., 237. 64. Ibid., 286. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 353. 67. Ibid., 353, 357. 68. Ibid., 354. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 64. 71. Anderson, Death and Afterlife, 65. It is in the Relation of 1649 and the Precieux Manuscrit of 1652 that Ragueneau presses the case for the recognition of Lalemant and Brébeuf as martyrs. 72. Ariel Gluklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 57.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   191 73. Gluklich, Sacred Pain, 179. 74. Ibid., 34, 33. 75. Ibid., 7. 76. Ibid., 34. 77. Ibid., 6. 78. Ibid., 40. 79. Ragueneau, Vie, 174–5. 80. Ibid., 203–4. 81. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6. 82. Mitchell and Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability, 10. 83. Ragueneau, Vie, 8. 84. Ibid., 19. 85. Ibid., 9. 86. Ibid., 11. 87. Ibid., 111–112, 94. 88. Ibid., 160–161. At least as elaborate as Catherine’s own visionary experience, Lidwina’s was richly detailed and thick with specifics that engaged the senses—­with the sight of the Virgin Mary, several angels, and “Jesus Christ clothed in the garb of a priest,” with the feel of the oil that “anointed . . . ​all the parts of her body,” with the sound of the heavenly alleluia “that . . . ​she would chant in paradise in the com­pany of holy virgins” within two days’ time. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 129. 90. Ibid., 138. 91. Ibid., 50–51. 92. Ibid., 198. 93. Ibid., 145. 94. Ibid., 152. 95. Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), 116, citing Sanson Birette, Refutation de l’erreur du Vulgaire, touchant les responses des diables exorcizez (1618). 96. Ibid., 173–4. 97. Ibid., 94. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid., 220. 100. Ibid., 95. Elsewhere, Ragueneau justified the suffering borne of the power­ ful sense of one’s own sinfulness as a means of spiritual purification. Citing the example of Juan de la Peña, a “very holy man” who spent the seven days before his death in total despair about the salvation of his soul, Ragueneau explained that God “purif[ies] and sanctif[ies] his predestined” in extraordinary ways. Ibid., 222.

192  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 101. Ibid. Other scholars, like Rosemarie Garland-­Thompson, locate the genesis of the “normal” e­ arlier, tracing its roots to the Enlightenment and the emergence of the new science. Rosemarie Garland-­Thompson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1–21. 102. For an argument about hagiography as an idealizing and not a normalizing proj­ect, see Scott Wells, “The Exemplary Blindness of Francis of Assisi,” in Disability in the ­Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, ed. Joshua Eyler (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 67–80. 103. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6. 104. Ibid. 105. Ragueneau, Vie, unnumbered page. 106. Ibid. 107. Les Annales de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, 1636–1716, ed. Albert Jamet (Quebec: l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec, 1939), 237–238. 108. Chrestien Le Clercq, Premier Établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle-­France (Paris: Amable Auroy, 1691), 25–27. 109. Ibid., 27. This was but a thinly veiled allusion to that section in the Vie where Ragueneau told the story of Catherine’s possessed tooth. See Ragueneau, Vie, 64–65. 110. Victor Le Sens, “Catherine de Saint-­Augustin,” Annuaire du département de la Manche, 1848, 330–336. The author repeats the stories told by F ­ ather Ragueneau concerning the apparitions witnessed by Catherine de Saint-­Augustin. See Encyclopedia of French Culture and Heritage in North Amer­ic­ a, s.v. “Catherine de Saint-­ Augustin, Remembered from Quebec to Normandy,” by Éric Thierry, accessed December 16, 2017, http://­www​.­ameriquefrancaise​.­org​/­en​/­article​-­346​/­Catherine​_­de​ _­Saint​-­Augustin,​_­Remembered​_­from​_­Quebec​_­to​_­Normandy​_­​.­html. 111. Francois-­Xavier Garneau, Histoire du Canada, vol. 1 (Quebec: N. Aubin Press, 1845), 369–370. 112. Ibid., 8. 113. For materials related to Catherine’s beatification and canonization pro­cesses, see Beatificationis et canonizationis servae dei Mariae Catharinae a Sancto Augustino (in saec. Catharinae Symon de Longprey) monialis professae Sonorum Hospitalarium a Misericordia O.S. Augustini (1668): positio super introducione causae et virtutibus ex officio concinnata (Rome: Sacra Congregatio Pro Causis Sanctorum Officium Historicum, 1974). 114. John Paul II, “Quamvis Cuilibet” [Apostolic Letter], Vatican.va, April 23, 1989, https://­w ww​.­v atican​ .­v a​ /­c ontent​ /­j ohn​ -­p aul​ -­i i​ /­l a​ /­a post​ _­l etters​ /­1989​ /­documents​/­hf​_­jp​-­ii​_­apl​_­19890423​_­quamvis​-­cuilibet​.­html. My gratitude to Chad Kim of St. Louis University for his help with the Latin translation of this letter. 115. Farah Verret, “Procès canoniques: Le cas de Catherine de Saint-­Augustin,” unpublished document.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   193

Chapter 4. Divine Presence in the Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier 1. Ragueneau, Vie, 376. 2. Ibid., 370. 3. Eventually, in addition to the eight Jesuit martyrs who had met violent ends in the context of the Beaver Wars of the 1640s, Marie de l’Incarnation (d. 1672), Marguerite Bourgeoys (d. 1700), and Francis de Laval (d. 1708) would be canonized saints by the Church in Rome (although, in ­every case, not ­until the late twentieth ­century). Kateri Tekakwitha (d. 1680), the first Indigenous American saint, was fi­ nally canonized by the Catholic Church in 2012. 4. Marie-­Aimée Cliche, Les Pratiques de dévotion en Nouvelle-­France: Comportements populaires et encadrement ecclésial dans le gouvernement de Québec (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1988), 30–31. For the names of miraculés and o­ thers who figure in the Actes, I have followed the orthography established by Odoric Jouve in his Étude historique et critique sur les Actes du Frère Didace Récollet (Quebec: l’Événement, 1911). 5. Archives du Séminaire de Quebec (ASQ), Fonds Verreau, Carton 13, no. 36. The Actes ­were reprinted and published in Le Canada Français IV (1892): 252–282, and it is to this published transcription that I cite in this chapter for my reader’s ease of reference. 6. The copy of the Actes preserved in the Seminary archives seems to have been one of several copies of Frère Didace’s dossier distributed through devotional networks in the early part of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. Evidence provided in the text itself suggests that in addition to the copy addressed to Claude Cliché, Didace Pelletier’s nephew, copies w ­ ere given to Vachon de Belmont, Superior of the Sulpician Seminary in Montreal, and M. du Belloy of the Sorbonne in Paris. 7. For a description of the pro­cess by which miracles ­were authenticated in seventeenth-­century France, including the criteria attached to the procès-­verbaux, see Henri Platelle, Les Chrétiens face au miracle: Lille au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1968), 32–38. 8. The stories recounted in the Actes did not, of course, come directly from the mouths of the farmers and their wives whose swollen joints and stubborn fevers yielded to the intercession of Frère Didace. Solicited ­under oath and redacted in written form, t­ hese stories w ­ ere fashioned in response to questions posed in the context of formal inquests and ­under the editorial influence of Père Joseph, intent on bringing his confrère’s cause to a successful resolution. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss ­these twenty-­one accounts of miraculous intercession as mere fabrications of the Church. 9. The subject of the miraculous has received substantial attention from historians of Chris­tian­ity. For an intellectual history of the miraculous in the Christian west,

194  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 see Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). For so­cio­log­i­cal approaches to the miraculous, see Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Simon Yarrow, Saints and Their Communities: Miracle Stories in Twelfth-­Century ­England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-­Century France (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1983). For anthropological approaches, see Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993). For approaches indebted to the history of religions, see Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle: The Prince, the ­Widow, and the Cure that Shocked Washington City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: ­Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless ­Causes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and Howard Clark Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical Method (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). For approaches that situate miraculous cures within the context of restricted medical knowledge in times past, see Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popu­lar Beliefs in Medieval ­England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). For phenomenological approaches, see Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Fi­nally, for approaches to the miraculous that adopt a narrative perspective of the sort undertaken h­ ere, see Rachel Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate: Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval ­England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2011); Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Eu­rope (London: Routledge, 2006); Nicholas Junkerman, “ ‘Confined Unto a Low Chair’: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives,” Early American Lit­ er­a­ture 52, no. 1 (2017): 53–78; and Patrick Nugent, “Bodily Effluvia and Liturgical Irruption in Medieval Miracle Stories,” History of Religions 41, no. 1 (August 2001): 49–70. 10. Frère Didace’s baptismal certificate is preserved in the Bibliothèque et Arch. Nationales du Québec, Centre d’arch. de Québec, CE301-­S16. In my reconstruction of his early years, I have depended not only on the Actes, which contain a brief biography, but also (and especially) on the meticulous work of Odoric Jouve, Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Récollet (Quebec, 1910). See also Jouve, “Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Franciscan,” Nova Francia 4 (1929): 195–215 and Jouve, Les Franciscans et le Canada aux Trois-­Rivières (Paris, 1934), 65–69. Other sources on Frère Didace include Frederic de Ghyvelde, Vie du Frère Didace (Montreal, 1894); N.S.P.S. François, De Dieppe aux Trois-­Rivières (Quebec, 1921); Germain-­Marie de Noyers, Un Serviteur de Marie: le Frère Didace Pelletier (Quebec, 1922); R.P. Hugolin, Le Serviteur de Dieu Frère Didace Pelletier (Quebec, 1932); Romaine Legare, Deux Ames Seraphiques (Trois-­ Rivières, 1957); and René Bacon, “Le Recollect Didace Pelletier: Est-il canonisable?

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   195 Regards sur les données historiques,” SCHEC Études d’Histoire Religieuse 57 (1990): 69–88. 11. “Gift of Sieur de Lessard of two frontal arpents of land for the church of Sainte-­ Anne,” 8 March 1658, PA.19, b1, L1, 934, Archives de Sainte-­Anne-­de-­Beaupré. 12. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 51 (Cleveland: Burrows, 1896–1901), 88. The Relations closely reproduces curé Thomas Morel’s account of the first six miracles at Petit-­Cap, written in 1667. Thomas Morel, “Miracles arrivés en l’Église de Saint-­Anne-­du-­Petit-­Cap côte de Beaupré en Canada, 1662–1667,” miracle I, Paroisses diverses, no. 72, Archives du Séminaire de Québec. In 1686, Morel would publish a second account, this one containing descriptions of thirty-­one miracles attributed to Anne at Petit-­Cap. Thomas Morel, “Miracles arrivés en l’Église de Saint-­Anne-­du-­Petit-­Cap côte de Beaupré en Canada, 1686,” Paroisses diverses, no. 84, Archives du Séminaire de Québec. 13. Lettres de la Révérende Mère Marie de l’Incarnation (Paris: H. Casterman, 1876), 310. 14. The events described in t­ hese reports range from w ­ ater rescues to miracles of healing from conditions like paralysis, arthritis, and the bloody flux. 15. For a recent history of the Recollects in New France, see Caroline Galland, Pour la Gloire de Dieu et du Roi: les Récollets en Nouvelle-­France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2012). See also Chrestien Le Clercq, Premier Établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle-­France (Paris: Amable Auroy, 1691). 16. Benjamin Sulte, Histoire de la Ville des Trois-­Rivières et de ses environs (Montréal, 1870). 17. Actes, 255. 18. In addition to the twenty-­two miracles reported in the Actes, Père Joseph compiled a list of several other claims of miraculous intercession. Likely composed between 1711 and 1719, this list included claims for which formal inquests ­were never undertaken and is preserved in the archives of the Seminary of Quebec. 19. Actes, 255. 20. Timothy Pearson persuasively makes this case. See Timothy G. Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2014), 164–167. 21. Jansenism articulated itself not just as a revival of Augustinian rigor, but also as a corrective to the more forgiving moral standards tolerated by the Jesuits. For histories of Jansenism, see William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Re­sis­tance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Jean-­Pierre Chantin, le Jansénisme: entre hérésie imaginaire et re­sis­tance catholique (XVIIe-­XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Cerf, 1996); and Bryan E. Strayer, Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in Seventeenth-­Century France (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008).

196  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 22. The pope may have found particularly unsettling Père Joseph’s impolitic inclusion of a letter of support from M. de Belloy, “a doctor of the Sorbonne and one of the most vocal opponents” of Unigenitus. Actes, 257. Belloy’s Jansenist sympathies must surely have done ­little to increase Frère Didace’s chances of weathering the canonization pro­cess. 23. Jouve, Le Frère Didace Pelletier, 280, citing from Lettre de Monsieur Daniel aux Ursulines des Trois-­Rivières, 16 décembre 1869, Archives aux Ursulines, 2-­C-01–082. 24. Ibid., 286–295. 25. Actes, 252. ­Father Verreau acquired the manuscript from Jacques Viger. It is unclear how Viger himself ended up with the manuscript. 26. Frédéric de Ghyvelde, Vie du Frère Didace Récollet (Montreal: Cadieux et Derome, 1894); Jouve, Frère Didace; Étude historique; “Le Frère Didace Pelletier, Franciscan,” in Nova Francia 4 (1929): 195–215. T ­ oward the end of the eigh­teenth ­century, the Ursulines also dedicated a portion of their written history to the memory of the defunct Recollect. Les Ursulines des Trois-­Rivières: despuis leur etablissement jusqu’à nos jours (Trois-­Rivières: P.V. Ayotte, 1888). 27. See, for example, René Bacon, “Le Récollet Didace Pelletier, est-il canonisable? Regards sur les données historiques,” SCHEC Études d’histoire religieuse 57 (1990): 69–88. 28. Protestant critiques of the cult of the saints—­directed against what Reformers like Luther and Calvin perceived as its excesses, idolatries, and inauthenticities—­had resonated in the Catholic Church, giving rise to internal denunciations of the baroque superfluity of traditional devotional practices vis-­à-­vis the saints. Core Catholic convictions, however, remained untouched. The Council of Trent affirmed at its twenty-­fifth session in 1563 that “[t]he holy bodies of martyrs and of other saints . . . ​ should be venerated by the faithful” and that it was right and good for devotees to “venerate and honor the relics of saints [and] . . . ​to visit the tombs of the saints to demand their aid.” Council of Trent, Session 25, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” in Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 235. Although the Council inveighed against superstitious accretions to the cult of the saints, the Church never wavered from its interpretation of miracles as signs of the true faith. In the eyes of the Church, miracles at once relied on and at the same time confirmed doctrine, offering power­ful evidence in ­favor of Catholic orthodoxy over and against Protestant revisions. 29. See Pierre Delooz, Sociologie et canonisations (Liège, Belgium: Faculté de droit, 1969). The pontificate of Urban VIII (1623–1644) was a crucial turning point in the history of the canonization pro­cess. By the terms of two decrees published in 1625 and 1634, the pope took major steps t­ oward centralizing authority over the cult of the saints in the Holy See, forbidding the establishment of religious cults honoring the recently deceased without papal approval and prohibiting the distribution of writings concerning visions and miracles ascribed to a holy figure absent the same.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   197 30. For a discussion of the evidentiary standards necessary to proving the authenticity of claims of miraculous intercession in seventeenth-­century France, see Henri Platelle, Les Chrétiens face au miracle, Lille au XVIIe Siècle (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1968), 32–40. In her analy­sis of more than six hundred miracle rec­ords dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Jacalyn Duffin highlights the role of physician testimony in establishing the facts of miraculous cures. The testimony of physicians, Duffin argues, was essential to declaring a prognosis hopeless even with the best of available care. Jacalyn Duffin, “The Doctor was Surprised; or, How to Diagnose a Miracle,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 699–729. 31. Historians of Catholicism in New France have long identified a kind of rigorism to religious practice in the colony. See, for example, Cornelius Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto: McGraw-­Hill Ryerson, 1976); Marie-­Aimée Cliche, Les pratiques de dévotion en Nouvelle-­France: comportements populaires et encadrement ecclésial dans le gouvernement de Québec (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1988); Guy Plante, Le rigorisme au XVIIe siècle: Mgr. de Saint-­Vallier et le sacrement de pénitence (1685–1727) (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1971). Less commonly noted, however, is the tendency of Catholic belief and practice in the colony to hew more closely (and for longer) to traditional patterns. Insulated from historical events like the Fronde and, l­ater, the revolution, that had reshaped Catholicism in France, the colony was more hospitable to the preservation of older forms of religious life. The growth of Frère Didace’s thaumaturgic cult at the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century in Canada (at a time when miracles w ­ ere on the decline in France) is symptomatic of colonial Catholicism’s more conservative flavor. 32. J. la Viguerie, “Les miracles dans la France du XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe Siècle 140 ( July-­September 1983): 323. Jean Delumeau, similarly, argues that “in the golden age of the Catholic Reform in France . . . ​­there is no place for establishing a distinction between the attitude of the elites and that of the masses regarding miracles.” Jean Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: le sentiment de sécurite dans l’Occident d’autrefois (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 210. By the turn of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, however, miracles ­were no longer as popu­lar among France’s elite and t­ hose making claims to miraculous intercession tended to come from the lower, less educated social classes. 33. Madeleine Beaudoin had emigrated from le Mans sometime before 1662. Antoine Brûlé was a more recent immigrant, having arrived in Canada from Amiens sometime ­after the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century. 34. A letter from M. de Belloy of the Sorbonne in Paris included in the Actes references his gratitude for having received an image of Frère Didace and a copy of the procès-­verbaux—­both sent by Père Joseph, likely in an effort to promote devotion to the Recollect and to drum up support for his cause for canonization. 35. The single exception is a miracle in which Frère Didace is credited with rerouting a storm that would have ruined a boatload of freshly cut hay en route to Trois-­ Rivières. With the storm clouds gathering above him, Pierre le Maistre Bourgeois

198  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 invoked “the intercession of Frère Didace, promising him a mass.” The clouds parted and the harvest was spared. Actes, 274. 36. la Vigurie, “Les miracles,” 320; Delumeau, Rassurer, 204–5. 37. la Vigurie, “Les miracles,” 323. 38. Actes, 265. 39. Actes, 263, 266, 277. 40. Actes, 260, 259. 41. Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2003), 238. 42. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112. 43. In her study of medieval En­glish miracle collections, Rachel Koopmans draws attention to the ways in which “[c]irculating stories functioned as blueprints for the active creation and telling of new ones, a pro­cess that tended to create clusters of like-­sounding narratives.” Koopmans, Wonderful to Relate, 30. Koopmans cautions against the presumption that clerical scribes manipulated—or, at least, manipulated beyond recognition—­w itness testimony to conform to generic norms. Miraculés themselves, she contends, would have perceived and ­shaped the narratives of their own experiences with reference to the miracle stories (­whether scriptural or hagiographic) they had heard. 44. Michael D. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Variations on a Theme by Hannah Arendt (Denmark: Museum Musculanum Press, 2013), 14. 45. Ibid., 35. 46. Ibid. 47. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2016), 3. 48. Ibid., 250, 58. Paradoxically, Orsi points out, con­temporary scholars of religion do not hesitate to ascribe agency to broader, more diffuse forces like the social—­abstract and insensible like the gods but nonetheless endowed “with a real­ity that real presences lack or of which they are distorted instantiations. Ibid., 59. 49. Ibid., 6. 50. Ibid., 252. An impor­tant companion to Orsi’s History and Presence is Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Hearing ­Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). In Hearing ­Things, Schmidt traces the development of Enlightenment discourses of absence, mostly through the medium of the ear, to make the compelling argument that absence is not what ­we’re left with when w ­ e’ve purified our senses of the film of presumptive enchantment but instead itself an acquired effect of techniques of perception. 51. Ibid., 8. The subject of divine presence has garnered the attention of other scholars of religion, too, in recent years, suggesting something of a shift in the field

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   199 away from exclusively naturalistic theories of religion to modes of treating religion that make room for super­natural agencies. See, for instance, Bissera Pentcheva, Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space, and Spirit in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) and “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 631–655; Katja Rakow, “The Light of the World: Mediating Divine Presence through Light and Sound in a Con­temporary Megachurch,” Material Religion 16 (2020): 84–107; Car­ter Hawthorne Higgins, “Ritual and Recognition of Divine Presence in North India,” Journal of Ritual Studies 30, no. 2 (2016): 1–11; Birgit Meyer, “Mediating Absence—­Effecting Spiritual Presence: Pictures and the Christian Imagination,” Social Research 78, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 1029–1056. 52. Ibid., 69, 66. 53. Ibid., 54. 54. Ibid., 50. 55. Ibid., 59. For a study of miracle stories as resources for disability history, see Nicholas Junkerman “ ‘Confined Unto a Low Chair’: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives,” Early American Lit­er­a­ture 52, no. 1 (2017): 53–78. See also Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Eu­rope: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High ­Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (London: Routledge, 2006), 126–185. For an analy­sis of miracle stories as indices of the limits of premodern healthcare, see Ronald Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popu­lar Beliefs in Medieval ­England (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1977). 56. The testimony of at least three miraculés in the Actes include allusions to the dangers of surgery. Catherine Le Pelé, for instance, had been “constrained to have her leg opened” ten years e­ arlier for a condition similar to the one for which she received a miraculous cure; ­Brother Louis narrowly escaped an emergency operation thanks to the intervention of Frère Didace; and Charles Antoine de Tonnancour’s ­mother, unable to consent to the surgeon’s recommendation that he “cut this fleshy growth” from her son’s throat, de­cided then and t­ here to ask for a miracle. Actes, 262, 269, 277. 57. Orsi, History and Presence, 65. 58. Actes, 262–263. 59. Ibid., 271. 60. Ibid., 279–280. 61. As in France, t­ here w ­ ere three classes of medical professionals in colonial New France: doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries. Doctors ­were the most prestigious among ­these, their education and training more intensive than what was required of surgeons whose work was considered a species of manual ­labor. ­Because, however, ­there w ­ ere so few doctors in proportion to the colonial population (only four doctors in all of the French colony’s history), surgeons provided the bulk of the healthcare in early modern French Canada. See Renauld Lessard, Se Soigner au Canada aux

200  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Hull, Quebec: Musée canadien des civilisations, 1989), 19–44; François Rousseau, La croix et le scalpel: Histoire des Augustines et de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Québec (1639–1989) (Sillery, Quebec: Éditions du Septentrion, 1989), 100; and Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 170–229, 284–346. 62. Actes, 263. 63. Ibid., 262, 273, 265. 64. Actes, 265. 65. Ibid., 277. Despite the ways in which the stories of miraculous healing in the Actes juxtapose physicians (ignorant, inept, and potentially lethal) to Frère Didace (capable, effective, and uniformly restorative), it would be wrong to conclude that medicine and religion competed in early modern Canada. In a­ ctual practice, the sick and disabled both in early modern Eu­rope and its colonial outposts tended to seek out the remedies made available by medicine and religion si­mul­ta­neously. Recourse to prayer and pilgrimage (among other devotional practices) was not the last resort of the hopelessly disabled and ­dying, but one pos­si­ble treatment plan pursued alongside available medical technologies. As Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones put it, “Physicians and clerics w ­ ere thus more likely to work in parallel streams than to seek out conflict”—­a fact substantiated by the willing participation of physicians as expert witnesses in support of the claims of miraculous healing. Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 79. 66. Orsi, History and Presence, 160. Actes, 262, 270, 279. 67. Orsi, History and Presence, 160. 68. Ibid., 66. 69. Actes, 258–259. Shortly ­after Louise’s miraculous restoration to full mobility, ­Sister de Saint-­Paul again recommended Frère Didace, this time to the pensioner Marie-­Anne Geneviève Angélique Robineau de Bécancour who had been troubled for some time by an inflamed knee. It is worth asking, as Timothy Pearson does, why ­Sister de Saint-­Paul took such an interest in Frère Didace. Pearson suggests that ­Sister de Saint-­Paul (born Marie-­Madeleine Gravel in 1656) and Frère Didace might have been childhood acquaintances. Pearson, Becoming Holy, 155–157. Given, however, that ­Sister de Saint-­Paul was born and raised in Quebec, moving with her ­family sometime around 1662 to Château-­Richer, the postulate of friendship between the two seems unlikely. It is more probable that the link between ­Sister de Saint-­Paul and Frère Didace was ­Sister de Saint-­Paul’s ­sister, Françoise, who (an Ursuline like ­Sister de Saint-­Paul) had been sent in 1697 to establish the order Trois-­Rivières, around the same time that Frère Didace and Père Joseph arrived in the town. 70. Actes, 271–272. 71. Ibid., 259. In a typical flourish of discursive redundancy, the Actes report that Louise thus “continued since the time of her cure ­until now without experiencing

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   201 any discomfort.” Ibid. Père Joseph also had a role to play in François Chèze’s miraculous recovery from his “long and dangerous sickness,” having planted the idea of Frère Didace’s sanctity and gifting the Sulpician priest with some of his relics. Ibid., 279–280. 72. It is worth noting that Marthe Fréchet, healed through the intervention of Frère Didace of a breast pain so severe that she c­ ouldn’t nurse her own child, was the grand­daughter of Elie Godin and Marie-­Esther Ramage, both documented miraculés from Petit-­Cap who, de­cades ­earlier, had been healed of their respective impairments through the intercession of Sainte Anne. 73. Ibid., 272. 74. Ibid., 278. 75. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Chris­tian­ity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 65. 76. Orsi, History and Presence, 105. 77. Actes, 272. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 278. 80. Ibid., 280. 81. Ibid., 260. 82. Ibid., 262. 83. Images, both in the early modern past and in the Catholic pre­sent, share with relics the qualities of real presence. See Orsi, History and Presence, 113–161. 84. Ibid., 280. 85. Ibid., 273. 86. Ibid., 263, 271. 87. Ibid., 268. 88. In ways that resonate with my argument h­ ere, Patrick Nugent draws attention to the irruptive qualities of eleventh and twelfth-­century miracle texts, arguing that “[s]tories of bodily effluvia . . . ​are more significant as literary signs than as indicators of what might actually have happened.” As literary signs, Nugent contends, descriptions of bodily effluvia function as narrative strategies intended to limn episodes of miraculous healing as instances of divine irruption into the midst of the ­human. Patrick J. Nugent, “Bodily Effluvia and Liturgical Interruption in Medieval Miracle Stories,” History of Religions 41, no. 1 (August 2001): 53. 89. Jon Bialecki, A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 77. “The question,” writes Bialecki, “is not ­whether God exists but in what specific modality he exists, how his existence is expressed and with what degrees of clarity and insistence. He is certainly expressed in the miraculous ele­ments of the sensorium: in anything from hearing God’s voice to a coincidence that suggests a divine hand.” Ibid.

202  N o t e s t o C o n c l u s i o n 90. Orsi, History and Presence, 114. 91. Brown, Cult of the Saints, 82. 92. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 6.

Conclusion 1. Kenny Freis, “Before the ‘Final Solution’ Th ­ ere Was a ‘Test Killing,’ ” New York Times, January 8, 2020, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2020​/­01​/­08​/­opinion​/­disability​ -­nazi​-­eugenics​.­html. 2. Mitchell and Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability, 33. 3. Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 71 no. 3 (Fall 2004): 691–710; Alisdair MacIntyre, ­After Virtue (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). See also Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Some, Bruner included, have gone so far as to collapse the space between real-­time experience and post-­hoc narrativization, arguing that all of h­ uman experience is filtered through a narrative lens at the very moment of experience itself. 4. Jackson, Politics of Storytelling, 16. 5. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 112. 6. Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 131. 7. Ibid. 8. Smith, Imagining Religion, 112. 9. Kleinman, Illness Narratives, 48. 10. Ibid., 49. 11. C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in Pre­sent Concerns (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 2002), 73. 12. Michael Jackson, Paths T ­ oward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 34. 13. Barthes, “Discourse of History,” 139. 14. Orsi, History and Presence, 64. 15. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 84. 16. Ibid., 12, 84. 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Ibid., 84. 19. Oliver Sacks, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Perennial Library, 1987), 141. 20. Ibid., 153.

N o t e s t o C o n c l u s i o n   203 21. Ibid., 3. 22. Felski, Limits of Critique, 17. 23. Ibid., 5. 24. Jackson, Paths ­Toward a Clearing, 186. 25. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 36–37. 26. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 164. 27. Amy Hollywood, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, suggests that the historian must at once attempt to recast the past in terms of the “critical categories of modern historiographical analy­sis” and at the same time take seriously “the alterity of voices, bodies, and practices rendered vis­i­ble through alternative histories, histories sensitive to precisely that which does not fit within modern, secularizing, and naturalizing narratives.” Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,” Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (October 2004): 526. What this means, for Hollywood, is not just affirming the beliefs of one’s subjects, but considering “the possibility of the truth of t­ hose beliefs.” Ibid., 523. Taking seriously the beliefs of one’s subjects as epistemological possibilities for oneself—­particularly within the context of secular scholarship on religion—­pre­sents unique challenges. Hollywood, however, insists that the effort is worth it, for “the tenets of modern historiography crucially limit the life worlds and modes of temporality that are available to knowledge.” Ibid., 521. I ­couldn’t agree more.

I n de x

the able-­bodied, 151 abnormality, 3, 165–6n9 academic interpretation. See interpretative possibilities Actes du très dévot Frère Didace Pelletier, 10–12, 120–21, 127–43, 145–49, 193n6, 193n8, 199n56, 200n65 agency, 13, 20, 25, 136, 138, 147, 161 Aktion T4 Program, 1, 150 Algonquin, 63–64 alter Christus, 108, 110, 116 Anne le Cointre de Saint-­Bernard, 63–64, 70, 75, 90 Antoinette du Tartre de la Visitation, 84 Augustinian Hospitaller nuns, 95 Augustinus, 126

Canada, 4, 21, 29, 31–33, 36, 39, 102, 107, 126, 129 Canadian mission, 28, 30–31, 35–39, 41, 44, 57, 66, 123, 126, 153 cancer, 7–8, 20, 159 caregiving, 66, 69, 81–82, 87–89 Casot, Jean Joseph, 33 Catherine Berthier de Sainte-­Geneviève, 84, 107 Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, 11, 78, 85–86, 90–120, 154, 192n113 Catherine la Cointre de Saint-­Agnès, 84, 107 Catholic hospital, early modern, 82–83 Catholicism: American, 134; church of, 78; early modern, 8, 55, 116; and embodied difference, 162; in New France, 197n31; orthodoxy of, 104; post-­Tridentine, in the New World, 87; post-­Tridentine French, 104, 112, 123; post-­Tridentine missionary work of, 17; reformed, 76; seventeenth-­ century French, 92 Catholic Reformation, 71 charity, 22, 43–44, 46, 62–63, 65, 77–78, 81–82, 84 Charles de Lauson de Charny, 85 Charon, Rita, 19 Chastelain, Pierre, 98 Chris­tian­ity: and the afterlife, 32, 76; and charity, 43–44, 62–63, 65, 81–82; and conversion, 31–32, 43, 75; devotion to, 30, 57; French Canadian, 84;

baptism, 31–32, 39–45, 49, 53, 56–58, 61, 64, 76, 174n34 Bérubé, Michael, 1–2 biomedical authority, 22, 25, 158. See also the biomedical system biomedical narrative. See biomedical authority the biomedical system, 7, 20. See also the medical model biomedicine, modern. See biomedical authority Blessed Stanislaus de Kostka, 113 Body in Pain (Scarry), 109 Brière, Eloise, 37 205

206 i n de x Chris­tian­ity (continued) history of, 72, 82; influence of, 61; loss of faith in, 58; rituals of, 49; and salvation, 22–23, 29–30, 45, 53, 138, 153; and virtue, 46, 54, 81, 84 Christus medicus, 72 Church Doctors, 104 Church of Saint-­Anne-­de-­Beaupré, 122–23, 125 Clement XI, 127 colonization, 20, 37 Constitutions de la Congrégation des Religieuses Hospitalières de la Miséricorde de Jésus, 71–72, 74, 82–83, 106, 181n48 con­temporary biomedicine. See the biomedical system conversion, 22, 30–31, 33, 43, 47, 61–65, 70, 75–76, 78–81, 153 coronavirus pandemic, 155 Council of Trent, 74, 196n28 counternarrative, 3–4, 23, 37, 161 cross, motif of, 105–6, 117 cultural narrative, 4, 159 Cum alias ad Apostolos, 93 cure, event of, 6, 38, 132, 140, 145–47 deathbed scenes, 86, 108, 174n30 de Brébeuf, Jean, 56, 68, 78, 84, 101–3, 108–9, 113–14, 118 de Champlain, Samuel, 31 defensive discourse, 38. See also Worcester, Thomas de la Motte Guyon, Jeanne-­Marie Bouvier, 93 de Latour, Bertrand, 70 demonic confrontation, 185n5–185n6. See also demonic possession demonic infestation. See demonic possession demonic possession, 35, 92, 111, 114, 116, 184n1 demons, 92, 97, 104 Denis, Joseph, 11, 123 dévotes, 177n7

devotional practices, 55 Didace, Frère, 120–22, 125–34, 136–37, 139–47, 149, 194n10, 200n69 disability: and Christian salvation, 138; concept of, 156; difference and, 165n7; and embodied difference, 101; as a feature of narrative, 99, 101; fitness and, 166n14; and heterogeneity, 4; history of, 5, 37, 137; Indigenous attitudes ­toward, 172n19; andIndigenous conversion, 47; and the Jesuits, 37, 46; Jesuit writings on, 29–30; and loss, 159; management of, 151; and missionary work, 34, 57; narrative repre­sen­ta­tions of, 8–9, 11, 16, 18, 22–25, 39, 65; as a narrative trope, 100; and Nazi euthanasia, 150; as a prob­l em, 3, 136, 160–61; and sickness, 6; symptoms and, 19; as a term, 5, 21; and traditional healing, 48. See also impairment disability narrative, 3 disability studies, 2, 5, 18, 94, 99 disabled body, 100, 109 discourse of ventriloquism, 37. See also Brière, Eloise disease: brought by Eu­ro­pe­ans to North Amer­i­ca, 171n4; and alienation, 25; and blasphemy, 55; and Christian charity, 82; concept of, 19; as distinct from illness, 19; in early Canada, 174n41; and Indigenous populations, 29, 35; Jesuit attitude ­toward, 38; and missionary work, 30, 32, 41. See also illness divine intervention, 56, 148 divine irruption. See divine intervention doctors, 199n61 Duchess d’Aiguillon, 64–65, 74 early Modern Canada. See New France, early modern embodied difference: of Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, 105, 108, 110, 116; as compared to disability, 101; as a

i n de x   concept, 4–5, 9, 12, 21, 111; in early modern Catholicism, 162; experiences of, 25, 155; French Catholic interpretations of, 23–24; ­under French empire, 17; and the hagiographic tradition, 100; and healing, 121, 140; Indigenous conceptions of, 35, 37; and loss, 159; and miraculous healing, 136; and missionary work, 34, 39, 54, 59; narrative repre­sen­ta­tions of, 8, 18, 22, 30, 146, 148, 161; in post­Tridentine Catholic France, 153; as a prob­lem, 26, 95, 137–38, 149, 151, 156, 163; and sanctity, 11 empathy, 15 encounter, 15, 17–18, 25 epidemic, 40 Eucharist, 55, 135 eugenics, 115 evangelical witness, 56 exorcism, 35 Felski, Rita, 158–59 fiction, 18 France, 39, 62. See also New France, early modern François de Laval, Bishop, 98 French Catholic Canada, 17, 67, 78. See also New France, early modern French Catholic hegemony. See French Catholic Canada French Catholic imperial interests. See French Catholic Canada; French empire French colony. See French empire French empire, 4, 17, 21, 64. See also New France, early modern French Huguenot, 78, 87 Fries, Kenny, 150 Gallicans, 39 Garnier, Charles, 40–42, 45 Gluklich, Ariel, 109–11 Guimond, Louis, 122

207 hagiographers, 115 hagiographic genre. See hagiographic tradition hagiographic tradition, 20, 94–95, 100, 103, 105, 111–12, 114–16, 132, 154 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), 32, 41–42, 50, 78, 83, 97, 102, 104–5, 108, 171n3 healers, traditional, 48–49, 58 healing, 28, 42, 56, 120, 131–32, 136, 143, 145–48, 200n65 healthcare, 64, 158, 180n40 Histoire de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, 9–12, 65–70, 76–77, 80–87, 106, 117, 178n23, 178n25, 183n81 historians, 8, 13–18, 37, 153–54, 156–58, 203n27 historical inquiry. See history, discipline of historical writing. See historians historiography, 12, 14, 16–17, 19, 25, 153, 156–57, 160 history, discipline of, 16, 25, 158 History and Presence (Orsi), 134–35, 138, 198n50 the Holocaust, 4 Holy ­water, 56 hôpitaux généraux, 71 hospital, modern, 180n42 hospitaller: identity, 10–11, 65–66, 69, 77–81, 84, 87, 106–7, 153; mystic, 91; nuns, 13, 16–17, 21, 46–50, 63–84, 87–91, 97, 106–7, 126, 177n11; of Quebec, 96; ­sisters, 21, 34, 85, 97, 118, 153–56; spirituality, 106; visionary, 95, 116; vocation, 10, 65–66, 69, 80–81, 153 hospitals and poor relief, Reformation era Eu­rope, 180n41 Hôtel-­Dieu, Bayeux, 95 Hôtel-­Dieu, Dieppe, France, 63, 71, 180n39 Hôtel-­Dieu, Quebec, 46, 50–51, 65–91, 97, 106–7, 126, 153, 181n43, 183n63, 183n81

208 i n de x illness: and agency, 13; and Christian salvation, 153; chronic, 151; and conversion, 78, 80; as distinct from disease, 19; and evangelism, 49, 58–59, 61; experience of, 82; in the Histoire, 69; and the Hôtel-­Dieu, Quebec, 81; meaning of, 84, 87; and miracle, 134, 139–40; and the patient, 20; as a term, 173n29. See also disease illness narrative: as a counterpoint to sickness, 21; in the Histoire de l’Hôtel-­ Dieu de Quebec, 66, 77–79, 81, 83; Hospitaller, 85–87; Jesuit, 23, 37, 47, 54, 56–57; in the Jesuit Relations, 33–34, 41–43; personal, 155–56; Vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin as an, 94, 100, 105, 116 The Illness Narratives (Kleinman), 19 imitatio Christi, 95, 106–7, 111, 116 impairment, 4–8, 16, 22, 26, 37, 52, 100–101, 125, 131–40, 145–48. See also disability Indigenous ­peoples: Americans, 28, 37, 41, 44, 51, 61, 75–76, 81, 106; Canadians, 40, 42; converts, 47–49, 53, 86; medical theory, practice, and healing, 35, 42, 172n18, 175n48; medicine men, 36; premodern, 29, 35; as protagonists, 57; re­sis­tance of, 57; of the Saint Lawrence River valley, 31; of the settlement of Saint-­Joseph, 97; sick and infirm, 42, 45–46, 51, 60–61, 64–65, 77 infirmities: of super­natural origin, 35; from unfulfilled desires, 36 interpretative possibilities, 4, 18, 24, 158 Jackson, Michael, 24, 134 Jamet, Dom Albert, 70 Jansen, Cornelius, 126 the Jansenists, 39, 80–81, 126–27, 195n21 Jesuit Relations, 9–12, 27–30, 33, 37–42, 46–51, 54–61, 65–69, 76–78, 167n23, 174n32

the Jesuits: and the Canadian mission, 123, 126; and Christian charity, 44; and Christian salvation, 29–30, 45, 53; and conversion, 61, 63, 65, 153; and disease, 38; ­fathers, 21, 48; history of, 171n5; and illness narratives, 54; and institutional healthcare, 64; mentalités, 39; missions of, 31–33, 35, 56, 61, 83; and the sick and infirm, 40–43, 46, 51; and sickness, 17, 37–38; in Sonora, 174n47 Joseph, Père, 124–28, 130, 132–34, 141–42, 195n18 Juchereau de la Ferté, Mère Jeanne-­ Françoise, 66–67, 75–79, 81, 83, 86 Kee, Howard Clark, 13–15 Kleinman, Arthur, 19, 88–89, 155 Koopmans, Rachel, 198n43 ­labor, industrial, 2 Lalemant, Charles, 30, 50 Lalemant, Gabriel, 68, 84, 108–9, 118 Last Supper, 73 Le Jeune, Paul, 60–65, 75 Les Annales de l’Hôtel-­Dieu de Quebec, 70 l’histoire de cabinet, 68 lifeworlds, 9, 14–15, 17 Limits of Critique (Felski), 158 liturgical calendar, 73 Lorde, Audre, 7 malady of Siam, 83 manitou, 35, 46 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Sacks), 158 Marie-­Andrée Régnard Duplessis de Sainte-­Hélène, 67, 70 Marie Bourdon de Sainte-­Thérèse, 85–86 Marie de l’Incarnation, 63, 90, 92–93, 101 Marie Forestier de Saint-­Bonaventure, 63–64, 67, 70, 75, 90

i n de x   Marie Guenet de Saint-­Ignace, 63–64, 70, 75, 83, 90 Marie Renée de la Nativité, 84, 86 Marie Tavernier de Sainte-­Monique, 84–85 Massé, Énemond, 30–31 meaning-­making, 25 medical interpretation of sickness and disability. See the medical model the medical model, 5–6, 8, 21 medical theory, early Modern French, 34 medicine man, 176n65. See also healers, traditional medieval hospitals, 71 Meiaskwat, Charles, 43 Mère François de Saint-­Ignace, 97 miracle, 134, 193n9, 198n43, 199n55 miracles of healing. See miraculous cure miracle stories, 128 miraculés, 121–22, 129–34, 136–45, 148, 199n56 miraculous cure, 54, 56, 122, 130–33, 136–40, 143, 145–48, 200n65 miraculous intercession, 121–22, 128–29, 131, 133–34, 143, 147–48, 197n30 miraculous intervention. See miraculous intercession missionary enterprise, 63, 75–76, 81, 83–84, 87–88 missionary strategy, 32, 35 missionary vocation. See missionary enterprise missionary work. See missionary enterprise mission field of early modern New France. See Canadian mission mission field of seventeenth-­century New France, missionary strategy. See Canadian mission Mitchell, David, 99–100, 116, 161 modernity, 2, 4, 135–37

209 modern medicine, 19–20, 25 Monastère des Augustines de l’Hôtel-­ Dieu de Québec, 70 the monastic chronicle, 67–68 narrative: action, 136; climax, 137, 148; and disability, 99–100; and embodied difference, 161; events of, 146; excess, 147; gospel, 105; hagiographic, 95, 103; of healing, 120; and illness, 58, 84; of Indigenous converts, 86; Jesuit, 49; and knowledge, 24; medical, 151; medium of, 8, 12, 16, 21, 30, 134, 153, 162; multiplicity of, 9, 23; of recovered Protestants, 86; strategies, 9, 38; and the subaltern, 37; subject, 134; tripartite structure of, 132 narrative medicine, 18–21, 39, 155 narrative of coherence, 18, 153–54 narrative prosthesis, 94–95, 99–101, 103, 115, 120, 160, 188n35 Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell & Snyder), 99, 116 narratives of physical infirmity, 29 narrative studies, 2, 17 narrative theory, 99 natu­ral remedies, 35, 46 New France, early modern, 4, 8, 17, 29, 31–35, 38–39, 42, 105, 179n32. See also French empire newly converted. See Indigenous convert the new spirituality, 93, 185n4 New Testament miracles, 132 New York Times, 150–51 normal, as it relates to disability, 165–6n9, 165n5 the normal. See normality normality, 3–4 normative body, 4 normative paradigm, 3. See also normativity normativity, 2, 8

210 i n de x Notre Dame des Anges, Quebec, 123 nursing ­sisters. See Hospitaller nuns odium fidei, 113 Orsi, Robert, 134–36, 140, 198n50 overcomer narrative, 166n10 pain, 109–11 passion narrative, 108 pathogens, Eu­ro­pean, 29 patient, as a term, 178n21 Paul the Apostle, 106 Pelletier, Claude, 122–23 Pelletier, Didace, 11, 120 Pelletier, Georges, 122 persona Christi, 72–73 persons with disabilities, 20 Petikouchkaouat, Lazare, 46–47 physicians, 6, 25, 35, 139, 158, 181n48. see also doctors Poncet, Joseph-­Antoine, ­Father, 90–91, 93, 101 postcolonial hermeneutics, 20 Poulet, Georges François, 80 presentism, 12, 14–15, 135–38, 140, 143, 146–48, 161, 198n51 presentist approach. See presentism presentist orientation. See presentism prosthesis, 109, 111, 116 Protestants, 78–79, 81, 86, 106, 135, 196n28 Purgatory, 103, 107 Quebec, 30–31, 62–63, 71, 77, 80, 90, 123 Quebec’s female religious communities, 70 Queen Anne’s War, 78 Quietism, 92–93, 117 Ragueneau, Paul, 11, 41, 91–105, 108–19, 154, 187n28, 190n51 Recollect ­brothers, 21, 31, 120–29, 133, 141–44, 147, 195n15

Recollect missionaries. See Recollect ­brothers Redemptorists at Sainte-­Anne-­de-­ Beaupré, 127 the Relation of 1635, 62 the Relation of 1636, 62 the Relation of 1639, 64 relics, 56, 144 religion. See Catholicism; Chris­tian­ity; the Jesuits religious studies, 134–35 restitution narrative, 6, 23, 121, 148, 151, 159–62 resurrection narrative, 108 Robineau de Bécancour, Marie-­Anne Geneviève Angélique, 133, 144 Sacks, Oliver, 149, 158–59 sacrament, 55–56 Sacred Congregation for Rites, 118 Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Gluklich), 109 Saint Anne, 122, 125 Sainte-­Anne d’Auray, 131–32 Saint Francis of Assisi, 114 Saint Jacques, village of, 45 Saint Jean Baptiste at Onnontagué, 40–41 Saint John Chrysostom, 114 Saint Paul, 112 Scarry, Elaine, 109, 162 the scholar. See scholarship scholarly distance. See scholarship scholarly pre­sent. See scholarship scholarship, 12–14, 17–18, 25, 157, 160 science of Galen, 34–35 shaman. See healers, traditional Short and Easy Method of Prayer (Bouvier), 93 sickness: accounts of, 28; and baptism, 41; ­causes of, 35; and Christian salvation, 87, 138, 182n52; concept of, 156; diagnosis of, 20; and disability, 6;

i n de x   and embodied difference, 5; history of, 37; and Indigenous conversion, 47; and the Jesuits, 17, 37–38, 46; Jesuit writings on, 29–30; and loss, 159; and missionary work, 32, 34, 57; narrative repre­sen­ta­tions of, 6, 8–9, 11, 16, 18, 21–25, 38–39, 65–66, 87; as a prob­lem, 136, 160–61; and sin, 107; and subjectivity, 13; and traditional healing, 48 Sillery, 63 ­Sister de Saint-­Paul, 140–41, 144, 200n69 ­Sister Geneviève Agnes de tous les Saints, 49–50 smallpox, 29, 64, 171n3 Snyder, Sharon, 99–100, 116, 161 Sonnontouan, 45 The Soul of Care (Kleinman), 88 storytelling, 26, 154–55, 157 suffering, 109, 169n57, 189n46 super­natural remedies. See natu­ral remedies Tchames, Emery, 23, 27–28, 37, 39–40, 45, 53, 57–59, 97 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 32 Teresa of Ávila, 111–12 Tiergarten Park, Berlin, 1, 4, 150 Tiergartenstrasse. See Tiergarten Park, Berlin

211 traditionalist treatments. See healers, traditional Trois-­Rivières, 124, 127 Unigenitus, 80, 127 Urban VIII, 196n29 Ursuline monastery, 90, 124–25, 127 Verreau, Hospice-­Anthelme-­Jean-­ Baptiste, ­Father, 127 verstehen, 156 Vie de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Saint-­Augustin, 10–12, 93–95, 97, 99–102, 105–6, 108–13, 115–19, 187n30, 190n51 Vie du Frère Didace, Récollet, 128 vision of 1664, 102 Vray portrait du très religieux Frère Didace, 127 Walker expedition in 1711, 67 the Wendat (Huron), 29, 31–32, 43–44, 49, 52–54, 57, 83 Western imperialism, 37 White, Hayden, 16–17, 37 ­women apostolates, 182n56 ­women authors, early modern, 70, 179n36 ­women religious, 61, 76 Worcester, Thomas, 38