Luca Codignola Luca.Codignola-Bo.1@nd.edu Last modified: August 2020
1. The Jesuits in New France: An Outline, 1611–1847
New France (Nouvelle-France) was a geographical entity whose location and extension varied with time. It included continental North America, but not the Caribbean region, which was always referred to as Antilles. New France began to take shape in the early seventeenth century, when the villages of Port-Royal in Acadia (1604) and Québec along the Saint Lawrence River (1608) were established by the French. These initiatives took place at the same time as Jamestown (1607), the earliest English settlement in Virginia. Both the French and the English, however, were latecomers to the New World, as the Spanish and the Portuguese had been there for over a century. New France consisted of two distinct regions, Acadia and Canada, distant from each other and for all practical purposes living separate lives. With time, Acadia extended itself over territories that are now part of the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Settlement, however, never took off and the population of French origin was always very scarce—thirteen thousand at most at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Canada too moved slowly, although by 1670 it had become a small but stable settlement of 6,600 inhabitants that dotted the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. East to west, its main urban centers were Québec, Trois-Rivières (1634), and Montreal (1642), now in the province of Québec. In the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, New France took advantage of its immense network of inland waterways to extend its territory to the far west towards the Great Lakes, in today’s provinces of Ontario and Manitoba and the midwestern American states (Pays-d’en-Haut or Upper Country), and southward along the Mississippi River all the way to Upper and Lower Louisiana. There, Détroit (1701) and Nouvelle-Orléans (1718) became urban centers of some significance.
Almost from its inception, the French crown had decreed that New France was to be a Catholic colony in which new material gains had to be coupled by the spiritual salvation of the local pagans. All active members of the Catholic Church who were involved in the evangelization of North America from 1610 to 1658 were influenced by a general atmosphere of religious awakening coupled with an acute awareness of the need for a profound reshaping of the ecclesiastical organization. These sentiments found their origin in the deliberations of the Council of Trent (1545–63) and reached their height in the first half of the seventeenth century. They were primarily European in scope, but they also touched upon the North American colonies, whose establishment happened to be taking place at the same time. At first, the absence of any diocesan organization meant that missionary activities among the indigenous peoples, whose number was reputed to be extremely vast, was entrusted to the French regular orders, both male and female. In the earliest phase of the history of New France (1608–32), the Jesuits shared their evangelical activity in Acadia and Canada with the Franciscans Recollet, a branch of the Order of Friars Minor. Subsequently, in Acadia the Jesuits were joined by the Capuchins and the Recollets (1632–58), whereas in Canada women religious and lay dévots and dévotes were active alongside the Jesuits in providing spiritual assistance to the French as well as to the indigenous people. It was during this period, and particularly so between 1634 and 1650, that the Jesuits established their celebrated mission among the Huron nation (Wendat, Wyandot). This happened to coincide with the last phase of a century-old conflict between the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) and the Hurons, which reached its conclusion with the latter’s utter defeat and ended the Jesuit dream of a quick and successful mission.
In 1657, the Jesuit predominance over New France was broken by the arrival of the first Sulpician contingent. (The Société de Saint-Sulpice was not a regular order proper, but a recently founded community of secular priests based in Paris.) In 1670, the Recollets returned to Canada after a hiatus of over forty years. However, the main ecclesiastical development in the history of New France was the appointment of a vicar apostolic in Canada in the person of François de Laval (1623–1708, in office 1658–88). This appointment, which took place in 1658, was the result of an agreement between all parties involved in New France—the French crown, the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (the Holy See’s department in charge of mission territories), and the Jesuits. Laval’s jurisdictional dependence on the Holy See ceased in 1674 when his vicariate apostolic was made into a full territorial bishopric. The diocese of Québec then became one of France’s many dioceses. As such, it fell under the Gallican system of ecclesiastical government. This system remained in place until the British Conquest of 1760.
The end of the Huron mission, Laval’s arrival, and the competition with other religious communities, as well as the growing number of diocesan priests, made the Jesuit presence less conspicuous. Their number waned. The Jesuit superior continued to reside in Quebec City, where the order was in charge of the main educational establishments. Some Jesuits continued their involvement with the indigenous missions, especially in the Pays-d’en-Haut and Upper and Lower Louisiana. Others coupled their missionary work with an active role in the exploration of new territories. Others still tried to help the survival of Catholicism among the French-speaking population and the indigenous peoples in Acadia, whose peninsular territories, now part of Nova Scotia, were ceded to the British at the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).
The later history of the Jesuits of New France was marked by two events that took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first was the British military conquest of Canada (1760), which was followed by France’s cession of the whole of continental New France to the British crown by virtue of the Treaty of Paris (1763). Its clauses did not require religious congregations, including the Society of Jesus, to leave the colony, but prohibited them from receiving new recruits from France, condemning them to a slow death. The second event was the suppression of the Society of Jesus, a worldwide process that began in 1759 and was officially completed in 1773. This crucial event, however, touched the Canadian Jesuits only marginally. When the French crown suppressed the Society in 1764, the twenty-one Jesuits who had remained in the Province of Quebec had already become British subjects and were consequently not affected by France’s edict. Later, when the brief Dominus ac redemptor (July 21, 1773) completed the suppression, the few Jesuits who had remained in the Province of Quebec acquiesced to the papal order—that Propaganda had recommended to the bishop of Québec, Jean-Olivier Briand (1715–94, in office 1766–84), to implement “with ease”—but did not give up their goods and possessions.1 The only New France Jesuits who were really affected by the suppression were those who were carrying out their missionary activities in Upper and Lower Louisiana, because these territories had fallen under the Spanish crown after the Treaty of Paris. Consequently, when Spain suppressed the Society in 1767, these missionaries were placed in legal limbo and were strongly discriminated by the Spanish authorities.2
Over the years, there have been several attempts at establishing a full list of the Jesuits—priests and lay brothers—who spent time in New France from the earliest arrival in Acadia of Pierre Biard (1567/8–1622) and Énemond Massé (1575–1646) in 1611 to the death of their last member on the Canadian soil prior to the Society’s return in 1842, Jean-Joseph Casot (1728–1800). What should have been a simple exercise of counting up how many of them crossed the Atlantic Ocean was complicated by the changing geographical extent of New France. Essentially, the question was whether to include Acadia, the Pays-d’en-Haut, and Louisiana in the list. The French Jesuit Auguste Carayon (1813–74) counted 239 of them in 1865 and 297 in 1869; the Canadian Jesuit Arthur Edward Jones (1838–1918) 320, and yet another Canadian Jesuit, Louis-Gédéon-Arthur Melançon (1879–1941) 332. All of them profited from the documents and checklists that had been made available at mid-century at the Collège Sainte-Marie of Montreal by their mentor and confrère Félix-François-Marie Martin (1804–86). All of these historians included Acadia, Louisiana, and the West, as well as Canada, in their lists. More recently, the Canadian demographer Louis Pelletier, who profited from the refined school of historical demography of the Université de Montréal, lowered those numbers to 280 or 281, but he limited his research to Canada proper, excluding New France’s peripheral regions. It might be worth noting that, following a trend that emphasized the uniqueness of the French-Canadian or Québec identity, both Melançon and Pelletier pointed out that very few of the Jesuits who were involved with New France were Canadian-born.3
The number of Jesuits in New France is most significant when compared with the number of clergy present in New France at any given time. In the past, the Canadian priest François-Xavier Noiseux (1748–1834), the American historian John Dawson Gilmary Shea (1824–92), and the Canadian priests, archivists, and historians Cyprien Tanguay (1819–1902), Jean-Baptiste-Arthur Allaire (1866–1943), and Ivanhoë Caron (1875–1941), made a number of pioneering attempts to list all of New France’s ecclesiastical personnel. None of their lists, however, are sufficiently reliable to allow any meaningful comparison. There again, Pelletier’s study is the only instrument that makes a comparison possible; however, its geographical scope limits its usefulness in that regard. Recent studies on Sulpicians, Recollets, and Capuchins have gone a step further in that direction, but so far these studies have not been used to that end.4 From an historiographical viewpoint, a sample of what such comparisons may entail is provided by historian Luca Codignola, Italian by origin but active in Canada and the United States, who has listed and compared ecclesiastical presences in New France for the period preceding the arrival of Bishop Laval (1659). He shows, for example, that in that crucial period, which included the so-called “heroic age” of the Huron mission, Jesuits were only seventy-seven overall, as opposed to some fifteen thousand members of the order. He also shows that at the same time the almost unknown Capuchin mission in Acadia boasted a comparable number of friars, sixty to sixty-three. This sample points to an overall minor interest in New France, and specifically to a limited commitment to missionary work among the indigenous peoples that the Jesuits shared with all regular orders.5
Finally, a quick note on sources. This article is not meant to be an indication of archival sources.6 The three main repositories for the history of New France—the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI) in Rome, the Archives Jésuites in Vanves, and the Archive of the Jesuits in Canada/Archives des Jésuites au Canada in Montreal—will be mentioned as we go along, together with the relating printed primary and secondary sources. However, as the following has always been the cause of some confusion, it should be noted right at the beginning of this chapter that as of 1616 the Jesuits wrote and published letters and reports concerning their activity in New France. However, only their forty-one reports published in Paris in book form between 1632 and 1673 by the printing houses of Sébastien Cramoisy (1585–1669) and his brother Gabriel Cramoisy (d.1663), and of Jean Boullenger (1582–1677) in Rouen, were titled then—and are still customarily referred to—as relations. The first relation was signed by Paul Le Jeune (1592–1664) and the last one by Claude Dablon (1619–97). These relations reported facts that had happened in 1632 and in 1671–72.
2. The Early Search for Jesuit Sources and Martyrs: Resuscitation to Canonization, 1847–1930
The search for Jesuit sources relating to New France began in the mid-nineteenth century in a wave of truly transnational exchanges. Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (1797–1880), an Irish medical doctor who had studied in Dublin and in Paris, moved to Quebec City in 1823 and for over a decade became politically involved in the anti-British Patriote movement. In 1839, he fled Lower Canada and relocated to the United States, where he devoted the rest of his life to archival and historical research.7 Far from sharing ultramontane sympathies, very soon O’Callaghan developed a scholarly interest in the early Jesuits of New France. As early as 1847, he alerted the members of the New-York Historical Society to the significance of their writings. In 1870–71, he published eight letters and reports authored by Jesuit missionaries.8 O’Callaghan shared his enthusiasm for the Jesuit writings with American book collector John Lenox (1800–80). With the help of his young librarian, Victor Hugo Paltsits (1867–1952), Lenox succeeded in reuniting a full collection of the published relations that became part of the Lenox Library (1870), later merged with the New York Public Library. O’Callaghan was a member of a network of learned scholars who, in France as well as in the Province of Canada, wanted to resurrect the little-known Jesuit texts of New France and celebrate the old Jesuits.9
Martin belonged to the O’Callaghan’s generation. In 1850, he revised and translated the latter’s 1847 address, adding to it a note on his own discoveries of the manuscript reports he had found in Rome. Martin had been called to the Province of Canada in 1842 by the bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget (1799–1885; in office 1840-76) and had since developed an interest in the history of the Jesuits of New France. In 1848, he inaugurated the construction of the Collège Sainte-Marie, that he subsequently led until 1857, and made it an archival repository of Jesuit documents. In 1844, for example, he received from the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec City a batch of very significant documents that had been in legal possession of the Society until Casot’s death in 1800. (This collection of early documents was later referred to as “Manuscrit de 1652” and provided the basis for a “Manuscrit de 1653” now preserved in Paris.) Martin and the new Canadian Jesuits regarded themselves as the heirs of their heroic confrères of New France. Because the memories of their deeds, even of their violent deaths, seemed to have been lost in the new Canada, they looked to the past in search of historical documentation that would establish a sort of continuing spiritual genealogy.10
Martin also travelled extensively. In 1856, he visited the sites of the ancient Huron mission, there again looking for archaeological traces of his confrères’ activity, together with the physical remnants of an indigenous world that had since profoundly changed and that he tried mentally to reconstruct. On a crown’s commission, in 1857–58, he also travelled to Paris and Rome in search of early Canadian documents. In the spring of 1858, he spent two weeks at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. Upon his return in 1859, Martin was appointed superior of the Jesuit residence of Quebec City and left Collège Sainte-Marie. During his twenty years in Canada, Martin immersed himself in the history of the Society of Jesus’s ancient missionaries and published some of their relations alone or together with his French confrère, Marie-Fortuné de Montézon (1800–62).11 In 1861, Martin returned to France, where he assisted Carayon in publishing the New France material of the latter’s documentary editions; published two lengthy biographies of the seventeenth-century Canadian missionaries, Isaac Jogues (1607–46) and Jean de Brébeuf (1593–1649), together with a summary of their deeds; and added several erudite remarks to his previous edition of the report by Francesco Giuseppe Bressani (1612–72).12
Still, Martin’s most important legacy was his contagious enthusiasm and the number of scholars of his generation or younger that he excited or rallied around the Jesuit reports project. The lengthy controversy over the legitimacy of the Jesuit estates, as well as an overall atmosphere of mounting French-Canadian nationalism, contributed to this common afflation. Martin’s desire to collect, transcribe, and publish all Jesuit sources relating to New France led to scholarly initiatives that others carried to completion. For example, he was responsible for some seventy-five per cent of the famous Jesuit Relations edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853–1913) at the turn of the century. One direct disciple of Martin’s was Ontario-born Jones, who returned to Canada in 1876 after several years abroad. He became the archivist at Collège Sainte-Marie in 1882, a position that he kept until his death. Although he was regarded as an authority on the sites of the Huron mission, Jones’s publications in the field of Jesuit history were not numerous. However, he significantly added to the Jesuit documentary corpus and was of great assistance to other scholars.13
In 1858, a group of Québec priest historians edited the first collection of Jesuit relations proper (1611–72). The team consisted of Édouard-Gabriel Plante (1813–69), Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland (1805–65), and Charles-Honoré Cauchon, known as Laverdière (1826–73). A few years later, the youngest among them, Laverdière, also edited the Jesuit journals (1645–68) together with Henri-Raymond Casgrain (1831–1904), another priest historian whose fame in the end surpassed them all. In fact, Casgrain’s 1864 synthesis of the religious history of New France proved to be a decisive effort in promoting the cause of the Jesuit martyrs. Most of these French-Canadian historians were also priests who shared an attitude that was both nationalist and ultramontane. Given the relative smallness of Québec society, necessary collaboration did not prevent personal rivalries to grow even among those devoted scholars. These rivalries were compounded by a sense of jealous admiration towards fellow American scholars who proved to be quicker and more successful in publishing Jesuit texts that their Canadian colleagues had generously put at their disposal, either in person or through letter writing.14
Curiously, the earliest among these American scholars was William Ingraham Kip (1811–93), a New York State Episcopal minister with an evident missionary vocation, but no known relationship to the Catholic Church, either Canadian or American. In 1844, he had stumbled across a set of the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (see below), and had been so taken by the Jesuit missionaries’ “labors and sufferings,” of which “so little [was] known,” that he selected and translated eleven documents covering the years 1656–1757. In 1853, he became himself a missionary bishop in California. Kip’s Early Jesuit Missions were published in 1845 and were a “touching and romantic” testimony not only of the Jesuits’ own devotion, but also of their role as “the earliest pioneers of civilization and faith.” For his part, Shea had started off in 1850 as one of Martin’s early disciples at the Collège Sainte-Marie. Although he renounced his spiritual vocation soon thereafter, Shea remained a practicing Catholic and devoted his life to the history of the church in the United States that he made to include the activities of the early French Jesuit missionaries. Among his numerous publications, Shea translated and reprinted forty Jesuit texts, covering the years 1632–72, under the aegis of his own Cramoisy Press (1857–66), a name that he chose in honor of the main publisher of the original Jesuit relations.15
Shea was followed by Thwaites, yet another American historian, not a great scholar himself, but certainly a formidable cultural entrepreneur. Undoubtedly, his documentary edition of Jesuit sources, titled The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610–1791, overshadowed all the previous ones. This was an imposing seventy-three-volume collection published in rapid succession at the turn of the century. (The printing took sixty-five months as a whole, with an average output of 1,12 volumes per month.) From an editorial point of view, the Jesuit Relations were a remarkable achievement. The collection required the ability to couple a demanding pace of publication with an unusual internal consistency. It included not only the missionary reports regularly published as books from 1632 to 1673 (later in their entirety referred to as relations), but also letters, deeds, petitions, journals, etc. (Hence the common mistake of later historians who confuse the Jesuit relations proper with the title of the Thwaites collection.)
Thwaites was not alone in this enterprise. He directed a small team of editors and translators, which included one assistant editor, Emma Helen Blair (1851–1911), who probably took care of most editorial work, and Paltsits, then with the Lenox Library, as bibliographical adviser. Thwaites was able to profit from an impressive network of scholars—mainly historians, archivists, and archaeologists—in the United States as well as in Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, who trusted and praised him. This network included some leading French-Canadian authors such as Hospice-Anthelme-Jean-Baptiste Verreau (1828–1901) and Auguste-Honoré Gosselin (1843–1918). Prominent among Thwaites’s collaborators were Jones, the Collège Sainte-Marie archivist, described as a scholar “whose knowledge of Jesuitica of New France is unapproached by any other authority,” and Andrew Frederick Hunter (1863–1940), a renowned Ontario archaeologist. Paradoxically, the only scholar missing from Thwaites’s list of acquaintances is yet another Jesuit, the American Thomas Aloysius Hughes (1849–1939). Hughes was working almost in the same years as Thwaites at a full history of the Society of Jesus in English America, which included some material on the earliest French Jesuit missionaries. In the end, Hughes produced a massive, albeit rather confused, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, which appeared between 1907 and 1917.16
It is on account of the inadequacy of their translations that the Jesuit Relations received their earliest negative criticism. In 1914, American historian Clarence Walworth Alvord (1868–1928), himself a prominent documentary editor, pointed out that translations could have been better had Thwaites’s team been more versed in the vocabulary of Catholic institutions. Yet these appeared as minor quibbles in view of the Jesuit Relations contribution. As late as 1951 the Canadian historian and archivist Gustave Lanctôt (1883–1975) regarded it as the “most complete edition [...] and, perhaps, the definitive edition.”17
These American historians did not limit themselves to the publication of Jesuit sources, but actually used them to write narratives—and in English at that—that soon became very popular and influential outside of the small universe of Québec Catholicism. Undoubtedly, the most successful of them all was Francis Parkman (1823–93), who in 1867 devoted one full volume of his magnum opus to the saga of the Jesuits in North America. As a young Bostonian, in 1844, Parkman had spent almost two months in Rome to get an insider’s feeling of Catholic mentality. He then immersed himself in the reading of the Jesuit reports he used profusely to narrate “the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians.” Some years later, the Canadian historian William John Eccles (1917–98) actually accused Parkman of having excessively immersed himself in the Jesuit documents.18 Parkman knew the 1858 Relations des Jésuites edited by Laverdière (with Plante and Ferland), as well as Shea’s Cramoisy series, both of whom he thanked in his preface. Another French-Canadian historian whose assistance Parkman acknowledged was Casgrain. The two scholars agreed to disagree both privately and publicly but were in constant touch throughout their lives. French-Canadian priest historians could not agree with Parkman’s providential interpretation of the destruction of the Huron mission (“Liberty may thank the Iroquois”) but were delighted and often quoted his portrayal of the Jesuits whose virtues shone “like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.”19
In his being American and Protestant, Parkman was a somewhat exceptional figure in Jesuit historiography. In fact, the next syntheses of the history of the Jesuits in New France were authored by a French Jesuit historian, Camille de Rochemonteix (1834–1923), whom Thwaites acknowledged for his assistance in providing access to French sources. De Rochemonteix made good use of all the available printed sources, from O’Callaghan onwards, and examined the Jesuit original catalogues as well as their correspondence. He well explained the genesis of the Jesuit sources, but what is more important he was able to distinguish the corporate mentality of the Society from the individual personalities of its members. He also showed how these individualities were reflected in the style and the contents of their reports. Whereas de Rochemonteix’s syntheses remained unsurpassed for a very long time, the three-volume history of the Canadian Jesuits written by another Jesuit historian, the American Thomas Joseph Campbell (1848–1925), took the form of individual biographies of noteworthy missionaries. Although Campbell had taken advantage of the Collège Sainte-Marie archives and of Jones’s presence there, his work had little to add to what was already known. In spirit, the devout studies by de Rochemonteix and Campbell did not substantially differ from Shea’s or Gosselin’s.20
Nurtured by a pervasive atmosphere of mounting ultramontanism, the American and the French-Canadian churches campaigned in Rome for the canonization of their early Jesuit martyrs, whose violent deaths had taken place in the state of New York and the province of Ontario between 1642 and 1649. As is well known, the prerequisites that normally made it possible for the Catholic Church to proclaim a person a saint and a martyr were defined by the Council of Trent. Normally, a candidate for sainthood must go through a process of canonization that includes several stages—Servant of God, Venerable, Blessed, and, eventually, Saint. Martyrdom was a special category that described men and women who sacrificed their life for the faith before a persecutor whose main motivation for the killing was hate of the martyr’s faith. In its mandate, the Sacred Congregation of the Rites, established in 1588, included the verification of all prerequisites for sainthood and martyrdom and the process of canonization.
The documentation initially provided by Martin and Jones to initiate the Canadian martyrs’ proceedings was supplemented by Thwaites’s JR. The impulse of the canonical process for beatification, which officially began in Quebec City in 1904, led to a full review of primary and secondary sources. This included references to Parkman’s tribute to Jesuit heroism. The review was eventually printed, for internal use, by the Sacred Congregation of the Rites in 1916 under the overall responsibility of the Augustinian Sebastiano Cardinal Martinelli (1848–1918). In the end, the Holy See beatified the eight Canadian martyrs on June 21, 1925, and canonized them on June 29, 1930.21 At first, the process leading to the canonization of the first North American indigenous saint, Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–80), proceeded in parallel fashion with that of the Jesuit martyrs. At some point, however, Tekakwitha’s and the Canadian martyrs’ proceedings were separated. It took a further eighty-two years for the proceedings relating to the “Lily of the Mohawks” to reach their successful conclusion: Tekakwitha was beatified in 1980 and canonized in 2012.22
3. From World War I to World War II: A Reappraisal of the Jesuit Relations, 1930–45
The Thwaites collection and the canonization process appeared to have closed the door to any new extensive research on the role of the New France Jesuits. In the period between World War I and the end of World War II, ecclesiastical authors, mainly Jesuit, continued to produce devout texts of little if any historiographical value. Some of them emphasized the role of the Jesuit missionaries as explorers of the North American continent.23 However, rather exceptional for their historiographical and geographical breadth are three monographs by yet another Jesuit historian, Jean Delanglez (1896–1949). Belgian by birth, American by education, Delanglez was an unsurpassed scholar for his attention to the new sources and for his narrative ability.24
This overall atmosphere of uncritical and devotional adherence to the model of the early Jesuit martyrs, as opposed to historical scholarship, was somehow broken by a new approach to the Jesuit relations that privileged the latter. This new approach took two forms. One investigated the published Jesuit reports within the context of travel literature, real or imaginary. It emphasized their role in influencing the early modern French literature and the corresponding representation of America, including the notion of the noble savage. The France-born American literary critic Gilbert Chinard (1881–1972), and his American colleague, Geoffroy Atkinson (1892–1960), worked separately but proceeded along parallel paths in this regard. An original spin-off of the Chinard-Atkinson approach was the 1950 article by the American intellectual historian George Robert Healy (1923–2010). According to him, the French Jesuits’ positive attitude towards the indigenous people as fundamentally good human beings who could be saved through proper evangelization was “largely formed before they left France.” Healy also emphasizes the importance of situating the case of New France within a larger Jesuit ideological universe that included Paraguay and especially China.25
A second feature of this new approach was a renewed, erudite analysis of the Jesuit relations and of their genesis and contexts. Unfortunately, the sharing of this new curiosity and understanding was inhibited by the ethnic nationalism of the times and the inward-looking attitude of Society of Jesus. When its upper echelons called for a renewed effort on the part of its historians in order to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of its foundation in 1540, a young French-Canadian historian, the Jesuit Léon Pouliot (1898–1980), responded with a full analysis of the Jesuit relations. Aside from the Thwaites collection he praised, not only was Pouliot unaware of any scholarly research being done outside the Society, but he also called for an exclusive Catholic and French-Canadian appropriation of the Jesuit sources:
Are not [the Jesuit relations] a wealth that belongs to the French Canadians in the first place? [...] Who could, more easily than us, reconstitute and relive the great events that they tell us, inspired as they always are by the noblest and saintest ideal? Did not the heroic acts of which they are full made some very special graces descend upon our country and our Church?
Pouliot’s driving idea was to show that the French-Canadian church could claim its origins in the primitive church of the Canadian martyrs.26
Jesuit documents, however, were studied and appreciated by non-Jesuit and non-French-speaking historians. American literary author Edna Kenton (1876–1954) compiled two lengthy collections of Jesuit texts in their English translations as previously printed in the Thwaites collection.27 The Kenton book was followed by a most comprehensive essay, the work of the American historian Lawrence Counselman Wroth (1884–1970), who presented it to an audience of bibliographers in 1931. He explained the methods used for the composition of the relations, summarized the chronology of the original publications and their modern editions, and emphasized their wide circulation. As for their sudden disappearance after the last issue published in 1673, Wroth agreed with de Rochemonteix and Paltsits in attributing this discontinuance to the global Chinese rites controversy, not to French, let alone Canadian motivations. Wroth’s attention to the Jesuit reports had been excited by the American book collector, James Comly McCoy (1862–1934), whose reading of Parkman as a youth had resulted in a catalogue of 132 published variants of the original forty-one relations. McCoy’s bibliography was eventually published posthumously. Collated in the same vein as McCoy’s, the detailed catalogue of yet another collection of Jesuit relations, that of book collector James Ford Bell (1879–1961), was compiled and introduced by the American librarian Frank Keller Walter (1874–1945), who retold and updated the history of the Jesuit reports and of their historiography.28
4. Diverging Trends: The Jesuit Monopoly of Jesuit Historiography and the Arrival of Ethnohistory, 1945–68
In Jesuit historiography, the period from the end of World War II (1939–45) to the Quiet Revolution in the province of Québec (1960–66) witnessed the customary flow of occasional publications of varied quality on individual Jesuit missionaries and their travels and explorations. They concentrated on some of the Society of Jesus’s most famed members, such as Brébeuf, Jogues, and Le Jeune, besides Noël Chabanel (1613–49), Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761), Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot (1611–93), Antoine Daniel (1601–48), Charles Garnier (1606–49), Louis Jolliet (1645–1700), Jacques Marquette (1637–75), and Pierre Millet (1635–1708). Most of these publications were authored by ordained members of the church, mostly Jesuits. One of them, the French François Roustang (1923–2016), a psychoanalyst by training, though admittedly not adding to what was already known via de Rochemonteix and Thwaites, focused on the spiritual aspects of the missionaries’ published texts.29
More significantly, however, this period saw the beginning of two diverging trends that would become more and more apparent in the half century that followed. The first one featured the beginning of a virtual monopoly of ecclesiastical and especially Jesuit historians over the writing of the Jesuits’ role in the history of New France. To be sure, most of them had by then abandoned devout providentialism in favor of historical scholarship. The second trend coincided with a new reading of the Jesuit texts as an ethnohistorical source. By combining the methods of history and anthropology and adding an indigenous perspective, indigenous peoples came out not only as ethnographic objects but as agents of their own history and of the history of contact. The first trend—signaling the overwhelming impact of Jesuit historians over the role of their confrères in New France—became all the more evident at the time of the planning of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The DCB was a model of its kind. Far from being a collection of compilations taken from secondary literature, its entries were intended to be full-length research articles based on primary sources. As a result, ever since its first volume appeared in 1966, the DCB became the recognized starting point of any further research and was as such extremely influential. Given that its volumes were organized by date brackets, the first four volumes, published between 1967 and 1979, included the biographies of ninety-nine noteworthy Jesuits among the 332 or so Jesuits who had been active in New France between 1611 and 1800. Probably under the influence of the Québec eminent historians Jean Hamelin (1931–98), Marcel Trudel (1917–2011), and André Vachon (1933–2003), all of whom could claim some expertise in the history of the Canadian Catholic Church, seventy of these biographies were assigned to Jesuit historians (seventy-two percent). Overall, eighty entries (eighty-two percent) were authored by members of religious communities or diocesan priests. Most contributions written by members of the Society of Jesus were authored by the dean of Jesuit historians, Pouliot (eighteen), followed by the younger but well-established historian Lucien Campeau (1914–2003) (eighteen), a recent PhD such as Jacques Monet, born in 1930 and ordained as late as 1966 (fourteen), and the archivist Joseph Cossette (1913–2007) (nine). Only eighteen entries (eighteen percent) were authored by historians with no official religious affiliations. Three of them are noteworthy: William Nelson Fenton (1908–2005), a well-established Canadian ethnologist and an expert on the Iroquois; the emerging forty-year-old Canadian ethnohistorian Cornelius John Jaenen; and the Canadian literary critic and DCB’s editor David Mackness Hayne (1921–2008), who kept for himself the entry on Charlevoix.30
Because Monet’s interests soon moved away from the early period, Campeau’s entries established him as the real star of Jesuit historiography of New France. Even more significantly, in 1967, only one year after the issue of first volume of the DCB, Campeau published the first imposing tome of his nine-volume collection of Jesuit documents on New France, a real monument to historical scholarship in the tradition of the Society of Jesus’s Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu series. Campeau’s Monumenta Novae Franciae cover the early years of the Jesuit presence in continental North America, from 1602 to 1661. That period roughly corresponds to the pioneering period that preceded the 1659 arrival of Laval, the vicar apostolic, and includes the Huron mission and the deaths of the Canadian martyrs. The Campeau collection includes thirty relations proper—originally published between 1632 and 1661 by the Cramoisy printing house, besides Bressani’s 1652 Breve relatione, and the Jesuit journals for the years 1645 to 1661. As a whole the MNF made available in print, in their original language, 1,324 documents pertaining to the history of the Canadian Jesuits.31
When one considers that, first, Thwaites’s volumes 1–47, which correspond to Campeau’s chronological span, only published eighty-nine documents, and, secondly, that all of the Thwaites documents were taken from printed or secondary sources, whereas Campeau took most of his documents from unpublished archival material, one would surmise that all historians would have immediately discarded Thwaites in favor of Campeau.32 Not so, for two main reasons. Ignorance of languages other than English is, of course, the first one. Campeau published his documents in their original languages—mostly French, Latin, and Italian—with his own commentary in French. (To be sure, Campeau’s editorial hand is not neutral, in that he reorganized paragraphs and punctuation, and added italics and quotation marks.) Thwaites, on the other hand, had coupled all original documents with their translations into English. The second reason is a disdainful rejection on the part of most lay scholars of Campeau’s interpretation of missionary activity. They were also taken aback by the Jesuit historian’s explicit contempt for the new ethnohistorians, the Canadian archaeologist and anthropologist Bruce Graham Trigger (1937–2006) in particular. At the core of Campeau’s interpretation is the idea that the acceptance of Catholicism on the part of the indigenous peoples was very much an act of free will. He admits that the presence of missionaries among them contributed to their material havoc. However, in his view, their teachings allowed their spiritual improvement and the abandonment of their “primitive” state. Campeau’s commentaries and annotations were often intended—one suspects quite deliberately—to irritate his critics and to throw the reader off balance. Campeau interspersed his scholarly annotations with statements of a moral nature that betrayed his providential vision of human history—a vision that, one should add, he unabashedly shared with his confrères of three centuries earlier. His short but uncompromising introduction to his 1994 tome epitomizes it all.33
However, lay scholars who do not subscribe to Campeau’s devout outlook should think twice before dismissing the MNF. The difference between the Thwaites and the Campeau collections is huge. For one thing, the passage from Thwaites to Campeau has provided more raw ethnographical material on which to base our knowledge of indigenous cultures at the time of contact. As we all know, the relations proper, which were at the core of the Thwaites collection, were the final product that surfaced after a rather careful vetting and editing process. Conversely, Campeau’s reliance on a vast and diverse array of original documents allows the reader to get closer to field observation. Furthermore, by documenting the inner workings of the Society of Jesus, the MNF allow the reader better to understand the background, the motivations, and the way of reasoning of the Jesuit missionaries. They make it easier, by consequence, to detect and remove some of the layers of the culturally oriented observants’ viewpoint and to get closer to the object they observed. In 1994 and 2000 respectively, the Canadians Thomas Wien and Allan R. Greer, certainly not confessional historians, provided the most explicit statements in support of Campeau’s MNF by describing them as the “definitive collection of Jesuit relations, letters, and other documents,” setting “a new standard for completeness and rigorous editing.”34 Apart from the MNF, which is his main accomplishment, and his DCB entries, Campeau single-handedly authored several books, chapters, and articles fully or partially devoted to the Jesuits of New France. Finally, with two thematic essays and thirty biographical entries, Campeau was the paramount contributor for New France to the 2001 Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, which was published shortly before his death but had been in the making for two decades.35
Ironically, in the same year when Campeau published his first volume of the MNF, his American confrère Joseph Peter Donnelly (1905–82) completed the task that the director of Loyola University Press, John Bernard Amberg, S.J. (1912–74), had entrusted to him, that is, the publication of an Errata and Addenda, a cover-to-cover and line-by-line critique of the Jesuit Relations edited by Thwaites, Campeau’s illustrious predecessor. Donnelly’s book was meant to correct Thwaites’s “mistakes, mistranslation, errors of fact and judgment regarding Catholic practice, misinterpretations of the internal workings of the government of the Society of Jesus”; to identify and translate all biblical quotations; and to update the bibliography. Though more addenda than errata, Donnelly’s is a very good introduction to the Thwaites corpus and is partially based on the Thwaites Papers preserved at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. However, his punctilious examination does not alter the gist of the Thwaites collection itself. Though aware of the Campeau project, “probably not [to] be completed for decades,” Donnelly did not anticipate how the MNF would have revolutionized our understanding of the Jesuit sources. Eccles, the great revisionist of the history of New France, had instead well understood the implications of the Campeau collection. In 1987, when calling for a “thorough re-examination of the roles played by the Church and the clergy in New France, including Acadia, Louisiana and the pays-d’en-haut, as well as Canada,” Eccles warned that such a task could have been undertaken only after the completion of Campeau’s MNF, the third volume of which had by then just been published.36
Besides Campeau, another protagonist of this trend towards a virtual monopoly of Jesuit historiography was the American Jesuit historian Charles Edwards O’Neill (1927–2009). His 1966 book on colonial Louisiana, written very much in the terse and scholarly style of the Delanglez tradition, signaled the beginning of a long career entirely devoted to Upper and Lower Louisiana and to the role of the early French Jesuits in the American middle-western states. In this capacity, O’Neill added several biographical entries to Campeau’s Canadian entries and one thematic essay relating to western New France for both the DCB (1969, 1974) and the DHCJ (2001). Undoubtedly, by the late 1960s, via Delanglez, the DCB, Campeau, and O’Neill, not only had Jesuit historians shown that their scholarship could well compete with that of their lay colleagues, but they had also managed to establish a quasi-monopolistic interpretation of the history of the Jesuits of New France, one that found its latest expressions in O’Neill’s DHCJ and in Campeau’s last volume of the MNF, which appeared in 2003.37
With regard to the second trend in Jesuit historiography of the post-World War II period, that is, the new reading of the Jesuit texts as an ethnohistorical source, Canadian ethnologists Jacques Rousseau (1905–70) and Madeleine Aquin Rousseau (1910–2004) mixed in an original fashion the Jesuit version of events with indigenous oral traditions. These oral sources do not have, they admit, “the historical value of documents entrusted to archives,” but they well illustrate “the psychological skein of the peoples without annals” at time of contact. Furthermore, they emphasize that even written documents, such as the Jesuit relations, were often the end results of stories passed over “by way of many intermediaries” and then suffered from similar problems of closeness to the original event or source. Over a decade later, the American anthropologist Elisabeth Jane Tooker (1927–2005) was more traditionally ethnographic in her well-documented description of the early Huron society. For his part, Trigger, who was then preparing a major study of the Huron nation, refuted previous views of the Jesuit missionaries as being motivated by economic gain of sort. In an historiographical era strongly influenced by economicism, Trigger called for “a more humanistic attempt to understand the manner in which individuals and groups perceived the situation in which they found themselves and responded to it.” In both Tooker and Trigger, Jesuit reports figure prominently.38
Two contributors to the DCB belong to this trend in Jesuit historiography. One was Fenton, who was responsible for the entry on the Jesuit celebrated author, Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746). The other was Jaenen, who shortly thereafter produced two well-balanced and influential books on New France’s missionary encounters in the age of contact. Jaenen’s books made good use of the Jesuit relations, but tried to look at them from an indigenous point of view. Fenton and Jaenen, however, were exceptions among the contributors to the DCB. The ethnohistorical wave, which will be so prominent in the decades to follow, had by then just begun.39
5. Ethnohistorians, Acadia, and Literary Critics, 1968–90
In 1990, in reviewing the first four volumes of Thwaites’s JR, Maureen Korp, a Canadian art critic, warned that their editor had not corrected the missionaries’ “Eurocentric racism and ignorance” nor had the Jesuits’ writings been “vetted by [...] the Indians of New France.” She concluded her tirade with the plea, “who is there to tell the other side of the story?” Evidently enough, Korp was unaware of the fact that the explosion of ethnohistory in the past twenty-five years or so had revolutionized the reading of the Jesuit relations “and allied documents.” Undoubtedly, from Kip (1845) and Shea (1854) onwards, scholars had mined the Jesuit writings as an encyclopedia for ethnographic data. Their unspoken premise was that indigenous societies were crystallized in their primitiveness and that the distinctive features of their societies, like dinosaurs’ bones, were there only to be discovered or unveiled. The devout historians’ own contribution to this static picture had been a benevolent portrayal of the Jesuit missionaries. Indeed, the indigenous peoples of North America had been the raison d’être of the presence of the Jesuits in New France, as well as the main reason of the publication of their reports, including the modern editions of their relations. The Canadian literary critic Guy Laflèche has in fact pointed out that the “Indians” entry in the index of Thwaites’s JR, exclusive of tribal and personal names, is forty-seven-page long and is by far its longest one of the whole collection.40
When they burst onto the historiographical scene in the early 1970s, ethnohistorians provided an alternative to the “heroic age” interpretive canon. Well in tune with the spirit of the late 1960s, ethnohistorians showed a sympathetic attitude towards indigenous societies and a sense of guilt for their European ancestors’ actions. As for their historiographical contribution, they added a new focus on reciprocal change at the time of the encounter. Because the mission was a major point of contact between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples, Jesuit missionaries were at the forefront of this process of reciprocal adjustment. Ethnohistorians then began to re-examine Jesuit texts, and the relations in particular, with a new eye. By and large, they shifted their interest from the missionaries onto the missionized. They also portrayed the missionaries as the unwitting agents of catastrophic change: in their attempt to save the indigenous people from eternal damnation, missionaries were asking them to bring about a radical transformation of their culture, that is, to erase their identity as indigenous people. However, ethnohistorians also emphasized that the indigenous people reacted to Jesuit intrusions in a variety of ways. Some willingly accepted the new religion and tried to adapt to the rules required by French society; others did so only partially; others still resisted outright. In this new historiographical debate, the issue of the indigenous conversion became as crucial has it had been at the very time of contact. When did missionaries admit bona fide conversions? What did indigenous people mean when they implored the Jesuits to accept them into the church through baptism and holy matrimony?41
To Jaenen, whom we have already mentioned as a 1969 contributor to the DCB, with regard to this period one should add the Americans James P. Ronda, James L. Axtell, and Daniel K. Richter, as well as the Canadians Trigger, Denys Delâge, and Alain Beaulieu. Some of them were younger historians who continued to write for many years to come. No matter what their case study or methodological approach were—Axtell was an intellectual historian, Trigger an archaeologist by training, Delâge a sociologist—they all emphasized indigenous agency and continued to use Jesuit writings, and the relations in particular, as a fundamental source for their analyses.42 Axtell is exceptional in this context, in that he is the only one among them who made the case for the sincerity and depth of indigenous conversions to Christianity. However, Trigger and Delâge proved to be more influential, especially on the Canadian scene. Both favored an economic interpretation of the contact period in which the impact of factors such as religion or conversion were of a limited significance. Trigger singled out local causations, such as the implications of the fur trade. For his part, in his 1985 book, Delåge’s favored a macroeconomic framework—although in his later works he significantly softened his approach. Nevertheless, Delåge did not renege on his conviction that the missionaries in general, and the Jesuits in particular, meant to impose on the indigenous peoples of New France “a totalitarian regime and to impose on them a rule that […] aimed at controlling the morals and the orthodoxy of the life of each and every one.” Delâge’s commentary was prompted by a church historian of the previous generation, John Webster Grant (1919–2006), a United Church clergyman. Grant had attempted a major history of missionary activity among the Canadian indigenous peoples. In his chapters on New France, Grant had shared Campeau’s view that external factors, not the Jesuits, had been responsible for the destruction of the Huron nation.43 Had not ethnohistorians come around to modify the overall perspective, the syntheses written by two American historians, Henry Warner Bowden and James Talmadge Moore, would have been considered rather good—especially Bowden’s. However, in spite of their sympathetic view of the indigenous cause, both authors were unwittingly limited by their strict dependence on Jesuit sources and the Jesuits’ perspective.44
Another old-fashioned yet popular synthesis of the early contact was Canadian writer Elizabeth Jones’s Gentlemen and Jesuits. Her book moves away from Canada proper and focuses on early Acadia, a region that had attracted much less attention among religious historians. Yet in the late seventeenth century, and especially after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Acadia had become the focus of clashing imperial strategies, so much that for the local missionaries the coincidence between the interests of the crown and those of the church became even more explicit than before. The most iconic and controversial among the Jesuit missionaries in Acadia was Sébastien Râle (1652–1724), who in the end was killed during a New England raiding party in the course of Dummer’s War (1722–27)—in the same fashion, one could add, that the Canadian martyrs of a century earlier had been killed during the Iroquois raids. The scholarly output regarding Acadia, though, remained limited in quantity and significance. The works of the American ethnohistorian Kenneth M. Morrison (1946–2012) were passioned but, in the end, of limited impact, whereas the books authored by the Canadians Antonio Dragon (1892–1977), a Jesuit historian, and Micheline Dumont-Johnson remained at the level of useful but rather traditional contributions.45
With regard to Jesuit texts considered as products of the creative mind, the writings of art historian François-Marc Gagnon (1935–2019) and of two literary critics, Laflèche and Réal Ouellet, all of them Canadians, must be singled out. Laflèche began in 1973 with a new edition of Le Jeune’s 1634 relation and—so far—ended with his 2017 linguistic analysis of the same missionary’s proficiency in the Montagnais (Innu, Nêhirawêwin) language. Laflèche’s major achievement is a five-volume edition of some among the most significant early Jesuit reports, which he subjected to a word-by-word philological and historical analysis. Although he began in a strictly “structuralist” fashion and softened his methodological approach as he went along, a number of unchanged elements can be identified in his writings. Some are of the negative sort. First, his books are poorly organized and cumbersome to use. The edited texts are drowned in a disproportionate number of endnotes and annotations, in which major interpretive issues are hidden by dozens of analyses of points of lesser significance. Secondly, Laflèche’s vitriolic prose, mostly directed against contemporary Jesuit historians—Campeau in particular (“Champion of evenemential history, fundamentalist supporter of the Jesuits’ good causes, great slayer of Iroquois, infidel natives, libertines, and liberal historians”)—is so constant and overwhelming that the reader is inclined to ascribe all his arguments to personal animosity.46
Unfortunately, these negative elements tend to hide what is really innovative and original in Laflèche’s books and articles. First, the story of the intellectual creation of the Canadian martyrs—from Martin, through Bourget and Casgrain, to the apotheosis of 1930—had never been told in such a persuasive manner. Secondly, through his careful textual analysis Laflèche is able to penetrate the inner façade of Jesuit uniformity and to show who materially wrote the reports, what sources were used, how was the material edited, and what were the motivations of both the authors and the editors. Thirdly, in a brilliant summing-up essay that he wrote in 1999, Laflèche emphasizes the relations paradox. On the one side, their contemporary reception left “no trace in the world of letters or among scholars”; they fell into oblivion until O’Callaghan’s 1847 resuscitation; and their nature was that of a journalistic “second-rank publication,” poorly written at that, where “material for satisfying the curiosity of those who take pleasure in being informed of what is happening in foreign Nations [would] be found,” as the Jesuit missionary François-Joseph Le Mercier (1604–90) wrote in 1670. On the other side, the importance of the relations as a historical and anthropological monument to the North American indigenous peoples, their “real subject,” significantly increased as of the mid-nineteenth century. As an example of how the relations must be evaluated in the wider context of global missionary endeavors, Laflèche explains that the long-debated issue of the reasons of their discontinued publication after 1673 was the overall waning interest in the indigenous missions—a trend that is also detectable in the European Americana collection (see below) as well as in Bishop Laval’s correspondence.47
Gagnon, who collaborated with both Laflêche and Ouellet, examined the visual production of the Jesuit missionaries—of Louis Nicolas (1634–post-1682) in particular—and their use of devout images as tools for the conversion of the indigenous people. Starting with Le Jeune, Ouellet began a quest for narratives published by the seventeenth-century French missionaries. Quite originally, Ouellet went beyond New France and examined the whole area of French expansion, including the West Indies (Antilles). Both Gagnon’s and Ouellet’s works are valuable, though at times they take their images and their texts at face value and do not place them in their ever changing context.48 Our knowledge of the Jesuit relations are summarized once more by Ouellet and by another Canadian literary critic, Pierre Berthiaume, the latter making reference to their alleged role in the shaping of the noble savage myth. For her part, Canadian historian Marie-Aimée Cliche wrote an extensive entry on Charlevoix’s works as a literary text.49
The iconoclastic spirit of the times is also rather evident in two collections published in the late 1980s in France and in Québec, the result of two major conferences convened by the French historian Marc Fumaroli (1932–2020) and the Québec literary critic Gilles Thérien. With regard to New France, most of their contributors shared a sympathetic view of the indigenous peoples coupled with a condescending attitude towards the Jesuit missionaries. Unfortunately, this pervasive sentiment made it difficult, if not altogether impossible, for some contributors to go beyond the “natives vs. Jesuits” surface and examine individual responses to change on both sides. Still to be noted for this immediate post-1968 period are the occasional publications relating to Jesuit missionaries and their sources, such as Brébeuf, Le Jeune and Marquette, besides Joseph Aubery (1673–1756), Claude Chauchetière (1645–1709), François de Crespieul (1639–1702), and Pierre-Philippe Potier (1708–81). These were authored by American and Canadian priest historians such as the Jesuits Raphael Noteware Hamilton (1892–1980), Robert Toupin (1924–2000), Vincent A. Lapomarda, and Charles J. Principe (1929–2016), the latter a Brazilian; the French archivist Hélène Avisseau; the Canadian literary critic Chantal Théry, and the Canadian theologians Gilles Raymond and René-Michel Roberge.50
Finally, with regard to this period a rather traditional reference work must be recalled. This is the updated list of the Jesuit published texts relating to the New World, starting with Biard’s 1616 report and including all the relations proper. An initiative of the John Carter Brown Library of Providence, Rhode Island, this list is part of a major bibliographical tool of the highest standard that help situate the publications relating to New France in the much wider geographical and chronological framework of the early European expansion. Historiographically, European Americana is more than a reference work. It confirms the relatively minor significance of New France within the European colonial expansion. Consequently, it diminishes the significance of the Jesuit relations in the context of the global missionary endeavors. This is a point that I have emphasized above, when discussing the dearth of New France missionaries in relationships to other parts of the world. Both Laflèche, explicitly, and Ouellet, more implicitly, share the same opinion.51
6. The End of the Jesuit Monopoly and the Diccionario, 1990–2001
In 1987, Fumaroli had regretted that the history of the Jesuits had been “for long time a topic of study reserved to the Jesuits.” Ten years later, with regard to New France such a statement would have made little sense. In fact, by the beginning of the new millennium Jesuit historians had almost disappeared from the historiographical scene. At any rate, surely, they had lost their interpretive monopoly over their own history. Appearances might be deceiving, though. In fact, 2001 saw the publication of the imposing and authoritative DHCJ, consisting of 5,637 biographical entries and 366 essays, which largely superseded the Jesuiten-Lexikon authored by the German historian Ludwig Koch (1878–1935).52 The DHCJ included fifty-eight entries devoted to New France missionaries and a special one for Tekakwitha, the celebrated Jesuit convert, besides seven entries relating to historians who had studied them (Campbell, Delanglez, de Rochemonteix, Jones, Martin, Melançon, and Pouliot). Furthermore, the DHCJ carried six essays on matters of New France interest authored by Campeau and O’Neill, besides the Canadian Gilles Chaussé (1931–2012) and the Americans James J. Hennesey (1926–2001) and George A. De Napoli (1932–92). Still, the DHCJ had been too long in the making. The project had been launched in 1977 and approved in 1979. Collaborators had been selected among the best the Society of Jesus had to offer at the time. Unfortunately, these authors—like Campeau—had taken little notice of the changes that were taking place in New France historiography, so that, when they came out, their entries appeared not in tune with the new questions that had arisen in the last quarter of the twentieth century.53 Take, for example, the case of the Tekakwitha entry, which does not take into account the new attention to the Mohawk-Algonkin saint in the context of a spate of new studies on hagiography and gender in New France, especially Greer’s.54
The Jesuit relations, especially in their Thwaites version, continued to provide the main documentary evidence for all, but their unrivalled length and encyclopedic nature allowed for interpretations that derived from different, and at times opposite, historiographical schools. See, for example, the case of the American ethnohistorian of Canadian origin, José António Brandão, whose radical revision of the causes of the Iroquois Wars—as not being mainly motivated by economic factors—are solidly based on an impressive array of documentary evidence. Once more, the Jesuit reports stand out as a premier source of evidence, but one that in the past had been interpreted in just the opposite way.55 With regard to Tekakwitha, here is Béchard, her Jesuit hagiographer (and vice-postulator in the canonization proceedings), who depicts the young woman as raised from a state of savagery and paganism through the missionaries’ intercession. But here is also the Canadian feminist sociologist, Karen L. Anderson, who posits a genderless and egalitarian indigenous society where the arrival of the Jesuits, armed with their European misogynist attitude, rendered indigenous women powerless and subjugated. In fact, K. L. Anderson’s arguments were soon to be disproved by other women historians, such as Carol Green Devens Ramirez (1953–2003) and Susan Sleeper-Smith. No less keen in re-evaluating the role of women in society, they were much more skillful in sorting out the missionaries’ ideological biases from their practical behaviors.56
Canadian anthropologist Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls provides yet another example of how a narrow sample of the early Jesuit relations (in their Thwaites version) could be bent to prove an author’s preconceived thesis. Blackburn’s stated intention was to “uncover the logic that underlies the Jesuits’ accounts of their activities and their perceptions of Aboriginal peoples.” Her aim was to show their “many contradictions and ambiguities, and the hierarchical vision [the relations] served.” Whereas K. L. Anderson, who had preceded Blackburn by a decade, had started off with feminism, Blackburn follows up with postcolonial studies, which she describes as a lever to be used in order to lift the veil on “the forms of knowledge that enabled and sustained colonial rule”—that is, in the postcolonialist lingo, “the colonial discourse.” Unfortunately, Blackburn does not add to what we already knew about the Jesuits and their texts. Yet knowledge is not what she was after. Her methodology consisted in starting with a “politically engaged strategy of reading,” and to fish for evidence backwards. Blackburn’s main preoccupation is to show how past categories of colonial domination “continue to matter very much in the present.” She concedes, however, that the “expression of dominance” (the discourse) ingrained in the Jesuit relations is “not necessarily equivalent to dominance in their actual relationship” with the indigenous people, meaning that there was a major discrepancy between what the missionaries hoped to achieve and what they actually managed to or were allowed to accomplish. All in all, one is better served by the shorter articles by two literary critics, the French Vincent Grégoire and the American Peter A. Dorsey, and especially by the Canadian historian Peter A. Goddard, in understanding Jesuit strategies and accomplishments. Goddard, in particular, very convincingly situates the case of New France within the changing context of Jesuit mentality.57
Besides re-examining Tekakwitha’s path to canonization, Greer also edited a new selection from Thwaites’s JR. Confirming a new overall attention to indigenous issues, Greer focuses on the indigenous side of their relationship with the missionaries. In a short but original introduction, he also updates a number of controversial issues that had often been stated as matters of fact. In Greer’s view, for example, local authorship was much more significant than French editorship; circulation and readership are still unknown; and the relations had no influence on the Enlightenment or on the development of the noble savage idea. Greer also makes reference to the Jesuits’ “experiments in cross-cultural evangelization” in Japan, China, India, and Iberian America. He adds that, as they moved into North America, “the French Jesuits could draw on the institutional memory of their order for guidance in this unfamiliar territory.”58
Greer’s last assertion, however, is yet another matter-of-fact statement that needs further elaboration. To be sure, one could safely affirm that these missionaries shared a common Society of Jesus imprint and a formal allegiance to Rome; that all would-be missionaries listened to the edifying stories of their confrères’ global deeds; and that they often demanded to be sent ad Indos—meaning among pagans in distant lands—where the harshest tests to the faith would prove their inner worth. We also know that the printed relations of New France circulated among Jesuit students as much as the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a similar periodical publication issued between 1702 and 1776 that mainly dealt with the Orient but also included some texts on New France.59 Yet individual missionaries were also strongly influenced by their original nationality, constrained by their loyalty to different crowns, and affected by the times they lived in. Surely, Saint Francis Xavier (1506–52), who was born eight years after the “discovery” of America, and Charlevoix, who died one year after the British Conquest of Canada, are hardly comparable. I have already mentioned the minor significance, in terms of ecclesiastical personnel and publication output, of the New France mission. A quick look at the statistics of the 2001 DHCJ confirms this view—fifty-eight entries devoted to New France missionaries against 5,637 biographical entries overall—and so does Thwaites’s accurate index to his JR. Once in New France, then, it appears that the Jesuit missionaries became engulfed in local practices and hardly made any reference to the experiences of their luckier confrères, either in Paraguay, Japan, or China.60
So, how is one to elaborate on the reciprocal influence of Greer’s “experiments in cross-cultural evangelization” with regard to New France? In his 1995 article assessing Catholic attitudes towards indigenous conversion in the early modern era, Codignola suggests that for the Canadian Jesuits the primitive communities of North America and the civilized societies of the Orient represented the opposite extremities of the pagan world, and that success was nowhere in sight in either. In 1633, Le Jeune consoled himself by remarking that “it was 38 years [...] before anything was done in Brazil. How long have they [the Jesuits] been waiting at the gates of China?” In 1636, at the height of Huron mission’s success, Brébeuf could not be more explicit: “I do not claim here to put our Savages on a level with the Chinese, Japanese, and other Nations perfectly civilized; but only to put them above the condition of beasts, to which the opinion of some has reduced them, to give them rank among men, and to show that even among them there is some sort of Political and Civil life.”61
Shortly after Codignola, two historians who could claim an extra linguistic advantage, the Japanese Takao Abé and the Chinese Shenwen Li, compared the experience of the New France Jesuits to that of their confrères in Japan and in China. (Li then accepted a teaching position in Canada.) Both authors help add to the global missionary context and provide new evidence to the fact that Jesuit missionaries did their best to adjust to different surroundings. Li examines Jesuit strategies and local reactions in New France and China by focusing on French missionaries in a comparable time frame, 1611 to 1701 (ninety years) for Canada, and 1610 to 1722 (112 years) for China. He provides a useful catalogue of the sixty-eight French missionaries in China. He also recalls that two of them, Adrien Greslon (1618–97) and Pierre-Nicolas Le Chéron d’Incarville (1706–57), died in China after experiencing Canada. Unfortunately, what could have been Li’s most original contribution, that is, local reactions, is negatively affected by his view of individual conversions. In his opinion, in China these were induced by material advantages or scientific curiosity only; in North America, conversions were only motivated by the military and technological changes brought about by the fur trade. These changes fell upon a New World that was not yet “disposed to understand and assimilate the Western cultural and scientific achievements.” (So much for indigenous agency.) In line with the Trigger school, Li does not acknowledge that men and women of China and New France could have made personal and intimate decisions about choosing another religion—as contemporary Europeans did at the same time. In the end, Li’s North American indigenous peoples come out as stilted figurines frozen in their primitiveness.62
For his part, Abé’s main interest seems to be in the Jesuit sources as an ethnographic means “to arrive at a more plausible image” of the cultures that the missionaries encountered. Thus, with regard to the North American indigenous peoples, he is particularly appreciative of Tooker’s and Trigger’s work, as they had made good use of the scarce indigenous sources. As for Japan, he points out that “historical sources, relics and remains” do exist, so that better informed historians should use them to “help identify the mistakes and illusions of the Iberian Jesuits.” In his rather positivistic approach, Abé’s interest lays less in the reciprocal modifications brought about by contact than in uncovering the reality of indigenous societies. For example, his thorough search for the historical antecedents of New France’s failed attempt at creating Christian réductions (mission settlements) in Paraguay, New Spain, the Philippines, even Japan, in the end brings him back to unspecified “basic Euro-Christian elements”—a conclusion that hardly adds to what was already known of the missionaries’ background. Finally, Abé too favors a sociological approach to the issue of individual conversion. In his view, Japanese and North American indigenous people were so blinded by “deep-rooted customs and beliefs” that they did not really understand the full meaning of their adhesion to Christianity.63
The Canadian historian Marc Jetten too makes reference to the Paraguay reducciónes as the ideological archetype of the Canadian réductions. Very much in the spirit of Delâge, his MA thesis supervisor (1988), Jetten explains the reasons for the indigenous acceptance to be reduced in purely practical terms—more food and more protection from the Iroquois. An opposite view on the issue of conversion is held by the American Jesuit historian, Nicholas P. Cushner (1932–2013), who compares Spanish, English, and French experiences of evangelization in the Americas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Although his comparative approach is similar to Li’s and Abé’s, Cushner’s indigenous people come up as diverse and multi-faceted human beings. Furthermore, their relationship with a new belief system is a dynamic one. In his view, some indigenous people willingly accepted Catholicism, including those of New France, but at the same time they “retained” their “political structure and economic base,” their “native religion,” and their “identity.” Confirming that Jesuit historians did not need to be “devout historians” any longer, Cushner admits that conversions were “muddled” by practical advantages and “compromised” by the system of trade and alliances. Still, one wonders why, in order to be “authentic,” a conversion should be detrimental to any practical advantage that would come along. Finally, it must be remarked that whether Europeans were bona fide converts or Christian in name only is a legitimate historical question, one that applies not only to indigenous peoples, but also to European Christians in a similar time frame.64
The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed yet another round of biographical studies of Jesuit missionaries, together with a new wave of literary studies mainly devoted to their relations. Most biographical studies—on Brébeuf, Bressani, Chaumonot, Le Jeune, Lafitau, Millet, Potier, and Râle, besides Jean de Quen (1603–59) and Jean Enjalran (1639–1718)—were, in fact, authored by a variety of Canadian, American, and French literary critics and ranged from the very good (the Canadian Andreas Motsch on Lafitau) to the very popular. What is to be noted is that priest historians had almost disappeared, except for two Jesuits, Toupin and René Latourelle (1918–2017).65 As for literary studies in general, the most original contributions were those that shifted their focus from the unveiling of the Jesuits’ ideological biases to the practice of the relationship between the missionaries and the missionized. In 1994, American folklore specialist William M. Clements warned that scholars who dismissed “older documents”—such as the Jesuit relations—on account of their authors’ European origin “risk of not learning things about context and performance esthetics that are unavailable elsewhere.” Clements shows that, in fact, indigenous voices had often been more carefully recorded by the missionaries than by later scientific observers. For example, while dismissing indigenous mythology as superstition, Jesuits “respectfully treated oratory as evidence of the innate reason [of the indigenous people].” Clements’s view that “the strength of their material [in the Jesuit relations] is not in its textualizations but in depictions of contexts of performance” is shared by Ouellet, who insists on the representation of the indigenous discourse (“Representation [...] of the indigenous word”) in the Jesuit reports as well as in the travel narratives. The role of music as a means of reciprocal understanding, given the language barriers, is also at the core of Canadian historian Paul-André Dubois’s early studies. Dubois emphasizes the fact that only the importance of music among the pre-contact indigenous explains their rapid and enthusiastic adoption of the religious chants imported by the Jesuits. In doing so, Dubois seems to favor cultural as opposed to geopolitical or socio-economic factors as the dominant elements of the contact era.66
7. Missionaries and Missionized, 2001–11
By the early twenty-first century, it appeared all the more evident that scholars interested in the history of New France had one “middle ground” in common, that is, their use of the Jesuit texts—and of their relations in particular. These continued to provide most of the evidence necessary to state one’s own case. Besides their sources, however, scholars shared little else, as they further diverged in the object of their study and in the perspective they adopted. For most, the thoughts and actions of the missionaries remained at the center of their concern. In a way, the task of these scholars was made easier by the relative abundance of written sources and by the legacy of studies of European society rooted in several centuries of self-examination. For others, what really mattered were the thoughts and actions of the missionized, or, to be precise, how indigenous societies changed—or did not change—when they met with the missionaries, who were part and parcel of the European colonization process. The latter group’s perspective was different, in that they did their best to adopt the indigenous viewpoint. In fact, indigenous sources are scarce; had mostly been filtered through European eyes; and are often polluted by an attitude on the part of the modern indigenous people that downplays or even excludes change in their past—unless in a negative sense. Still, these scholars’ embracing of the indigenous viewpoint allowed for a new overall awareness of the fact that, at least during the New France era—and particularly so in the seventeenth century—northern and western North America were a vast indigenous country populated by many nations, among which the French represented but a tiny minority with limited physical and ideological power.67
Let us start with interest in the missionaries, a good number of whom, one should recall, belonged to the Society of Jesus and were active in Acadia, Canada, and the West. We can detect two major historiographical trends here, which are not necessarily interconnected. One is a new interest in the Canadian martyrs as objects not of martyrdom, but of hagiographic narratives. This was a line of inquiry that Laflèche had inaugurated in the mid-1970s and Greer and others had followed up in the 1990s. Here, the main question was, what purpose did the accounts of the Jesuits’ “heroic” behavior serve in the communities that celebrated them, either during their lifetimes or decades—even centuries—later? Most literary critics continued to be interested in how the Jesuit texts were constructed and how they must be deciphered, independently of the veracity of the facts they contained. Two notable exceptions were the American Julia Boss Knapp, a historian by training, and the Canadian literary critic Alexis Lussier. Boss Knapp shows the contemporary use of the Jesuit paraphernalia, including the printed Jesuit relations, not as texts but as holy relics and physical reminders of the missionaries’ deeds on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; Lussier insists on the character of “historical fable” of Jogues’s narrative, “similarly to many others,” which the French-Canadian public never really read but that its church passed on as a sort of myth of its primitive origins.68
In different ways, the Canadians Laurier Turgeon and Emma Anderson tried to bridge the gap between the hagiographic and the ethnographic values of the Jesuit relations. Turgeon, a historian and ethnologist, believes that the original hagiographic intent of the relations does not preclude their ethnographic value, which significantly adds to our knowledge and understanding of indigenous societies. The relations are, in his view, a “contact zone” between missionaries and indigenous people, “a site of this process of hybridization” through which the Jesuits translated the indigenous people—in an anthropological sense—for the sake of their seventeenth-century Catholic readership. In a similar fashion, Turgeon argues, historians should now translate their texts for the sake of today’s readership. For her part, in a chapter that in 2013 will be expanded into a full-size book, E. Anderson, an intellectual historian, re-examines the martyrdom account compiled by the Quebec City superior, Paul Ragueneau (1608–80). She dissects the Brébeuf narrative in order to identify not only the role of the Jesuit protagonists, but also that of the Iroquois torturers, as well as that of the Hurons, the latter in their double role of repented torturers (“apostates”) and of “unrecognized” martyrs. In the end, E. Anderson concludes, perspectives are more significant than events, as all events are “true” depending on whom relates them. Although her effort at inclusiveness is praiseworthy, one could argue that the absences of hard evidence except for the Jesuit own writings—on the Huron apostates, for example—cannot always be filled by the historian’s hindsight and imagination.69
Among scholars mainly interested in the thoughts and actions of the missionaries, the second major trend concerns the role and significance of the Jesuits of New France within the global activity of the Society of Jesus.70 Actually, were we simply to follow the opinion of the American eminent Jesuit historian, John W. O’Malley, any effort at comparison would be a frustrating experience, because, in his opinion, “Jesuit institutions in New France seem almost threadbare compared with those in Brazil, Peru, and New Spain.” For his part, the American historian Liam Matthew Brockey added that, in spite of the many similarities between the Jesuits’ experience in China and New France, “the physical conditions of missionary work in different regions” varied to such an extent “as to make easy comparison impossible.” Still, whether it was an effort at comparison or an attempt to place local experiences within a global context, the novelty of the first decade of the twenty-first century was the reinclusion of Europe into this larger framework. The Canadian historian Luke Clossey’s learned and daring attempt at showing the substantial unity of the Jesuit missionaries’ outlook over their national origins and local practices had its France counterpart in Canadian intellectual historian Dominique Deslandres, who was in fact the main source for Clossey’s discussion of New France.71
Strongly influenced by the French historians Jean Delumeau (1923–2020) and Bernard Dompnier, Deslandres developed her main points in her PhD dissertation (1990) that in the 1990s and 2000s she amplified but did not substantially change in a series of articles, a short synthesis, and a major book.72 Methodologically, she chooses to ignore the debate over the hagiographic character of the Jesuit relations, let alone over the responsibility of the Jesuit missionaries in the demise of the Hurons and their indigenous allies. Although she is far from being a “devout” historian, she prefers to describe and judge the Jesuits on their own terms, that is, as devoted missionaries who doggedly and uncompromisingly pursued their dream of universal conversion, first with the indigenous peoples, and later with the French-Canadian community. Substantially, Deslandres describes the French Jesuits’ North American experience as being “derivative from the experience that the Jesuits had acquired during their missions in France’s interior, these ‘black Indies of the Interior.’“ Objectives, methods, and organizational models were identical. They all descended from “a gigantic project of conversion—internal and external—that at the same time aimed at educating the French faithful, to bring the Protestants back to the Catholic Church, to convert the infidels and the idolaters ‘of the new lands and of New France […],’ to reconquer Jerusalem, and consequently to ruin the Turkish empire.” The Jesuit activity in New France cannot be comprehended, in Deslandres’s view, unless we place it in its wider European context.73
However, Deslandres’s was far from being the last word on the issue. Whether the Canadian missions were essentially derivative from a French model, or were an original response to a unique environment, remained a matter of contention. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Canadian art historian Muriel Clair’s essay on the Jesuits’ understanding of the significance of light among the Iroquois posits “the exceptional situation of the evangelization of the peoples of the American North-East in the seventeenth century.” A decade later, the French historian Emmanuelle Friant cited approvingly Clair’s article, but at the same time espoused Deslandres’s opposite thesis of the derivative character of the Canadian missions. Friant investigates the domain of material history and extends to three-dimensional objects, such as rosaries, the concept of Gagnon’s conversion images. (Friant does not mention either Deslandres or Gagnon.) Tellingly, both Clair and Friant based their perceptive analyses entirely on the Jesuit relations—yet another indirect example of how the encyclopedic nature of the Thwaites collection could be used at random to prove anyone’s point of view. Interest in material history, coupled with a thorough knowledge of the Jesuit texts, is also at the core of Brandão’s archaeological research at the site of the old Poste des Miamis, later Fort Saint-Joseph, near Niles, Michigan. Together with the American archaeologist Michael Shakir Nassaney, Brandão examined some unusual and previously unidentified religious artifacts, most significantly a cilice, in order better to understand their users’ piety and religious practice in ways that could not be satisfactorily discerned through written records alone. The site of Fort Saint Joseph had been intermittently served by Jesuit missionaries since the times of Claude Allouez (1622–89). From 1721 through 1763, sacramental records attest the presence of Potier, as well as of Jean-Baptiste Chardon (1671–1743), Pierre-Luc Du Jaunay (1704–80), Michel Guignas (1681–1752), Jean-Louis de La Pierre (1704–post-1756), Jean-Baptiste La Morinie (1704–54), and Jean-Baptiste de Saint-Pé (1686–1770).74
In the first decade of the twentieth-first century, contributions by scholars who were mainly interested in the missionaries’ viewpoint and were not part of the major trends described above continued to privilege Jesuit writings. They made their relations the object of textual analysis within the overall corpus of the written production of the Society of Jesus since its very beginning in the sixteenth century. These contributions did not focus on the veracity of the described facts but were only interested in the implicit motivations and the literary mechanisms that were behind the construction of these texts. The French Jean-Claude Laborie and Caroline Montel-Glénisson respectively show their initial background and intents and briefly introduce the relations; the Swiss Adrien Paschoud adds the eighteenth-century Lettres édifiantes et curieuses to his inquiry. He highlights the strict editorial practices of the Society (“the Jesuits’ editorial machine”) and the creation of this “vast historiographical operation of which the Jesuits are both witnesses and actors.” That Jesuit schooling was imbued in ancient classicism is a well-known fact. Thanks to his own background, Canadian classicist Haijo Jan Westra was able to detect and explain the classical references as they appear in their relations.75
For their part, the Canadians Ouellet and Marie-Christine Pioffet continued to examine the Jesuit relations within the corpus of French colonial literature and the genre of travel writing, and so does the American literary critic Sara E. Melzer in a major interpretation of the origins of French cultural identity. Melzer suggests that most “scholars of France” overlook the contradiction between its past as a colonized people (the Gauls as they were conquered by the Greek-Romans) and France’s later role as a colonizer power in the New World, a contradiction that is a central element of such an identity. In her view, church and crown fundamentally agreed on the necessity to integrate the indigenous peoples into French culture through intermarriage and other means. Other contributions fell more traditionally in the domain of (good) intellectual history (Axtell, Edward G. Gray) or rephrased old concepts around “inculturation,” the new official doctrine coined by the Catholic Church in 1977 (Latourelle). Others still were either rather outdated (Berthiaume), poorly researched (Catharine Randall), or blindly ideological in their refusal to admit even the possibility of any European understanding of indigenous languages and cultures (Joëlle Gardette)—in this case, the Montagnais—an attitude that echoed a negationist school that belonged to an earlier generation.76 There were also a number of studies that were not strictly biographical, but that focused on individual Jesuit missionaries such as Brébeuf, Bressani, Charlevoix, Chaumonot, de Crespieul, Jogues, Marquette, Nicolas, and Potier, besides Vincent Bigot (1649–1720), in order to address issues—hagiography, nationhood, identity, and language—that reflected new historiographical trends. As opposed to the previous decade, these contributions were mostly authored not by literary critics, but by intellectual historians and anthropologists. Greer’s examination of Chaumonot’s complex identity; Canadian literary critic Francesco Guardiani’s new edition of Bressani’s Breve relatione, which he sets in the context of the Jesuits’ global perspective; and Canadian cultural historian Germaine Warkentin’s first in-depth analysis of Nicolas’s Codex Canadensis are worth noting.77
Let us now move from the missionaries to the missionized, that is, to the scholarly production of those who were interested in the thoughts and actions of the missionized. By and large, this fails to impress on account of its lack of methodological innovation. Canadian ethnologist Roland Viau’s second book (based on his 1985 MA thesis), for example, disproves the traditional notion of an Iroquois society dominated by women, but is mainly based, once more, on a reading of traditional sources such as the European travel narratives and the Jesuit texts. For his part, French historian Gilles Havard had started off in 1992 with a most original examination of the Great Peace of Montreal (1701), a model of ethnohistorical analysis. Yet his vast 2003 synthesis on the encounter in the Pays-d’en-Haut expands but does not substantially alter the very fashionable idea of reciprocal accommodation (“middle ground”) put forward by American historian Richard White. As part of this accommodation process, the Jesuit missionaries are described by Havard as the “spearheads of the Counter-Reformation,” that is, minor actors in the overall process.78
Accommodation is also at the core of two shorter but somehow innovative contributions. Canadian archaeologist Marcel Moussette is rather rigid in his application of the capitalist world-system economy model to the Canadian encounter. Yet his case study, which includes the baroque objects brought over by the Jesuits, well exemplifies the compatibility and reciprocal interest in each other (métissage) shown by the two parties. In turn, the American Jesuit historian William A. Clark brilliantly uses the existing indigenous sources to examine, from their viewpoint, the attitude of the Abenakis (Wabanakis) of today’s Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, towards Râle’s lengthy stay among them. Clark makes a case for reciprocal inculturation and concludes that, as was the case for the China Jesuits in the same era, “it is difficult to believe that the kind of linguistic and day-to-day familiarity [...] over a period of thirty years would produce no adaptation in the missionary’s way of thinking, in pastoral application if not in doctrinal formulation.”79
The overall impression, however, is that the thirty-odd years of scholarly debate over the issue of conversion—in its social meaning, not as an act of religious faith—had reached a dead end, no matter what terms were used to describe the process: acculturation, mixture, hybridity, métissage, reciprocal representation, inculturation, etc. In a case study devoted to the Iroquois Catholic community in the late eighteenth century, Greer was the first to recognize this impasse and to say it candidly with his trademark historiographical nonchalance: “[So far] conversion [has been] understood in bipolar terms—successful or unsuccessful, real or false, a sign of assimilation or evidence of covert resistance—with ‘syncretism’ occasionally invoked.” In his view, “both Iroquoian and European/Catholic antecedents” could be found for “almost every aspect of the mystic-ascetic movement” that flourished in the Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake) community. Those who call for a shift of focus from the missionaries to the missionized, Greer convincingly argues, should avoid generalizations, look for a variety of individual responses, and recognize that there always were “different interactions operating at the various levels involved: parallel coexistence, selective borrowing, and localized syncretism.”80
As described so far, except from the “middle ground” provided by the sources they shared, scholars interested in the missionaries and those interested in the missionized showed little in common. There was one topic, however, where the two schools might have met—language. The spoken word was, second only to microbic exchange, the immediate instrument of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples. In 1723, Râle, who by then had been in New France for thirty-four years, recounted his difficulties with the learning of the indigenous languages, and how change in his postings from Quebec City to Kaskaskia to Acadia had made him start anew each time. He also remarked that, with regard to the Huron language, which he reputed the most difficult among indigenous languages, “a missionary is happy when [...] after ten years of constant labor, he expresses himself with the required propriety.” Language could also have been a point of contact between scholars. However, surely on account of the technical abilities it required, ethnolinguistics had barely made a dent in contact historiography. To learn and express oneself eloquently and effectively in the language of one’s flock was, of course, a problem for all missionaries. Their experience constantly reminded them of St. Paul’s warning: “Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air [...] if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me.”81
In New France, where the oratorical art was so praised and oral communication was the norm, language was the occasion of unavoidable misunderstanding, ridicule, offense, unfulfilled expectations, and deliberate duplicities. The earliest exception in this absence of ethnolinguistics in contact historiography is the American of Hungarian origin Victor Egon Hanzeli (1925–91), whose 1969 book was still regarded as “the best introduction to the work accomplished by the Jesuit missionaries in French North America in the field of linguistics” as late as 2010. Hanzeli examined the proficiency of the Jesuit missionaries and showed that their acquired competency was obtained through agonizing practice in the field—and in spite of their formal grammatical training at home. Furthermore, Hanzeli pioneered a new way of looking at the linguistic outcome of the New France encounter through texts written not only in French, but also in Latin and in indigenous languages. These texts included prayers, hymns, catechisms, confessors’ guides, parish registers, bilingual dictionaries, lexicons, etc. In Hanzeli’s opinion, all these primary sources were often closer to field experience than traditional narrative sources such as the relations.82 One must jump to the turn of the century, about one generation later, to find an ethnolinguist of Hanzeli’s caliber, the Canadian John L. Steckley. A specialist in the Huron language, he ranks the linguistic materials on that language collected by the Jesuit missionaries as “superior to any comparable material in and about the English language (though not the French language) during the same period.” Among his publications, Steckley translated and edited the treatise De religione, written in Huron by the Belgian Jesuit Philippe Pierson (1642–88), a Western missionary of the mid-eighteenth century.83
In first decade of the twentieth-first century, two new developments in the field of linguistics—if not ethnolinguistics proper—were brought to the fore. One consisted in a new appraisal of a non-narrative textual corpus, mostly in Latin or in an indigenous language, that had been accumulated through day-to-day missionary contact. According to a most perceptive article focusing on the Montagnais language, the Canadian historian John E. Bishop emphasizes that such documents, as opposed to the Jesuits’ own self-portrayals in the relations and in their correspondence, show the parameters of the missionaries’ knowledge of the indigenous languages and cultures. Thwaites’s JR had almost ignored them, while Campeau’s MNF had stopped short of including such texts, most of which originated after the earliest phase of contact. The second development consisted in a new awareness of the fact that all indigenous languages, as well as Latin, must be taken into account. Bishop’s viewpoint to that effect was shared by Canadian literary historian Laura J. Murray (as regards dictionaries) and by the French philologist Jean-François Cottier. The latter also convincingly suggests that the selective interest in the French language and the dismissal of Latin might have been induced by early nineteenth-century Québec nationalism and the anti-ecclesiastical sentiment engendered by the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.84
In between Steckley’s strictly ethnolinguist approach and Bishop’s and Cottier’s call for a more extensive use of Jesuit sources, a number of authors, with mixed results, focused—more traditionally—on the Jesuits’ difficulties in language learning and on their communication strategies. The American historian Margaret Joan Leahey, a most refined reader of the Jesuit relations—but not of other Jesuit sources—is keen in pointing out that not all missionaries had an ear for languages, as they went from the “near-zero fluency” of Chabanel (a Canadian martyr) and Anne de Nouë (1587–1646) to Brébeuf’s semi-proficiency. Their preference for printed images, for example graphically depicting the torments of hell—so similar to the all-too-present ravages of the epidemics—is by itself evidence of the missionaries’ awareness of their own flawed locutions and language limitations. For his part, Canadian cultural historian Micah True situates the way the early Jesuits portrayed themselves as humble pupils in front of their indigenous teachers in the framework of a power struggle against their rivals, the Recollets—a rivalry, incidentally, never hinted at anywhere in the relations.85
Finally, the American historian Tracy Neal Leavelle left the well-trodden path of the early Canadian Jesuits to move to that shared region, located at the center of early North America, that in the early eighteenth century was known as the Pays-des-Illinois (Illinois Country, or Upper Louisiana). At Peoria, the young convert Aramepinchone, also known as Marie Rouensa Accault (c.1677–1725) -– like Kahnawake’s Tekakwitha almost a century earlier—epitomizes the successful preaching of the Jesuit Jacques Gravier (1651–1708). The Christian Illinois prayed, recited articles of catechism, sang hymns, and confessed their sin in Latin or in their own language. Yet, Leavelle explains, the Jesuits “could not control nor even limit meaning” and worried about what their Illinois faithful’s words really meant, because their spiritual landscape continued to be populated by “reminders of manitous.” A similar point is made by American cultural historian Brian Brazeau, who places indigenous conversion in the larger framework of French expansion and insists on Jesuit linguistic rigidity and poor translations as being among the main obstacles to full colonization.86
8. The Closing of an Era, 2011–20
According to Canadian historian Paul Shore, the years from 1990 to 2019 “have seen a transformation of Jesuit historical studies beyond anything that might have been anticipated only a short time earlier.” Shore’s statement includes New France. In fact, the second decade of the twenty-first century shows a new sense of accomplishment that called for overall assessments and seemed to prelude to a new era of studies, with new sources, new questions, and, perhaps, new answers.87 Let us start with two articles, one by Monet, a veteran historian, and the other by Adina Ruiu, forty-odd years his younger, Rumanian by origin but active in Canada and France. Both are to be praised for their clarity and originality. Monet’s is a succinct but full assessment of the Canadian martyrs from their deaths in the seventeenth century to their canonization in the twentieth. It is now the best starting point for any further research either on the eight martyrs or on their subsequent assumption to their symbolic role. As for Ruiu’s, her article is a breath of fresh air. After decades of using the same sources for repeating the story of Martin’s discovery of the Jesuit martyrs and his being the driving force towards their canonization, for the first time the relations are left aside and the personal papers of the protagonists are examined first-hand in the Canadian (Montreal) and French (Vanves) Jesuit archives. These nineteenth-century ultramontane priests’ search for New France’s mythic past, which included the “Indians” in their idealized state, is well illustrated. The personal relationship between the Canadian and the French Jesuit historians, not always a smooth one, is also investigated, together with their enthusiastic search and exploitation of new documentary evidence. In spite of its abrupt ending, Ruiu’s article, like Monet’s, is now an essential reading point for any future research.88
The 2010s also wrapped up a century or so of discussion over the Jesuit relations. Not all assessments, however, were equally satisfactory. Undoubtedly, the most refined one is Canadian historian Catherine M. Desbarats’s short essay. With her customary historiographical sophistication, she weaves together a number of issues that had been kept separate or had gone undetected so far—the ethnographic value of the relations, the necessity to integrate the Jesuits’ relations with other sources such as “their bilingual dictionaries, their maps, their autobiographies or spiritual journals, even their songs and prayers in indigenous languages”; the significant contribution of archaeology; and the literary invention of the Jesuits as solitary martyrs in the face of an indefinite indigenous victims of the raging wars. Desbarats also interprets the relations very much in their national context, pointing to the absence of Rome and the pope from their pages. She also emphasizes the strong opposition faced by the Society of Jesus in France. In comparison, the summary of the American Jesuit historians, Thomas M. Cohen and Emanuele Colombo, is rather dated in its depiction of Jesuit “intermittent accommodation of indigenous tradition,” and even more so in claiming that the missionaries “were fascinated by indigenous societies”—a claim that applied to the Oriental civilizations, certainly not to the nations of the American North-East. Randall (a selection from Thwaites’s JR), Paschoud, and Austrian literary critic Klaus-Dieter Ertler do not add to what was already well known, especially via Ouellet’s literary studies. For his part, contrary to Korp 1995 ideological critique, True maintains that Thwaites’s mistranslations were few and are of minor importance. However, correcting them would ease the task of literary critics, for whom words are of crucial importance. In conclusion, True calls for a new edition of the relations that combines Thwaites’s inclusiveness and Campeau’s rigourousness.89
In 2015, Greer closed his two-decade long list of publications relating to Jesuit writings with a short piece on conversion and indigenous Christianity. Even more conclusively than before, he emphasizes that the indigenous peoples “were not passive victims of religious colonization, but rather active, even aggressive, appropriators.” For his part, American anthropologist Neal B. Keating’s synthesis of Iroquoian religion is rather disjointed from any historiographical tradition or debate, except for his use of Thwaites’s JR. Keating inclines towards what a previous generation of scholars would have described as syncretism: most Iroquoian people were successfully converted, but missionaries “did not completely destroy the indigenous religion.”90
Two back-to-back syntheses by Deslandres and Codignola, which cover the New France portion of a collective history of religion in America, provide the useful background to four major book-length contributions by younger scholars—True, American historians Karin Vélez and Bronwen Catherine McShea, as well as Lozier—mainly devoted to the seventeenth century. They all employ a long-durée approach to their own topics of choice. Deslandres reiterates her points about the similarity of the Jesuit missions in France and in New France. In this contribution, she highlights the importance of the so-called intermarriage, which she interprets as a policy meant to integrate the indigenous people both as Catholic faithful and as French nationals. For his part, Codignola emphasizes the 1650s as a turning point in the history of the Catholic Church in New France. In his view, the next decade witnessed the loss of the Jesuit monopoly over Canada and the sidelining of the indigenous missions. It also brought to New France rivalries within the church, that until then the Jesuits had managed to confine to metropolitan France. As for intermarriage, in a subsequent article Codignola takes issue with Deslandres’s interpretation. In his opinion, very soon church and crown disagreed on whether to implement Tridentine marriage in New France. The Jesuits were well conscious of the difficulties they encountered. On the one side, they never formally accepted anything less than a canonical union between two fully converted partners, whatever their ethnicity. On the other, their daily practice made them more lenient—although the Holy See’s official acknowledgement of their special case never came. In the end, Codignola maintains, marital unions between partners belonging to the two ethnic groups proceeded independently of any policy Europeans officials and clergymen decided to implement.91
Masters and Students completes True’s study of the Jesuit relations and confirms the reciprocal learning and teaching roles of the Jesuit missionaries and their indigenous counterparts. True agrees with Deslandres on the significance of the role played by France in this ongoing process. The Canadian Jesuits, True also argues, were kept informed of the editorial modifications applied to their original texts. Consequently, they were able to devise the next issue of the relations so as to accommodate their distant superiors as well as their lay readership interested in travel accounts. (But see Canadian historian Johanne Biron’s analysis of the Québec Jesuits’ own library.) The effect of this double-sided learning process influenced both style and contents of the Jesuit published reports, as well as their ethnographic value. For her part, Vélez applies the experience of previous hagiographic and hybridity studies to show the modifications of devout objects and ideas, such as the Lorette legend. In 1674, Chaumonot, the multinational Jesuit missionary, had brought the cult of the “miraculous flying house of Loreto” to the midst of the Canadian Hurons. Far from being a superimposed manifestation of a one-way French colonialism, Vélez argues, this imported myth was the beginning of a truly Atlantic devotion that brought together Catholic communities located in such distant places as the Italian peninsula, France, Belgium, Mexico and Peru—as well as and Canada’s Hurons.92
McShea’s Apostles of Empire is compact, well organized, and brilliantly written. Unfortunately, the book suffers from a tendency to reinvent the wheel. McShea’s main thesis, that France’s Jesuit missionaries were willingly and knowingly agents of empire and “patriotic Frenchm[e]n,” had first been suggested by Parkman over a century and a half ago and has since been repeated by a plethora of anti-Catholic scholars. McShea mentions Deslandres and Greer only to accuse them of “Americentrism.” Her historiographical background is rather weak, being either outdated (George T. Hunt) or second-hand (David Hackett Fischer). She mentions Eccles but does not really understand the chronological developments and turn-arounds of the French crown’s imperial policies in the second half of the seventeenth century (well summarized by Lozier just one year earlier). McShea throws in the now obligatory labels of transculturalism and transatlanticism, but anachronistically uses “Vatican” instead of “Holy See” and conflates “inculturation” and “acculturation,” which are two distinct concepts. Finally, in spite of her claim to the contrary, McShea’s references are almost all from either Thwaites’s JR or Campeau’s MNF. Still, her book leaves significant ground for appreciation. It shows a return to the “French connection,” after so many years of calls for globalism, which risk to downplay the local rooting of the missionaries. Her in-depth analysis of the Paris background of French Catholic expansionism is illuminating and confirms Desbarats’s 2014 intuition. (McShea’s pages on the publisher Sébastien Cramoisy and his circle—incidentally almost the only ones that make a significant reference to ARSI—are innovative and original.) The inclusion of the individual stories of those Jesuits who found themselves dispersed in foreign lands after the British Conquest of Canada and the suppression is uncommon. Furthermore, McShea is to be congratulated for casting no moral blame on her imperialist “apostles,” as postcolonialist scholars would certainly have done in her shoes.93
Finally, closing the chapter accounting for the syntheses that appeared in the 2010s, here is Canadian ethnohistorian Lozier’s story of the four so-called “mission settlements” of the Saint Lawrence valley—Lorette (Wendake), Saint-François (Arsikantengouk), Sault Saint-Louis (Kahnawake), and La Montagne-Sault-au-Récollet (Kanehsakate-Skawenati). In the seventeenth century, these ever-changing indigenous communities (mostly Algonkin, Montagnais, and Huron) kept their kinship structures, languages, and mostly agricultural subsistence patterns in spite of a constant engagement with their French-speaking neighbors. Lozier describes this relationship as “the Franco-Indigenous alliance.” His book is a model for future studies on several counts. By showing the significance of intra-indigenous politics, Lozier is more attentive to an indigenous perspective than the traditional narratives of the French-native relationship. He singles out individual indigenous players in the same fashion that traditional historical narratives do with individual French players. Lozier makes the Jesuit missionaries part of the story but shows that the acceptance or refusal of their preaching was not at the center of the mission settlements’ dynamics. Finally, he regularly consulted and used the Jesuit relations, but his primary sources encompass an impressive range of other archival sources, including the Jesuits archives in Montreal and what used to be the mainstay of New France historiography, namely, the French crown’s administrative records now preserved in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence (formerly in Paris) and their corresponding Manuscript Groups 1–8 in Library Archives Canada (formerly Public Archives of Canada) in Ottawa.94
Moving away from the early seventeenth century and from Canada proper, the first half of the 2010s also witnessed a follow-up to Leavelle’s 2007 article on Illinois Christianity. This consisted in three major monographs authored by Leavelle himself (2012), Sophie White (2012), and Robert Michael Morrissey (2015), all of them American historians. The main Jesuit protagonists of this story are first Marquette and Allouez, and then, one generation later, their confrères Gravier and Pierre-Gabriel Marest (1662–1714). But in the three books the real historiographical point of contention is the extent of reciprocal understanding of the two sides—the indigenous people and the missionaries. How did such understanding change over time in conjunction with major progress in language proficiency, the mounting hostility within the indigenous community, and the increasing size of the French presence? As it had already happened in the early days of New France—and in the personal itinerary of each missionary priest—at some point early dreams and illusions were replaced by disappointment and even disaffection. Leavelle, S. White, and Morrissey are not of one mind, but they all use similar documentary evidence (the relations proper had stopped in 1673); are attentive to the indigenous perspective; are not ideologically biased against the missionaries; and are keen in pointing out individualities on both sides. The extent and significance of intermarriage is a common theme. They also agree on the reasons for the indigenous women’s attraction to the Christian—and French—lifestyle as a way of avoiding their traditional subordinate role in their indigenous society. Morrissey, in particular, takes issue with R. White’s paradigm by showing that a “middle ground” might have been an initial condition of encounter based on misunderstanding, but that such condition was abandoned as soon as the two sides had matured a better knowledge of each other. As for the Jesuits, they too were transformed by the encounter experience, but of course not as much as the indigenous peoples that also had to face the impact of colonial settlement.95
The Jesuit experience in the Illinois Country points, once more, to the crucial importance of language proficiency in the contact experience. Cottier’s analysis of the use of Latin as the structural reference for the systemic organization of indigenous languages continued into this decade. In this case, the edition of the linguistic notes of the Jesuit Louis André (1631–1715), a missionary with the Montagnais from 1693 to 1709, is preceded by a substantive introduction reviewing the state of research from Hanzeli onwards. More traditional in their literary approach are an article by French historian Éva Guillorel and a book by American literary critic Sarah Rivett. Both employ a long-durée perspective that takes them into the early nineteenth century. Whereas Guillorel focuses on Acadia, Rivett ambitiously examines both New France and the United States. With regard to sources, Guillorel’s article, which emphasizes Biard’s and Râle’s attitudes towards indigenous languages, is soundly based on a variety of lesser-used Canadian and French archival sources. For her part, Rivett shows a preference for the printed texts, although she is keen in verifying the original manuscript versions of such texts whenever these are available, as in the case of linguistic dictionaries. Although she confusingly tends to describe as relations all the Jesuit texts—not only the relations proper—Rivett uses them profusely with regard to early seventeenth-century Canada and later activities in the Illinois Country and Acadia. The originality of Rivett’s treatment mainly consists in her constant and sweeping comparison between the attitude of the French-speaking Catholic missionaries in New France and the English-speaking Protestant missionaries in the British continental colonies. In her view, their massive effort at learning the indigenous languages and at translating Christian concepts—a process in which Jesuit missionaries were at the forefront—had two main consequences. The first was the scientific collation of a vast patrimony of indigenous languages that favored their survival to this day. The second consequence was that the process of translation required the missionaries’ full immersion into indigenous cultures. This immersion allowed not only an exchange of knowledge, but also a transformation of the missionaries’ world vision. For example, how did indigenous peoples and their languages fit into the biblical narratives of the dispersion of races and the linguistic confusion that followed the Tower of Babel episode? Such cultural transformation had also significant effects on the Jesuits’ acceptance of approximate expressions denoting the indigenous people’s level of understanding of the main tenets of the Catholic religion, as opposed to their parroting undigested formulas. Regarding the eighteenth century, Rivett’s insistence on language learning as intrinsic to the French imperial project and military strategy seems somehow ideologically juxtaposed (see McShea’s Apostles of Empire above) but is not inherently wrong.96
Bordering on and drawing from a number of disciplinary approaches—literary studies, philology, history, and linguistics—that he brings together under the common label of New France, in 2017 Laflèche returned to Le Jeune, the subject of his first book of almost half a century earlier. Laflèche’s controversial urge is still there, as is his tendency to lose the impatient reader in a flow of unranked details. Still, the intermixing of his personal research itinerary, his philological textual analysis, and his critical reading of secondary sources is often unsurpassed. His demonstration of Le Jeune’s learning of the indigenous language through the converted Montagnais, Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan (d.1636) is most convincing, as is the direct filiation of the celebrated Montagnais dictionaries of the Jesuits Antoine Silvy (1638–1711) and Bonaventure Fabvre (1655–1700) from Le Jeune’s own dictionary, now lost. His point about the historical birth and trajectory of the Montagnais/Innu name, in contrast to the recently invented Nehiraw-Iriniw term and the political implications of indigenous tribal names, seems also well taken.97
During the second decade of the twentieth-first century, Lozier’s Flesh Reborn and the new studies of the Illinois Country encounter are as close as we get to Jesuit historiography in New France from the point of view of the missionized. Indeed, this decade shows a growing interest in the Jesuit sources and protagonists on the part of lay scholars. This interest, however, is inherently linked to a better understanding of the missionaries themselves. There is, of course, the never-exhausted field of biographical studies focusing on individual missionaries, such as Allouez, Biard, Brébeuf, Charlevoix, Dablon, Jogues, Jolliet, Lafitau, Le Jeune, and Marquette, besides Étienne de Carheil (1633–1726), Gilbert Du Thet (c.1574/5–1613), Jacques Largillier (c.1644–1714), and François Ragueneau (1599–1665). In this perspective, two books stand out. One is True’s new translation and scholarly edition of Charlevoix’s Journal of a Voyage in North America; the other is American historian Laura M. Chmielewski’s portrait of late seventeenth-century western French America through the lives and deeds of the two Jesuit missionaries and western explorers, Marquette and Jolliet.98 Literary studies follow the same trend, as they focus on special or previously untapped themes—France’s role in Christian expansion, climate, cannibalism, masculinity—as they appear in the Jesuit relations.99
It is hard to place the two contributions by the Americans Lisa J. M. Poirier, Mary Dunn, and James Taylor Carson anywhere else but immediately after the literary studies rubric. Their publications are in fact mostly or uniquely based on yet another re-reading of Thwaites’s JR. Ironically, Dunn, a historian, admits that she does not trust these relations at all. In her view, “even presuming (albeit incorrectly) that the Relations faithfully report the observed behavior of Amerindian women,” one should not “assume that Amerindian women and their Jesuit witnesses understood such behavior in the same way.” Dunn agrees with Canadian historian E. Anderson’s assertion that “events in colonial New France were informed by a ‘range of perspectives’ and subjected to ‘multiple interpretations.’“ Indeed, when one starts off by stating that nothing is what seems to be and that everything there can be understood in opposite ways, what are we left with if not the latest fashionable theories and preconceived answers to questions never really tested through research? (Tellingly, in her mostly negative review of Poirier’s book, Dunn accuses the latter of “under-theoriz[ing].”) Through the stories of four individuals involved in it, Poirier, a religious studies specialist, describes the early encounter between the French and the Hurons as one between a system of aggressive inequality motivated by mercantile gain on the one side, and another one based on reciprocity and equilibrium. As for Dunn, her point about the ambivalence of the Jesuits’ portrayal of the converted indigenous women—docile, humble, and chaste, but also independent, authoritative, and essentially virile—is original and interesting, but one wonders how long will it take before the next fashionable theory takes Dunn’s point apart—because scholars had not really understood what the Jesuit missionaries meant when they wrote their reports, and neither did themselves. As for Carson, a historical sociologist, his article is a purely rhetorical exercise, allegedly written from an indigenous viewpoint, but in fact disparaging their agency and their ability to comprehend their own role in the encounter process. Decades of research and knowledge are tossed in the same basket, from Parkman, the “repackage[r]” of “lurid stories,” to Canadian sociolinguist Rachel Major’s embarrassing account of her own ignorance. Torture, of course, is morally condoned as being a cultural act—as if that made the victims’ agony less tragic. The date of the Canadian martyrs’ elevation as patron saints of Canada (1940) is confused with that of their canonization (1930). What is worse, however, is that the indigenous peoples are thrown back into their passive role as puppets in their trade relationship with “the Men of Iron,” who in the 1630s and 1640s had “become more and more vital to the people’s way of life.”100
A sign that the initial enthusiasm for the Atlantic, continental, and global historiographical drive was beginning to fade as it confronted the harsh realities of field research, is provided by the limited number of works that touch upon New France in an international context.101 In fact, these works appear to be simple additions rather than organic contributions to the global world view of the Jesuit missionaries. Canadian literary critic Yvon Le Bras, for example, who had started off in 1992 with a PhD dissertation on Le Jeune’s indigenous peoples, enlarged his view to include the West Indies and the texts of two seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries, Jacques Bouton (1590–1658) and Pierre Pelleprat (1606–67), so confirming Ouellet’s initial inspiration. For his part, Laborie adds to what he knows best—the Jesuits’ experience in French Brazil—some remarks concerning their confrères’ experience with the Mi’kmaq (L’nu’k) and the Hurons in New France. The analogy, however, seems to be a bit far-fetched. It does not actually add much to a such a well-researched field of study nor does it show any real relationship between the two experiences, except for the common origin of the missionaries.102
More to the point is Motsch’s results of his solid research on Lafitau, this time in the context of the Chinese rites controversy. He explains the Jesuits’ attempt to reconcile two diverse civilizations such as the primitive Americans and the sophisticated Chinese with the biblical narrative, especially with regard to the origin of humankind and the chronology of the Oriental empire. Motsch shows to what extent Lafitau’s Moeurs de sauvages américains (1724) differed from the figuristes. These were a group of French Jesuit scholars who tried to identify disguised biblical references in other cultures, such as the Chinese. Interestingly, Motsch’s analysis implicitly confirms Codignola’s 1995 statement that for the Jesuits “the Indigenous peoples had [...] little to offer there than furs” (Motsch’s words), whereas the Oriental civilized societies represented the opposite—and much coveted—extremity of the pagan world. In Motsch’s view, the Society of Jesus’s missionary strategy was influenced by the relationship between its theoretical premises and the missionaries’ pragmatic accommodations in the field, “be it in China, in North America, in South America or elsewhere”—a point that was also very convincingly made by American historian Andrés I. Prieto, with regard to Iberian expansion.103
Finally, the second decade of the twenty-first century shows a renewed interest in two major themes, different but strongly interrelated—hagiography and martyrdom. Clair goes back to the famous “Manuscrit de 1652” that in 1844 the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec City had entrusted to Martin, in order to show the psychological transformation of the early Jesuit missionaries and the way indigenous surroundings influenced their “ascetic and abstract spirituality” outside of what their French superiors might have accepted at the time.104 The new attention towards women’s and indigenous studies, as well as her officially recognized sainthood in 2012, made Tekakwitha the object of a revamped popular and scholarly interest. In fact, her figure could be interpreted both ways—as the ultimate symbol of female and indigenous surrendering to masculine and colonial imposition, but also as a long-delayed official recognition of indigenous agency in North America. (In the Spanish imperial world, for example, indigenous recognition had preceded Tekakwitha’s by almost four centuries.)105
Around the time of Tekakwitha’s canonization, American historian Kellie Jean Hogue was able to retrace the many petitions that representatives of indigenous movements from all over the United States sent to Rome in 1884–85 to support her cause. These petitions had been somehow misplaced when Tekakwitha’s proceedings were put aside in order to favor the cause of the Canadian martyrs. American religious studies specialists Mark G. Thiel and Christopher Vecsey edited a collective book meant to illustrate the recent responses to the canonization outcome, while their colleague, the Jesuit Michael F. Steltenkamp, described his personal acquaintance with Béchard, the vice-postulator of Tekakwitha’s file, and emphasized the need to recognize the role of other indigenous leaders in a similar way.106
Canadian historian Megan C. Armstrong would have wrapped up our state of knowledge of Tekakwitha in a terse and contextualized entry for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, had not American historian Kathleen Sprows Cummings made the Mohawk young woman one of the earliest protagonists of the American Catholics’ “quest” and promotion of “national saints” of their own. In Sprows Cummings’s opinion, sainthood is about holiness, but also about national values. When their cause was promoted, the Canadian martyrs epitomized the national values of the French-Canadians. Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774–1821) had performed the same role for the late nineteenth-century American Catholics. However, for reasons that concerned ecclesiastical and national politics rather than her own virtues, Tekakwitha was soon dropped from the race. According to Sprows Cummings, she suffered from a double disadvantage. Ecclesiastically, she had not died a martyr, which contributed to her Jesuit promoters’ decision to defer pursuing her cause for canonization until the Canadian martyrs were elevated; nationally, she did not enhance the cause of those American Catholics who wanted to blend in and avoid the attacks of Protestant nativism. In the end, as mentioned above, she was canonized almost a century after the Canadian martyrs.107
The issue of sainthood is also at the core of two more books that appeared in this decade, authored by two Canadian historians, E. Anderson and Timothy G. Pearson. In her Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs, E. Anderson expands her 2010 article to cover what she describes as the “afterlife” of the celebrated seventeenth-century Jesuits, that is, their cult, their sanctuaries, and their political use on the part of an ever-dwindling number of so-called pilgrims—now mostly English-speaking Canadian tourists or American conservative right-wingers. With regard to her documentary background, the Jesuit relations remain the main source for E. Anderson’s original martyrs’ story. For the later cult, however, she makes good use of the Archives of the Midland Martyrs’ Shrine (Midland, Ontario), of the Our Lady of Martyrs Shrine Archives (Auriesville, New York), and of the archives of the Canadian Jesuits. For his part, in his Becoming Holy in Early Canada, Pearson focuses on New France, but examines the issue of sainthood in a more comprehensive fashion. According to his computation, from 1607 to 1763 thirty-eight persons—twenty-three men and fifteen women, including eleven indigenous people—were recognized by their community as “holy persons.” However, the church canonized only twelve of them, eight of whom were the celebrated Canadian martyrs. The difference between “the process of becoming holy” and a holy person’s recognition by his or her community—and later by the official church—is at the core of Pearson’s original and innovative book. Pearson waives into his topic the holy person’s performance and its immediate reception by the community. He agrees with Sprows Cummings that the creation of an institutional memory in the form of a hagiographical written text was a necessary step towards later canonization. Tekakwitha is included in Pearson’s list of holy persons, as is Sillery’s Algonquin convert and martyr Onoharé (rechristened Joseph, d.1650). Cholenec and Chauchetière had provided such a written text for Tekakwitha; in their different ways, so did P. Ragueneau, Poncet de La Rivière, Martin, Casgrain, and Thwaites for the Jesuit martyrs. Nobody, however, did it for Onoharé, so that in the end “the claim of martyrdom,” which remained “in the voice of the Huron witnesses,” proved not to be sufficient.108
This return to the two early nineteenth-century themes with which this survey has begun—hagiography and martyrdom—is perhaps more than a curious occurrence. It probably is an indication that a historiographical era is nearing its completion, all the more so since Jesuit historians seem to have abandoned New France as a field of study, leaving it in the hands of a new generation of lay scholars. To be sure, New France has long lost its centrality as a steppingstone in the construction of the French-Canadian nation or the bicultural Canadian Confederation, so that fewer and fewer young scholars are attracted to it. Historiographical trends of the future are impossible to anticipate, as they so much depend on new sensibilities regarding society at large. In the context of New France, Shore’s 2019 statement about the unpredictable transformation of Jesuit historical studies of the previous three decades could be made to highlight women’s studies, Atlantic history, global history, and indigenous studies, as well as the renewal of religious studies and the virtual end of the Jesuit historians’ monopoly over their own historiography. Ironically, the new opportunities for research provided by the web have so far stifled originality. Confronted with a vaster and vaster ocean of undigested information, new researchers tend to start with fashionable answers and fish for evidence wherever search engines might take them. Still, although original approaches on the part of individual scholars will at some point become common enough to be regarded as trends, at the end of the 2010s these trends have yet to emerge. What the future has in store, then, cannot be foretold. However, if this historiographical survey has shown anything, is that we eagerly await the posthumous publication of Campeau’s vol. 10 of his MNF collection. We also trust that the MNF collection is moved beyond 1666 by a new editor, Jesuit or otherwise. Finally, we cannot but notice that the other men’s religious communities that were active in New France—the Recollets, the Capuchins, the Sulpicians, the Spiritans, and even the diocesan priests of the Séminaire de Québec—have been the subject of new syntheses and overall appraisals. As regards the Jesuits, however, we still have to rely on the de Rochemonteix’ Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France series, which appeared between 1895 and 1906.109 As this survey has proven, much has been done since then in the almost 120 years that followed.
Notes
1 Archives of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (Rome) [APF], ser. Lettere, vol. 222, fols. 475r–v, [Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide] to Jean-Olivier Briand, September 8, 1773 (“pacaté ac tranquillé”); APF, ser. Congressi, America Settentrionale, vol. 1, fols. 323r, 326v, Briand to [Giuseppe Maria Castelli], November 8, 1774 (original letter); Archives of the Archidiocèse de Québec (Quebec City), ser. 20 A, vol. I, item no. 173, [Briand] to Castelli, November 6, 1774 [recte November 8, 1774] (register copy) (goods).
2 For short overviews, see Terence A. Crowley, “The French Regime to 1760,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Terrence M. Murphy and Roberto Perin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–54; Dominique Deslandres, “French Catholicism in the Era of Exploration and Early Colonization,” in The Cambridge History of Religions in America, ed. Stephen J. Stein, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1: Pre-Columbian Times to 1790, 200–18; Luca Codignola, “French Catholicism in New France,” Cambridge History of Religions, 1:263–81.
3 Bannissement des Jésuites de la Louisiane: Relation et lettres inédites, ed. Auguste Carayon, S.J. (Paris: L'Écureux, 1865), 111–36, here 239; Documents inédits concernants la Compagnie de Jésus, ed. Auguste Carayon, 23 vols. (Poitiers: Henri-Oudin, 1863–86), 13 (1869): 198–225, here 297; Arthur Edward Jones, S.J., “Catalogue of Jesuit Missionaries to New France and Louisiana, 1611–1800,” in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, 73 vols. (Cleveland: The Burrow Brothers, 1896–1901) [hereafter JR], 71 (1901): Lower Canada, Illinois 1759–1791: Miscellaneous Data), 120–81, 320 Jesuits; Louis-Gédéon-Arthur Melançon, S.J., Liste des Missionnaires Jésuites Nouvelle France et Louisiane 1611–1800 (Montreal: Collège Sainte-Marie, 1929), 332 (seven Canadians: four in Canada, one in Louisiana, two who did not return from France, here 85); Louis Pelletier, Le clergé en Nouvelle-France: Étude démographique et répertoire biographique (Montreal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1993), 113 (280), 173–91 (281) (five Canadians, here 113). See also Paul Desjardins, S.J., Le Collège Sainte-Marie de Montréal (Montreal: Collège Sainte-Marie, 1940–45), 1 (1940): 215 (on Félix-François-Marie Martin's initial list). Thomas Aloysius Hughes, another Jesuit historian of this period, took for granted Jones's 320 Jesuits for New France and added another 144 for the British colonies, including the West Indies, for a total of 464 Jesuits overall. See Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America Colonial and Federal: Text and Documents, 2 vols. in 4 tomes (London: Longmans, Green, 1907–17), 1/2: Text: From 1645 till 1773 (1917), 677–704.
4 François-Xavier Noiseux, Liste chronologique des évêques et des prêtres tant séculiers que réguliers, employés au service de l'Église du Canada depuis l'établissement de ce pays, et aussi la liste des évêques des autres possessions britanniques de l'Amérique du Nord: Revue au Secrétariat de l'Évêché de Québec (Quebec City: T. Cary et Cie, Imprimeurs Libraires, 1834); John Dawson Gilmary Shea, Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529–1854 (New York: P. J. Kenedy, Excelsior Catholic Publishing House, 1854), 499–502; Cyprien Tanguay, Répertoire général du clergé canadien par ordre chronologique depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu'à nos jours (Quebec City: C. Darveau, 1868); Jean-Baptiste-Arthur Allaire, Dictionnaire biographique du clergé canadien-français, 2 vols. and 4 supplements (Montreal, Saint-Hyacinthe: École catholique des sourds-muets, La Tribune, Devoir, Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe, 1908–34); Ivanhoë Caron, “Liste des prêtres séculiers et religieux qui ont exercé le saint ministère en Canada (1604–1690),” Bulletin des recherches historiques 47, no. 3 (mars 1941): 76–78; no. 6 (juin 1941): 160–75; no. 7 (juillet 1941): 193–201; no. 8 (août 1941): 225–35; no. 9 (septembre 1941): 257–68. See also Les Sulpiciens de Montréal: Une histoire de pouvoir et de discrétion 1657–2007, ed. Dominique Deslandres, John Alexander Dickinson, and Ollivier Hubert (Montreal: Fides, 2007); Odoric-Marie Jouve, O.F.M., et al., Dictionnaire biographique des Récollets missionnaires en Nouvelle-France 1615–1645 – 1670–1849 ([Montreal]: Bellarmin, 1996); Caroline Galland, Pour la gloire de Dieu et du Roi: Les récollets en Nouvelle-France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2012); Codignola, “Les Capucins de l'Acadie dans le contexte international (1632–1656),” in Les Récollets en Nouvelle-France: Traces et mémoire, ed. Paul-André Dubois (Quebec City: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2018); 123–38.
5 In 1616, the Society of Jesus boasted 15,544 priests; in 1653 Jesuit missionaries around the world were a little less than one thousand, of whom the highest number (381) were in continental Europe and the lowest (9) in Scotland; 18 were active in New France. See Codignola, “Competing Networks: Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics in French North America, 1610–58,” The Canadian Historical Review 80, no. 4 (December 1999): 539–84, here 551.
6 See John D. Meehan, S.J., “Historiography of Jesuits in Canada since 1842,” in Jesuit Historiography Online, ed. Robert Alexander Maryks (Leiden: Brill, 2017), https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/jesuit-historiography-online/historiography-of-jesuits-in-canada-since-1842-COM_196201 (accessed July 23, 2020), for an overview.
7 John Dawson Gilmary Shea, “Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, MD, LLD, Historian of New Netherland and New York,” Magazine of American History 5, no. 1 (July 1880): 77–80; James J. Walsh, “Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, of New York. Physician, Historian and Antiquarian. D.D. 1797–1880,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 16, no. 1 (March 1905): 5–33; Francis Shaw Guy, Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan: A Study in American Historiography (1797–1880) (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1934); Léon Pouliot, “Note sur Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan (1797–1880),” Bulletin des recherches historiques, 47, no. 1 (janvier 1941): 18–20; Joseph Peter Donnelly, S.J., Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations Errata and Addenda (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1967), 8; Jacques Monet, S.J., “O’Callaghan, Edmund Bailey,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, ed. George W. Brown et al., 15 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–2005) [hereafter DCB], 10: 1871 to 1880 (1972): 554–56; Robert Charles Daley, “Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan: Irish Patriote” (PhD diss., Concordia University, 1986), 376–77, 422–23, 433; Jack Verney, O'Callaghan: The Making and Unmaking of a Rebel (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994).
8 Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, “Jesuit Relations of Discoveries and Other Occurrences in Canada and the Northern and Western States of the Union, 1632–1672.” Proceedings of the New York Historical Society 5 (1847): 140–58. The full list of these letters is in Verney, O’Callaghan, 222.
9 Henry Stevens, Recollections of James Lenox and the Formation of His Library, ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York: The New York Public Library, 1951); Margaret Cross Norton, “Victor Hugo Paltsits, 1867–1952,” The American Archivist 16, no. 2 (April 1953): 137–40; Donnelly, Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations, 8–9.
10 O’Callaghan, Relations des Jésuites sur les découvertes et les autres événements arrivés en Canada, et au nord et à l'ouest des États-Unis (1611–1672), par le Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan, membre correspondant de la Société historique de New-York, et membre honoraire de la Société historique du Connecticut: Traduit de l'anglais avec quelques notes, corrections et additions, ed. Félix-François-Marie Martin (Montreal: Bureau des Mélanges Religieux, 1850) (Martin’s note at 61–70); Pierre-Basile Mignault, Souvenir des Fêtes jubilaires du Collège Saint-Marie de Montréal 1848–1898 publié par le Comité général d'organisation des Fêtes jubilaires (Montreal: Desbarats, [1899]); Desjardins, Collège Sainte-Marie, 1:216–17; Guy Laflèche, Les saints martyrs canadiens, 5 vols. (Laval: Les Éditions du Singulier, 1988–95), 1: Histoire du mythe (1888): 95–97; Jean Cinq-Mars, Histoire du Collège Sainte-Marie de Montréal 1848–1969 (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1998); Jean-Sébastien Sauvé, “Les carnets de croquis du père jésuite Félix Martin (1804–1886),” Journal de la Société pour l'étude de l'architecture au Canada 39, no. 1 (2014): 35–56 (for a less known aspect of Martin's multifaceted line of interests and experiences); Muriel Clair, “Le Manuscrit de 1652 sur les martyrs jésuites canadiens: en deçà d'une perspective hagiographique et ethnologique,” in Penser l'Amérique: De l'observation à l'inscription, ed. Nathalie Vuillemin and Thomas Wien (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2017), 43–55, here 43; Adina Ruiu, “French and Canadian Jesuit History Writing: A Bridge between the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Society,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. Ines G. Županov (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 974–1003. Tellingly, even The Early Jesuit Missions in North America, ed. William Ingraham Kip (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), devotes a chapter to “The Iroquois Martyrs: 1688–1693” (117–36), but does not mention the early martyrs.
11 Desjardins, Collège Sainte-Marie, 1:214–48 (on Martin's historical research and his relating travels); Félix-François-Marie Martin, “Tombeau découvert à Penetanguishene: Des temps anciens qu'on peut appeler l'époque héroïque de ces vastes contrées,” L'album littéraire de la Revue canadienne (janvier 1848): 14–17; Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, S.J., Relation abrégée de quelques missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle-France, par le R.P. F.-J. Bressany, de la même Compagnie: Traduit de l'italien et augmenté d'un avant-propos, de la biographie de l'auteur, et d'un grand nombre de notes et de gravures, par le R.P. F. Martin, de la même Compagnie (Montreal: John Lovell, 1852) (originally published in Italian in 1653); Claude Dablon, S.J., Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable aux missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en la Nouvelle France les années 1673 à 1679 Par le R.P. Claude Dablon Recteur du Collège de Québec & Supérieur des Missions de la Compagnie de Jésus en la Nouvelle France, ed. Martin (Quebec City: A la Presse Cramoisy, and Albany: J. Munsell, 1860); Mission du Canada: Relations inédites de la Nouvelle-France (1672–1679) pour faire suite aux anciennes Relations (1615–1672), ed. Marie-Fortuné de Montézon and Martin, 2 vols. (Paris: Douniol, 1861); reprinted as Relations inédites de la Nouvelle France (1672–1679) pour faire suite aux anciennes relations (1615–1672), ed. Georges-Émile Giguère, S.J., 2 vols. (Montreal: Éditions Élysée, 1974), which includes Giguère, “Présentation: Des Relations encore inédites,” 1:i–xi (a history of the early publications of the Jesuit relations).
12 Première mission des jésuites au Canada: Lettres et documents inédits, ed. Auguste Carayon (Paris: L’Écureux, 1864); Bannissement, ed. Carayon; Documents inédits, ed. Carayon; Le Père Pierre Chaumonot de la Compagnie de Jésus: Autobiographie et pièces inédites, ed. Carayon (Poitiers: Henri Oudarayon 1869); Félix-François-Marie Martin, Le R.P. Isaac Jogues de la Compagnie de Jésus premier apôtre des Iroquois par le R.P. F. Martin de la même Compagnie (Paris: Joseph Albanel, 1873); Martin, Hurons et Iroquois: Le P. Jean de Brébeuf; Sa vie, ses travaux, son martyre (Paris: G. Téqui, 1877); Martin, Les Jésuites-Martyrs du Canada (Montreal: Compagnie d'Imprimerie Canadienne, 1877); Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Les Jésuites-Martyrs du Canada: Relation abrégée de quelques missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle France par le Père François-Joseph Bressani de la même Compagnie traduite de l'italien par le Père Félix Martin de la même Compagnie; Nouvelle édition, ed. Martin (Montreal: Compagnie d'Imprimerie Canadienne, 1877).
13 On the Jesuit estates, see Roy Clinton Dalton, The Jesuits’ Estates Question 1760–1888: A Study of the Background for the Agitation of 1889 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968); James Rodger Miller, Equal Rights: The Jesuits’ Estates Act Controversy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). On Jones, see JR, 1: Acadia: 1610–1613 (1896): xi–xii, 72: Final Preface, Additional Errata. Index: A–I (1901): 11; Hughes, History, I/1: Text: From the first Colonization till 1645 (1907), 29; E. J. D., S.J., “Father Arthur Edward Jones, SJ: A Sketch,” The Woodstock Letters 47, no. 3 (October 1, 1918): 281–93; Donnelly, Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations, 11–12; Joseph Cossette, S.J., “Jones, Arthur Edward,” in Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jésus: Biográfico-temático, ed. Charles Edwards O'Neill, S.J., and Joaquín Maria Domínguez, S.J., 4 vols. (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., and Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2001) [hereafter DHCJ], 3:2153; Ruiu, “French and Canadian Jesuit History,” 989. On Jones’s publications, see La mission du Saguenay: Relation inédite du R.P. Pierre Laure, SJ, 1720 à 1730 précédée de quelques notes biographiques sur ce missionnaire, ed. Arthur Edward Jones (Montreal: Archives du Collège Ste-Marie, 1889); Jones, ed., The Aulneau Collection 1734–1745 (Montreal: Archives of St. Mary's Collège, 1893); Jones, “Catalogue.” On Martin, see Georges-Émile Giguère, “Martin, Félix (baptized Félix-François-Marie),” in DCB, 11: 1881 to 1890 (1982), 587–89; Giguère, “Martin, Félix-François-Marie,” in DHCJ, 3:2520–21.
14 Relations des Jésuites: Contenant ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable dans les missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle France, ed. Charles-Honoré Cauchon [known as Laverdière], Édouard-Gabriel Plante, and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Ferland, 3 vols. (Quebec City: Augustin Coté, 1858), reprinted in 6 vols. (Montreal: Éditions du Jour, 1972) (see the original “Avis de l’éditeur” for the network of Canadian and American scholars who assisted in this “enterprise that one could describe as national,” [iii–iv, quotation at iv, “entreprise que l’on peut appeler nationale”]); Henri-Raymond Casgrain, Histoire de la mère Marie de l’Incarnation, supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France précédée d'une esquisse sur l’histoire religieuse des premiers temps de cette colonie (Quebec City: Desbarats, 1864) (see “Introduction [5–70]); Le Journal des Jésuites publié d’après le manuscrit original conservé aux archives du Séminaire de Québec par les abbés Laverdière et Casgrain, ed. Charles-Honoré Laverdière and Henri-Raymond Casgrain (Montreal: Léger Brousseau, 1871), reprinted (Montreal, Laval: Éditions François-Xavier, 1973). See Thomas-Marie Charland, O.P., “À qui devons nous la réédition des Relations des Jésuites?,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française [hereafter RHAF] 3, no. 2 (septembre 1949): 210–26 (for the rivalries surrounding the 1858 edition); Georges-Émile Giguère, “Sous les auspices du gouvernement Canadien,” RHAF 8, no. 3 (décembre 1954): 359–79.
15 Kip, Early Jesuit Missions, quotations at viii (labors, touching, pioneers), x (little); Shea, Catholic Missions; Henry De Courcy and Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States: From the Earliest Settlement of the Country to the Present Time; With Biographical Sketches, Accounts of Religious Orders, Councils (New York: P. J. Kennedy, Excelsior Catholic Publishing House, 1879); Shea, A History of the Catholic Church within the Limits of the United States: From the First Attempted Colonization to the Present Time, 4 vols. (New York: Edward Jenkins' Sons, and Rahway, NJ: The Mershon Company, 1886–92); Hughes, History. See Dudley C. Gordon, “A Dedication to the Memory of John Gilmary Shea 1824–1892,” Arizona and the West 6, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 1–4; Donnelly, Thwaites' Jesuit Relations, 12–13; Henry Warner Bowden, “John Gilmary Shea: A Study of Methods and Goals in Historiography,” The Catholic Historical Review 54, no. 2 (July 1968): 235–60; Karen Hoffman O'Connell, “The Library of John Gilmary Shea: Exploring the Book Collecting Mind of a Nineteenth-Century Historian” (MA thesis, Georgetown University, 2011); Robert Emmett Curran, S.J., “From Saints to Secessionists: Thomas Hughes and The History of the Society of Jesus in North America,” in Studies in Catholic History: In Honor of John Tracy Ellis, ed. Nelson H. Minnich, Robert B. Eno, P.S.S., and Robert Frederick Trisco (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1985), 239–59.
16 Hospice-Anthelme-Jean-Baptiste Verreau, “Suppression des relations de la Nouvelle-France,” Revue de Montréal 1, no. 1 (mars 1877): 107–16; no. 2 (avril 1877): 162–71; Auguste-Honoré Gosselin, Vie de Mgr de Laval premier évêque de Québec et apôtre du Canada 1622–1708, 2 vols. (Quebec City: L.-J. Demers & Frère, 1890); Auguste-Honoré Gosselin, La mission du Canada avant Mgr. de Laval, 1615–1659 (Evreux: Imprimerie de l'Eure, 1909); Gosselin, L'Église du Canada depuis Monseigneur de Laval jusqu'à la Conquête, 3 vols. (Quebec City: Laflamme & Proulx, 1911–14); JR, 1:xiii (Andrew Frederick Hunter described as an “antiquarian”); Bruce Graham Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985), 60–61 (on Hunter's major role).
17 Clarence Walworth Alvord, “A Critical Analysis of the Work of R. G. Thwaites,” Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association 7 (1913–14): 321–33, here 332 (an overall rather scathing assessment); Léon Pouliot, Étude sur les Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (1632–1672) (Montreal: Scolasticat de l'Immaculée-Conception, and Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1940), 37–39 (on imperfect proof reading); Frederick Jackson Turner, Reuben Gold Thwaites: A Memorial Address (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1914), 43–45 (“definitive edition” [44]); Gustave Lanctôt, L'oeuvre de la France en Amérique du Nord: Bibliographie sélective et critique (Montreal: Fides, 1951), 27 [“édition (...) la plus complète et, peut-on dire, l'édition définitive”]. Later, problems regarding translations will also be raised by Maureen Korp, “Problems of Prejudice in the Thwaites Edition of the Jesuit Relations,” Canadian Society of Church History Papers (1990): 99–131, republished with few revisions in Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 21, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 261–76; The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America, ed. Allan R. Greer (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000), vi; Micah True, “Is It Time for a New Edition of the Jesuit Relations from New France?: Campeau vs. Thwaites,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada 51, no. 2 (2013): 261–79; Jean-François Lozier, Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018), 15.
18 Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1867), vi. See Luca Codignola, “Francis Parkman's Roman Experience (1844),” Quaderni d'italianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies 26, no. 1 (2005): 77–100; William John Eccles, “The History of New France According to Francis Parkman,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. [hereafter WMQ] 18, no. 2 (April 1961): 163–75 (“His familiarity with the documents is most praiseworthy; unfortunately, however, lengthy sections of his volumes were put together with scissors and paste, being little more than translations of long passages from the documents” [166]).
19 Parkman, Jesuits, 552–53 (quotation). See Henri-Raymond Casgrain, Francis Parkman (Quebec City: C. Darveau, 1872); Casgrain, F. X. Garneau et Francis Parkman (Montreal: Librairie Beauchemin, 1912); The Journals of Francis Parkman, ed. Mason Wade, 2 vols. (New York, London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947); Letters of Francis Parkman, ed. Wilbur R. Jacobs, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960).
20 JR, 30: Hurons, Lower Canada: 1646–1647 (1898), 16 (acknowledgment); Camille de Rochemonteix, S.J., Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siècle d’après beaucoup de documents inédits, 3 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1895–96), 1:i–lxiv (“Introduction”); Camille de Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle, d’après beaucoup de documents inédits, 2 vols. (Paris: Picard et Fils, 1906). See also de Rochemonteix, ed., Relation par lettres de l’Amérique septentrionale (années 1709 et 1710) (Paris: Létouzey et Ané, 1904; his attribution to the Jesuit Antoine Silvy was incorrect, the real author being the Intendant, Antoine-Denis Raudot [1679–1737]; see on this Mémoires of Michilimackinac and the Pays d’en Haut: Indians and French in the Upper Great Lakes at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century, ed. José António Brandão (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, and Mackinac Island: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 2019), xlvi. On de Rochemonteix, see Adhémar d’Alès, S.J., “Le Père Camille de Rochemonteix (1834–1923),” Lettres de Jersey 38, no. 1 (8 juin 1924): 105–53; Hugues Beylard, “Rochemonteix, Camille de,” in DHCJ, 4:3384; Thomas Joseph Campbell, S.J., Pioneer Priests of North America 1642–1710, 3 vols. (New York: Fordham University Press and The America Press, 1908–11) (note the short “Authorities” list at 1:xvi, and similar lists in the following vols.); John J. Wynne, S.J., “Reverend Thomas J. Campbell,” The Woodstock Letters 60, no. 2 (June 1, 1926): 269–76; Francis Xavier Curran, “Campbell, Thomas Joseph,” in DHCJ, 1:616.
21 A few years earlier, Sebastiano Martinelli had unsuccessfully represented a similar dossier for Bishop François de Laval. Laval was eventually canonized together with Marie Guyart-Martin, a Canadian Ursuline nun of French origin, known in religion as Marie de l'Incarnation [1599–1672]; Pope Francis I’s special decree, dated April 3, 2014, bypassed the usual canonization process. See Quebecen: Beatificationis et Canonizationis Servi Dei Francisci de Montmorency-Laval Primi Quebecensis Episcopi; Positio super Validitate Processuum; Sacra Rituum Congregatione, Emo et Rmo Domino Card. Sebastiano Martinelli Relatore (Rome: Guerra et Mirri, 1904); Quebecen: Beatificationis seu declarationis martyrii servorum Dei Joannis de Brébeuf, Gabrielis Lalemant, Antonii Daniel, Caroli Garnier, Natalis Chabanel, Isaaci Jogues, Renati Goupil et Joannis de La Lande e Societate Jesu; Positio super Introductione Causae; Pars Altera Informatio, Animadversiones et Responsiones; Sacra Rituum Congregatione; Emo et Rmo Domino Cardinale Antonio Vico Pro-Praefecto et Relatore (Rome: Guerra et Mirri, 1916). The Jesuit Frédéric Rouvier (1851–1925) figures prominently in the 1916 Quebecen text. See Frédéric Rouvier, Trois apôtres de la Nouvelle France: Les PP. Jean de Brébeuf, Is. Jogues et G. Lalemant de la Compagnie de Jésus ([Lille]: Société Saint-Augustin, Desclée, De Brouwer, [1890]); Rouvier, Au pays des Hurons: Les premiers apôtres de la Nouvelle France; Le P. Jean de Brébeuf; Le P. G. Lalemant; Le P. Isaac Jogues; Le P. Bressani (Lille: Société de Saint-Augustin, Desclée, De Brouwer, 1891); Rouvier, Au berceau de l’autre France: Le Canada et ses premiers martyrs (Paris: Victor Retaux et fils, 1895). The 1925 date was meant to coincide with the three-hundredth anniversary of Jean de Brébeuf's landing at Quebec City. On that occasion the Québec Provincial Archives published a 1652 Collège Sainte-Marie manuscript, “Les Martyrs jésuites canadiens,” Rapport de l'Archiviste de la Province de Québec (1924–25): 1–93; later revised in Louis-Gédéon-Arthur Melançon, ed., Memoires Touchant la Mort & les Vertus des Peres Isaac Jogues, Anne de Noue, Anthoine Daniel Jean de Brebeuf Gabriel Lallement, Charles Garnier Noel Chabanel & Vn Seculier René Goupil (Montreal: [typescript], [c.1935]); and examined in Clair, “Le Manuscrit de 1652”; Les Jésuites à Québec 19 juin 1625: Fêtes du 3ème centenaire 22–23–24 juin 1925 1625–1925, ed. Louis-Adolphe Paquet, S.J. (Quebec City: L’Action Sociale, 1925), was also published on the same occasion (this celebratory collection announced the beatification ceremony in Rome on its back cover). For a short but very good synthesis of the whole process, see Jacques Monet, “Canadian/North America Martyrs,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 130–32.
22 Marianopolitan. seu Albanen. in America: Beatificationis et Canonizationis Servae Dei Catharinae Tekakwitha Virginis Indianae Positio super introductionae causae et super virtutibus ex officio compilata (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1938). See Ruiu, “French and Canadian Jesuit History,” 988. Kateri Tekakwitha had also been the subject of a chapter in Kip, Early Jesuit Missions, 79–116.
23 Alfred Hamy, S.J., Au Mississipi, la première exploration (1673): Le père Jacques Marquette de Léon Prêtre de la Compagnie de Jésus (1637–1675) et Louis Jolliet d'après M. Ernest Gagnon (Paris: Champion, 1903); Joseph-Édmond Roy, “Essai sur Charlevoix,” Mémoires de la Société Royale du Canada, 3ème sér., 1 (1907), sect. 1, 3–96; Georges Goyau, Une épopée mystique: Les origines religieuses du Canada (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1924); Martyrs de la Nouvelle-France, ed. Claude Rigault and Georges Goyau (Montreal: Desclée de Brouwer, 1925); Édouard Lecompte, S.J., “Les Jésuites,” in L'Acadie: Ses Missionnaires Jésuites, Récollets, Capucins, Prêtres des Missions Étrangères, Sulpiciens (Montreal: Les Éditions du Devoir, 1925), 5–11; Édouard Lecompte, Les Anciennes Missions de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle-France (1611–1800) (Montreal: Imprimerie du Messager, 1925); Lecompte, “La tragédie de la nation huronne,” in Paquet, Les Jésuites à Québec, 61–69; Francis Borgia Steck, O.F.M., The Jolliet-Marquette Expedition, 1673 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1928); John Joseph Birch, The Saint of the Wilderness: St. Isaac Jogues, SJ (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1936); Francis Xavier Talbot, S.J., Saint among the Hurons: The Life of Jean de Brébeuf (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
24 Jean Delanglez, S.J., The French Jesuits in Lower Louisiana (1700–1763) (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1935); Delanglez, Frontenac and the Jesuits (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit History, 1939); Delanglez, Louis Jolliet: Vie et voyages (1645–1700) (Montreal: Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique Française and Éditions Granger, 1950). See Guy Frégault, “Jean Delanglez, SJ (1896–1949),” RHAF 3, no. 2 (septembre 1949): 165–71; O'Neill, “Delanglez, Jean,” in DHCJ, 2:1071.
25 Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1913); Geoffroy Atkinson, Les Relations de voyages du XVIIe siècle et l’évolution des idées: Contribution à l’étude de la formation de l’esprit du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard Champion, 1924); George Robert Healy, “The French Jesuits and the Idea of the Noble Savage,” WMQ 15, no. 2 (April 1958): 143–67, quotation at 150. Further updates in Réal Ouellet, “Monde sauvage et monde chrétien dans les Relations des jésuites,” Littératures classiques 22 (1994): 59–72; Ouellet and Mylène Tremblay, “From the Good Savage to the Degenerate Indian: The Amerindian in the Accounts of Travel to America,” in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700, ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 159–70; Gordon Mitchell Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Sayre, La modernité et son autre: Récits de la rencontre avec l'Indien en Amérique du Nord au XVIIIe siècle (Bécherel: Les Perséides, 2008).
26 Pouliot, Étude, 281–82, quotation at 282 [“Ne sont-elles pas une richesse qui appartient d’abord aux Canadiens français? [...] Qui pourrait plus facilement que nous reconstituer et revivre [...] les grand événements qu’elles nous racontent, inspirés toujours par le plus noble et le plus saint idéal? Les actes d’héroïsme dont elles sont remplies n’ont-ils pas fait descendre sur notre patrie et sur notre Église des grâces de choix?”]. See also his later synthesis, Léon Pouliot, “Les Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (1632–1672),” in Histoire du Canada: Une expérience tricentenaire, ed. Albert Desbiens (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université de Québec, 1970), 7–17. In the United States, the Society of Jesus’s call was answered by Gilbert J. Garraghan (1871–1942), a more experienced Jesuit historian. See Gilbert J. Garraghan, The Jesuits of the Middle United States, 3 vols. (New York: Loyola University Press, 1938).
27 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America (1610–1791), ed. Edna Kenton (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925); The Indians of North America: From The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791: Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites Secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, ed. Kenton, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). Later, the Kenton selection was further reduced in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: A Selection, ed. Stanley Robert Mealing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963).
28 Lawrence Counselman Wroth, “The Jesuit Relations from New France,” The Papers of The Bibliographical Society of America, 30 (1936): 110–49; James Comly McCoy, Jesuit Relations of Canada 1632–1673: A Bibliography (Paris: Arthur Rau, 1937), xiii (Parkman) (McCoy died in January 1934; his book was at the press in April 1936; it included an introduction by Wroth [iii–xv] and a shortened version of the latter's 1936 article); Frank Keller Walter and Virginia Doneghy, Jesuit Relations and Other Americana in the Library of James F. Bell: A Catalogue (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, and London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1950) (it takes for granted the relations being “best sellers of their day” [v]). As for the discontinuance of the relations after 1673, see de Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites au XVIIe siècle, 1: xxx–xxxi; Camille de Rochemonteix, “La suppression des Relations des Jesuites,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 4, no. 8 (août 1898): 226–41; Victor Hugo Paltsits, “Bibliographical Data,” in JR, 55 (1899): Lower Canada, Iroquois, Ottawas 1670–1672, 315–16.
29 Textes des martyrs de la Nouvelle-France, ed. Robert Rouquette (Paris: Seuil, 1947); Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France, ed. François Roustang (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), 8, 10, 25; Jean Côté, S.J., “L'institution des donnés,” RHAF 15, no. 3 (décembre 1961): 344–78; Léon Pouliot, “Pierre Boucher et les jésuites,” in Pierre Boucher, Histoire véritable et natvrelle des Moeurs & Productions du Pays de la Novvelle France, Vulgairement dite le Canada: Composé par Pierre Bovcher, Escuyer Sieur de Gros-bois, & Gouuerneur des Trois-Riuieres, audit lieu de la Nouuelle-France (Boucherville: Société Historique de Boucherville, 1964), 212–25; Talbot, Saint among the Hurons [on Brébeuf]; René Latourelle, S.J., Étude sur les écrits de Saint Jean de Brébeuf, 2 vols. (Montreal: Les Éditions de l'Immaculée-Conception, 1952–53); Paul Piron, Isaac Jogues: Apôtre et martyr des Peaux-Rouges 1607–1646 (Namur: Grands Lacs, 1940); Gilles Chaussé, S.J., “Le Père Paul Le Jeune, s.j., missionnaire-colonisateur,” RHAF 12, no. 1 (juin 1959): 56–79; no. 2 (septembre 1959): 217–46; Pouliot, “La contribution de P. Paul Le Jeune aux Relations des Jésuites de 1650 à 1663,” Bulletin des recherches historiques 68, no. 1 (janvier-février 1966): 49–53; no. 2 (avril-mai-juin 1966): 77–85; no. 3 (juillet-août-septembre 1966): 131–35; Frédéric Saintonge, S.J., Martyre dans l'ombre: Saint Noël Chabanel (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1958); Pouliot, Charlevoix: François-Xavier de Charlevoix, sj (Sudbury: Société historique du Nouvel-Ontario, 1957); William F. E. Morley, “A Bibliographical Study of Charlevoix's Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France,” Bibliographical Society of Canada, Papers, 2 (1963): 21–45; André Surprenant, S.J., “Le Père Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, missionnaire de la Huronie,” RHAF 7, no. 1 (juin 1953): 64–87; no. 2 (septembre 1953): 240–58; no. 3 (décembre 1953): 392–412; no. 4 (mars 1954): 505–23; Fernand Potvin, “Saint Antoine Daniel, martyr canadien,” RHAF 8, no. 3 (décembre 1954): 395–414; no. 4 (mars 1955): 556–64; 9, no. 1 (juin 1955): 74–92; no. 2 (septembre 1955): 236–50; no. 3 (décembre 1955): 392–409; no. 4 (mars 1956): 562–70; 10, no. 1 (juin 1956): 77–92; no. 2 (septembre 1956): 250–56; no. 3 (décembre 1956): 391–415; Florian Larivière, S.J., La vie ardente de saint Charles Garnier (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1957); Virginia S. Eifert, Louis Jolliet Explorer of Rivers (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1961); Ernest Joseph Burrus, S.J., “Father Jacques Marquette, S.J.: His Priesthood in the Light of the Jesuit Roman Archives,” The Catholic Historical Review 41, no. 3 (October 1955): 257–71; Francis Borgia Steck, Marquette Legends, ed. August Reyling, O.F.M. (New York: Pageant Press, 1960); Richard J. Walsh, “Père Marquette—Padre Kino—Father De Smet,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 67, no. 3 (September 1946): 169–78; Jean Leclerc, S.J., “Un aumônier militaire: Le P. Pierre Millet (1685–1689),” Lettres du Bas-Canada 16 (juin 1962): 82–106.
30 The first four volumes of the DCB (1966–79) were edited by Brown, Marcel Trudel, and André Vachon (1); David Mackness Hayne and Vachon (2); Francess G. Halpenny (3), and Halpenny and Jean Hamelin (4). Its French version, Dictionnaire de biographie canadienne, was published by Les Presses de l'Université Laval of Sainte-Foy at the same time.
31 Monumenta Novae Franciae, ed. Lucien Campeau, 9 vols. (Rome: Monumenta Hist. Soc. Iesu and Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu; Quebec City: Les Presses de l'Université Laval; and Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1967–2003) [hereafter MNF] (the manuscript draft of a vol. 10, Incertitudes et espoirs (1662–1666), was apparently ready at the time of Campeau's death, but so far it has not been published); Campeau, Biographical Dictionary for The Jesuit Missions in Acadia and New France: 1602–1654, ed. William Lonc, S.J., and George Topp, S.J. (Hamilton, Ont.: Steve Catlin, 2001) (containing the translations of all biographical notices of vols. 1–8 of the MNF; Steve Catlin, of Hamilton, Ont., is the archivist at the Martyr's Shrine, Midland, Ont.). Later, Monet published a lucid description of the presence and role of the Jesuits of 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), 186–98.
32 The official numbering of the listed documents, in both Thwaites (108) and Campeau (1,569), is deceiving, because, for example, several documents are listed more than once, and others (the journals for example) are renumbered every time a new extract is printed. See Luca Codignola, “The Battle is Over: Campeau's Monumenta vs. Thwaites' Jesuit Relations, 1602–1650,” in Missionaries, Native Americans, and Cultural Processes, ed. Sylvia S. Kasprycki, special issue of European Review of Native American Studies 10, no. 2 (1996): 3–10; revised as “Jesuit Writings According to R. G. Thwaites and Lucien Campeau, SJ: How Do They Differ?,” in Codignola, Little Do We Know: History and Historians of the North Atlantic, 1492–2010, ed. Matteo Binasco (Cagliari: CNR–ISEM, 2011), 219–40. See also Codignola, “Note critique,” RHAF 44, no. 1 (été 1990): 97–103, a review of MNF, 4: Les grandes épreuves (1638–1640) (1989).
33 MNF, 7: Le Témoignage du sang (1994), 32* (with reference to Trigger). For a well-developed critique of Campeau, see Alain Beaulieu's review of Lucien Campeau, La mission des jésuites chez les Hurons 1634–1650 (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, and Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1987), in RHAF 41, no. 2 (automne 1987): 249–53; Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn: Jésuites et Amérindiens nomades en Nouvelle-France, 1632–1642 (Quebec City: Nuit Blanche Éditeur, 1990), 157. For an in-depth appreciation, see Pierre Trépanier, “Lucien Campeau, SJ (1914–2003),” Les Cahiers des Dix 57 (2003): 21–30.
34 Thomas Wien, “Canada and the Pays d'en haut 1600–1760,” in Canadian History: A Reader's Guide, ed. Martin Brook Taylor and Dough Owram, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 1: Beginnings to Confederation, 33–75, quotation at 42 (“definitive”); Jesuit Relations, ed. Greer, v (“standard”).
35 Lucien Campeau, La première mission des Jésuites en Nouvelle-France (1611–1613) et le commencement du Collège de Québec (1626–1670) (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1972); Campeau, L'évêché de Québec (1674): Aux origines du premier diocèse érigé en Amérique française (Quebec City: La Société Historique de Québec, 1974); Campeau, Gannentaha: Première mission iroquoise (1653–1665) (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1983); Campeau, La mission des jésuites; Campeau, “Roman Catholic Missions in New France,” in History of Indian-White Relations, ed. Wilcomb Edward Washburn (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 464–71, here 465–68; Campeau, “Canadá. Antigua CJ (1611–1800),” in DHCJ, 1:539–40; Campeau, “Mártires canadienses,” in DHCJ, 3:2531–32.
36 Donnelly, Thwaites’ Jesuit Relations, quotations at 7 (not to be completed), 24 (mistakes); William John Eccles, “The Role of the Church in New France,” in Eccles, Essays on New France (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 26–37, quotation at 26 (new preface to a chapter previously published in Religion in the 18th Century, ed. Richard Everett Morton and John Dudley Browning [New York: Garland, 1979], 41–57). See also Joseph Peter Donnelly, Jean de Brebeuf 1593–1649 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1975); Donnelly, Jacques Marquette, SJ, 1637–1675 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985).
37 Charles Edwards O’Neill, Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); O’Neill, “Estados Unidos de América: Territorios franceses,” in DHCJ, 3:1322–23; MNF, 9: Pour le salut des Hurons (1657–1661) (2003). See also Charlevoix’s Louisiana: Selections from the History and the Journal, ed. O’Neill (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press for the Louisiana American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 1977).
38 Madeleine Aquin Rousseau and Jacques Rousseau, “La crainte des Iroquois chez les Mistassins,” RHAF 2, no. 1 (juin 1948): 13–26, quotations at 26 [“la valeur historique des documents consignés dans les archives,” “l’écheveau psychologique de peuplades sans annales,” “par de nombreux intermédiaires”]; Jacques Rousseau, “Les voyages du Père Albanel au Lac Mistassini et à la Baie James,” RHAF 3, no. 4 (mars 1950): 556–86; Elisabeth Jane Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615–1649 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1964); Bruce Graham Trigger, “The Jesuits and the Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory 12, no. 1 (Winter 1965), 30–53, quotation at 31; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976). For a full examination of Trigger's interpretation, see Catherine M. Desbarats, “Essai sur quelques éléments de l’écriture de l’histoire amérindienne,” RHAF 53, no. 4 (printemps 2000): 491–520.
39 William Nelson Fenton, “Lafitau, Joseph-François,” in DCB, 3: 1741 to 1770 (1974), 334–38; William Nelson Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, “Lafitau et la pensée ethnologique de son temps,” Études littéraires 10, nos. 1–2 (1977): 19–47; Cornelius John Jaenen, “Bruyas, Jacques,” in DCB, 2: 1700 to 1740 (1969), 106–8; Jaenen, “Germain, Joseph-Louis,” in DCB, 2:245–46; Jaenen, “Lamberville, Jacques de,” in DCB, 2:340–42; Jaenen, The Role of the Church in New France (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976); Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, and New York: Columbia University Press, 1976).
40 Korp, “Problems of Prejudice,” quotations at 101 (vetted), 104 (Eurocentric), 119 (who is there); Guy Laflèche, “Les relations des jésuites de la Nouvelle-France: Un document anthropologique majeur de l’américanité française du XVIIe siècle,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 29, no. 2 (1999): 77–87, here 83; JR, 72:313–59 (Indians entry).
41 See Conrad E. Heidenreich, “Settlements and Missionaries: 1615–1650,” in Historical Atlas of Canada, ed. Richard Colebrook Harris et al., 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987–93), 1: From the Beginning to 1800 (1987), plate 34, for a descriptive map of the locations of the early missions.
42 James P. Ronda, “The European Indian: Jesuit Civilization Planning in New France,” Church History 41, no. 3 (September 1972): 385–95; Ronda, “'We Are Well as We Are': An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” WMQ 34, no. 1 (January 1977): 66–82; 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; James L. Axtell, “The European Failure to Convert the Indians: An Autopsy,” in Papers of the Sixth Algonquian Conference, 1974, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, 1975), 274–90; Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Daniel K. Richter, “Iroquois Versus Iroquois: Jesuit Missions and Christianity in Village Politics, 1642–1686,” Ethnohistory 32, no. 1 (1985): 1–16; Trigger, “Jesuits and Fur Trade”; Trigger, Children of Aataentsic; Trigger, Natives and Newcomers; Denys Delâge, Le pays renversé: Amérindiens et européens en Amérique du nord-est 1600–1664 (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1985); Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn. Very much in the Axtell spirit and using a similar comparative framework is British literary critic David Murray, “Spreading the Word: Missionaries, Conversion and Circulation in the Northeast,” in Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America, ed. Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999), 43–64.
43 Axtell, Invasion Within, 91–127, 271–86; John Webster Grant, Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 26–68; Delâge's review of Grant, Moon of Wintertime, in Recherches sociographiques 28, no. 1 (1987): 132–39, quotation at 135 [“un régime totalitaire et d'y exercer un pouvoir qui (...) visait le contrôle de la morale et de l'orthodoxie de la vie de chacun”].
44 Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981); James Talmadge Moore, Indian and Jesuits: A Seventeenth-Century Encounter (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982). For a favorable critique of Moore's book, see Charles J. Principe, C.S.B., “Les Jésuites missionnaires auprès des Amérindiens du Canada,” in Les Jésuites parmi les hommes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1987), 309–20. See also Michael Pomedli, “Beyond Unbelief: Early Jesuit Interpretations of Native Religions,” Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 16, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 275–87 (a philosophical approach).
45 Elizabeth Jones, Gentlemen and Jesuits: Quests for Glory and Adventure in the Early Days of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); Kenneth M. Morrison, “Sebastien Racle and Norridgewock, 1724: The Exckstrom Controversy Thesis Reconsidered,” Maine Historical Society Quarterly 14 (1974): 76–97; Morrison, The Solidarity of Kin: Ethnohistory, Religious Studies, and the Algonkian-French Religious Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Antonio Dragon, S.J., Trente robes noires au Saguenay (Barcelona: T. C. Casals, 1970); Dragon, L’Acadie et ses 40 robes noires (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1973); Dragon, Le vrai visage de Sébastien Rale (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1975); Micheline Dumont-Johnson, Apôtres ou agitateurs: La France missionnaire en Acadie (Trois-Rivières: Le Boréal-Express, 1970.
46 Laflèche, “Les relations des jésuites,” 84 [“Champion de l'histoire événementielle, intégriste des bonnes causes jésuites et grand pourfendeurs d'Iroquois, d'Indiens infidèles, de libertines et d'historiens libéraux”]. Most of Laflèche's works were issued by his own publishing house, Les Éditions du Singulier. This unrestrained freedom may account for some editorial choices that normally would not be allowed by commercial or university presses.
47 Le missionnaire l'apostat le sorcier: Relation de 1634 de Paul Lejeune, ed. Guy Laflèche (Montreal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1973); La vie du Père Raguenau de Jacques Bigot édition critique, ed. Laflèche (Montreal: VLB Éditeur, 1979); Laflèche, “Les Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France et le mythe de leurs martyrs,” in Les Jésuites parmi les hommes, 35–45; Laflèche, Les saints martyrs; Laflèche, “Les relations des jésuites,” quotations at 77 [“publication de second ordre”], 79 [“sujet véritable”], 82 [“absolument nulle trace dans le monde des lettres et des savants”]; Laflèche, “L'analyse littéraire des Relations des Jésuites: 1970–2000,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 30 (2000), no. 1: 103–8; no. 2: 89–93; no. 3: 101–9. For Laval's waning interest, see Luca Codignola, “The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America, 1486–1760,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1995), 195–242, here 209–11. François-Joseph Le Mercier's quotation is in JR, 53: Lower Canada, Iroquois: 1669–1670 (1899), 24 [“on y trouvera dequoy [sic] contenter la curiosité de ceux qui prennent plaisir à s'instruire de ce qui se passe dans les Nations étrangères”].
48 François-Marc Gagnon, La conversion par l’image: Un aspect de la mission des jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au XVIIe siècle (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1975); Gagnon, “Les images,” in Laflèche, Les saints martyrs, 1:35–79; The Codex Canadiensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World/Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales, ed. Gagnon, Nancy Senior, and Réal Ouellet (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011); Ouellet, “La visée historiographique de Charlevoix d'après ses ‘Liste et examen des auteurs consultés,’” in L’homme et la nature: Actes de la Société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle, ed. Roger L. Emerson, Gilles Girard, and Roseann Runte, 2 vols. (London, Ont.: The University of Western Ontario, 1982), 1:153–63; Rhétorique et conquête missionnaire: Le jésuite Paul Lejeune, ed. Ouellet (Sillery: Éditions du Septentrion, 1993); Ouellet, “Monde sauvage et monde chrétien dans les Relations des jésuites,” Littératures classiques 22 (1994): 59–72; Ouellet, “Les Antilles et le Canada dans la perspective des missionnaires du XVIIe siècle,” in Regards croisés sur le Canada et la France: Voyages et relations du XVIe au XXe siècle; Actes des congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques; 130e; La Rochelle, 2005, ed. Pierre Guillaume and Laurier Turgeon (Quebec City: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007), 63–90.
49 Claude Rigault and Réal Ouellet. “Relations des Jésuites,” in Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires du Québec, ed. Maurice Lemire et al. (Montreal: Fides, 1978), 1:637–68; Pierre Berthiaume, “Les Relations des jésuites: nouvel avatar de la Légend doré,” in Les figures de l'Indien, ed. Gilles Thérien (Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 1988), 129–58; Berthiaume, “Les Relations des Jésuites (1632–1673),” in Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789, ed. Jean Sgard (Paris: Universitas, 1991), notice 1187 (a very good summary); Marie-Aimée Cliche, “Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle-France, du père François-Xavier de Charlevoix,” in Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires, 1:366–73. On Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix's historical methodology, see also Marcel Paquette, “François-Xavier de Charlevoix ou la Métaphore historienne: Contribution à une systématique du récit historiographique,” Recherches sociographiques 15, no. 1 (janvier-avril 1974): 9–19.
50 Les Jésuites parmi les hommes; Les figures de l’Indien; Raphael Noteware Hamilton, S.J., Marquette’s Explorations: The Narratives Reexamined (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Hamilton, Father Marquette (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1970); Robert Toupin, S.J., “L’érudition et la fonction du savoir au XVIIIe siècle: Pierre Potier chez les Hurons du Détroit,” in L’homme et la nature, 165–74; Toupin, “Les coordonnées d’un nouvel espace dans les écrits de Pierre Potier, Jésuite belge chez les Hurons du Détroit,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 56, no. 1 (janvier–mars 1986): 57–66; Toupin, Arpents de neige et Robes Noires: Brève relation sur le passage des jésuites en Nouvelle-France au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Ville Mont-Royal: Éditions Bellarmin, 1991): 81–97 (contains a scathing attack on Laflèche, Delâge, and Beaulieu, together with a full appreciation of Campeau); Vincent A. Lapomarda, S.J., “The Jesuit Missions of Colonial New England,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 121, no. 2 (April 1990): 91–109; Charles J. Principe, “Les Jésuites missionnaires”; Principe, “A Moral Portrait of the Indian of the St. Lawrence on One Relation of New France, Written by Paul Le Jeune, sj,” The Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Historical Studies 57 (1990): 29–50; Une mission jésuite au Canada au XVIe siècle: Narration de la Mission du Sault depuis sa fondation jusqu’en 1686 per le père Claude Chauchetière, ed. Hélène Avisseau (Bordeaux: Archives départementales de la Gironde, 1984); Chantal Théry, “Un Jésuite et un Récollet parmi les femmes: Paul Le Jeune et Gabriel Sagard chez les sauvages du Canada,” in Les Jésuites parmi les hommes, 105–13; Gilles Raymond, “Le premier catéchisme de la Nouvelle-France: Celui de Jean de Brébeuf, sj,” in Une inconnue de l’histoire de la culture: La production des catéchismes en Amérique française, ed. Raymond Brodeur and Jean-Paul Rouleau (Sainte-Foy: Éditions Anne Sigier, 1986), 17–49; René-Michel Roberge, “L’originalité du catéchisme de Brébeuf,” in Une inconnue de l’histoire, 53–55.
51 European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, 1493–1750, ed. John Mark Alden et al., 6 vols. (New Canaan, CT: Readex Books, 1980–97). The Pierre Biard entry is at 2: 1601–1650 (1982): 141 (“The earliest of the Jesuit accounts devoted to Canada”).
52 Les Jésuites parmi les hommes, v [“longtemps un objet d'étude réservé aux Jésuites”]; Ludwig Koch, S.J., Jesuiten-Lexikon: Die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1934). O'Neill was the first general editor of the DHCJ; he was replaced by Domínguez in 1993.
53 The most prolific authors were Campeau with thirty entries, Giguère (1917–96) with twelve, and Cossette with ten. They were followed by O’Neill (five) and Toupin (four). Henri Béchard (1909–90), Beylard (1904–87), Chaussé, Francis Xavier Curran (1914–1993), and Thomas F. Mulcrone (1912–96) had one entry each. There were also two co-authors, Lapomarda and Joseph N. Tylenda (1928–2018).
54 Béchard, “Tekakwitha, Kateri (Catalina),” in DHCJ, 4:3717–18. On Tekakwitha, see also Lecompte, Catherine Tekakwitha: Le lis des bords de la Mohawk et du St-Laurent (1656–1680) (Montreal: Imprimerie du Messager, 1927); Béchard, “Tekakwitha (Tagaskouita, Tegakwitha), Kateri (Catherine),” in DCB, 1: 1000 to 1700 (1966), 635–36; Béchard, Kaia'tanoron Kateri Tekakwitha (Kahnawaké: Centre Kateri, 1992); Kay I. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethnohistory 40, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 277–306; Susan R. Dauria, “Kateri Tekakwitha: Gender and Ethnic Symbolism in the Process of Making an American Saint,” New York Folklore 20, nos. 3–4 (1994): 55–73; Allan R. Greer, “L'hagiographie en Nouvelle-France: Le cas de Kateri Tekakwitha,” in La création biographique/Biographical Creation, ed. Marta Dvorak (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, and Bordeaux: Association française d'études canadiennes, 1997), 267–74; Greer, “Savage/Saint: The Lives of Kateri Tekakwitha,” in Vingt ans après Habitants et marchands. Lectures de l’histoire des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles canadiens/Twenty Years Later Habitants et marchands. Reading the History of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Canada, ed. Sylvie Dépatie et al. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 138–59; Greer, “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” WMQ 57, no. 2 (April 2000): 323–48; Greer, “Iroquois Virgin: The Story of Catherine Tekakwitha in New France and New Spain,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800, ed. Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 235–50; Greer, “Natives and Nationalism: The Americanization of Kateri Tekakwitha,” The Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 2004): 260–72; Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
55 José António Brandão, “Your fyre shall burn no more”: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). For the reasons behind the Iroquois Wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sometimes referred to as Beaver Wars, see the discussions in Brandão, “Iroquois Expansion in the Seventeenth Century: A Review of Causes,” European Review of Native American Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 7–18; Lozier, Flesh Reborn, 313n67.
56 Karen L. Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991); Carol Green Devens Ramirez, Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
57 Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000), quotations at 10 (forms of knowledge, politically engaged), 11 (uncover the logic, many contradictions, continue to matter), 12 (expression of dominance, not necessarily); Vincent Grégoire, “Pensez-vous venir à bout de renverser le pays': La pratique d'évangélisation en Nouvelle France d'après les Relations des jésuites.” Dix-septième siècle 50, no. 4 (octobre–décembre 1998): 681–707; Peter A. Dorsey, “Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,” WMQ 55, no. 2 (July 1998): 399–420; Peter A. Goddard, “The Devil in New France: Jesuit Demonology, 1611–50,” The Canadian Historical Review 78, no. 1 (March 1997): 40–64; Goddard, “Converting the Sauvage: Jesuit and Montagnais in Seventeenth-Century New France,” The Catholic Historical Review, 84, no. 2 (April 1998): 219–39; Goddard, “Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater Or Opportunity?,” in Decentring the Renaissance, 186–99. See also his later works: Goddard, “Two Kinds of Conversion ('Medieval' and 'Modern') among the Hurons of New France,” in The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas, ed. James Michael Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 57–77; Goddard, “The Amerindian in Divine History: The Limits of Biblical Authority in the Jesuit Mission to New France, 1632–1649,” in The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography, and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present, ed. Mark Vessey et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 253–72.
58 Jesuit Relations, ed. Greer, 5–7, 14–15, quotations at 5 (experiments), 6 (French Jesuits). See another selection, dating from this period: Robes noires et sorciers: Relations des jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (1616–1649)/Von Schwartzröchken und Hexenmeistern: Jeuitberichte aus New-Frankreich (1616–1649), ed. Klaus-Dieter Ertler (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1997).
59 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, écrites des missions étrangères, par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, 32 vols. in 34 tomes (Paris: Nicolas le Clerc et al., 1702–76); Lettres édifiantes et curieuses de Chine par des missionnaires jésuites, 1702–1776, ed. Isabelle Vissière and Jean-Louis Vissière (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979); Peaux-Rouges et Robes noires: Lettres édifiantes et curieuses des jésuites français en Amérique au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Isabelle Vissière and Jean-Louis Vissière (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1993); Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites par des missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus (recueillies par les PP. Charles Le Gobien, J.-B. Du Halde, N. L. Ingoult et autres): Collationnées sur les meilleures éditions et enrichies de nouvelles notes (par l'abbé Y.-M.-M. de Querbeuf, ex-jésuite), ed. Desbarats (Montreal: Boréal, 2006) (reproducing the edition that appeared in Paris, chez Gaume, 1829–32) See also Paltsits, [Bibliography of Lettres Édifiantes], in JR, 66: Illinois, Louisiana, Iroquois, Lower Canada 1702–1712 (1900), 298–334 (also describing modern editions of the original Lettres édifiantes); Donnelly, Thwaites' Jesuit Relations, 6.
60 JR, 72: 22–380; 73: Index: J–Z (1901), 5–398.
61 Codignola, “Holy See,” 216. Quotations are in MNF, 2: Établissement à Québec (1616–1634) (1979), 482 (Le Jeune) [“On a esté 38 ans (...) avant que de rien faire au Brasil). Combien a-(t)-on attendu aux portes de la Chine?]; 3: Fondation de la Mission Huronne (1635–1637) (1987): 371 (Brébeuf) [“Je ne prétends pas icy mettre nos sauvages en parallèle avec les Chinois, Japonais et autres nations parfaitement civilisées, mais seulement les tirer de la condition des bestes, où l’opinion de quelques-uns les a réduits, leur donner rang parmi les hommes et faire paroistre qu’il y a mesme parmy eux quelque espèce de vie politique et civile”].
62 Shenwen Li, Stratégies missionnaires des jésuites français en Nouvelle-France et en Chine au XVIIe siècle (Sainte-Foy: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 183–87 (catalogue), 221, 229, 246, 271–72, 286–89, quotation at 130 [“disposé à comprendre et à assimiler les réalisations culturelles et scientifiques occidentales”]; Li, “Adaptation et innovation: les stratégies évangélisatrices des missionnaires jésuites français en Chine au XVIIe siècle,” in L’espace missionnaire: Lieu d’innovation et de rencontres interculturelles; Actes du colloque de l’Association francophone oecuménique de missiologie, du Centre de recherches et d’échanges sur la diffusion et l’inculturation du christianisme et du Centre Vincent Lebbe (Québec, Canada, 23–27 août 2001), ed. Gilles Routhier and Frédéric Laugrand (Paris: Karthala, and Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2002), 19–36. For the Portuguese Jesuits in China in the same period, see Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
63 Takao Abé, “A Japanese Perspective on the Jesuits in New France,” in Proceedings of the Twentieth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society: Cleveland, May 1994/Actes du Vingtième Colloque de la Société d'histoire coloniale française: Cleveland, Mai 1994, ed. Andrew John Bayly Johnston (Cleveland: French Colonial Historical Society/La Société d'histoire coloniale française, 1996), 14–26; Takao Abé, “What Determined the Content of Missionary Reports?: The Jesuit Relations Compared with the Iberian Jesuit Accounts,” French Colonial History 3 (2003): 69–83; Abé, “The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan” (DPhil diss., The University of Leeds, 2008), quotations at 10 (historical sources, help identify), 17 (basic), 50 (to arrive), 218 (deep-rooted customs); Abé, The Jesuit Mission to New France: A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Abé, “The Missionary Réductions in New France: An Epistemological Problem with a Popular Historical Theory,” French Colonial History 15 (2014): 111–33.
64 Marc Jetten, Enclaves amérindiennes: Les “réductions” du Canada 1637–1701 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1994), 39; Nicholas P. Cushner, Why Have You Come Here?: The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), quotations at 48 (retained), 103 (identity), 124 (authentic), 148 (muddled, compromised), 166 (native religion), 196 (bona fide).
65 Andreas Motsch, Lafitau et l’émergence du discours ethnographique (Sillery: Septentrion, and Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2001); René Latourelle, Jean de Brébeuf (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1993); Latourelle, Compagnon des Martyrs canadiens: Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1998); Latourelle, François-Joseph Bressani: Missionnaire et humaniste (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1999); Robert Toupin, Les écrits de Pierre Potier (Ottawa: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996). See also the biographical studies by literary critics Pierre Berthiaume, Dominique Deffain, Pierre Dostie, Normand Doiron, Rémi Ferland, Yvon Le Bras and Jack Warwick; linguist Peter Wallace Halford (1942–2002); historians Marie-Léone Alary, Martin Fournier, Mary Renier Calvert (1904–2000), Gilles Drolet, and André Sanfaçon (1941–2011); ethnohistorian Christian F. Feest, Daniel St-Arnaud; and bio-archaeologist Robert Larocque.
66 William M. Clements, “The Jesuit Foundations of Native North American Literary Studies,” American Indian Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 43–59, quotation at 59; Réal Ouellet and Marie Parent, “Mise en scène et fonctions de la parole amérindienne dans la relation de voyage,” in Transferts culturels et métissages Amérique/Europe XVIe–XXe siècle/Cultural Transfer, America and Europe: 500 Years of Interculturation, ed. Laurier Turgeon, Denys Delâge, and Ouellet (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, and Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 281–304; Paul-André Dubois, De l'oreille au coeur: Naissance du chant religieux en langues amérindiennes dans les missions de Nouvelle-France 1600–1650 (Sillery: Septentrion, 1997); Dubois, “Naissance du cantique en langue vernaculaire dans les missions de la Nouvelle-France et conquête des langues amérindiennes: Une relation méconnue,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 27, no. 2 (automne 1997): 19–31. This idea of the “representation” [“mise en scène”] is also in Claude Reichler, “Littérature et anthropologie: De la représentation à l'interaction dans une Relation de la Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siècle,” L'Homme: Revue française d'anthropologie 164 (octobre–décembre 2002): 37–56.
67 For a short but original and unbiased expression of this new awareness of the French minority status published in this period, see John Graham Reid, “How Wide is the Ocean?: Not Wide Enough!,” Acadiensis 34, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 81–87. We have taken the “middle ground” trope from Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). As regards New France, the idea of a “middle ground” had been around for a while (see Eccles, for example), but the expression got off the ground with R. White. The idea has since been the object of criticism. See for example Desbarats, “Essai sur quelques éléments”; “The Middle Ground Revisited,” ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, special section of WMQ 53, no. 1 (January 2006): 3–96 (with articles by Heidi Rosemary Bohaker, Philip J. Deloria, Desbarats, and Brett Rushforth); Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 333–34; Andrew Lipman, “No More Middle Grounds?,” Reviews in American History 44, no. 1 (March 2016): 24–30; Mémoires, ed. Brandão, lxxiii–lxxiv.
68 Julia Boss Knapp, “Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France,” in Colonial Saints, 211–33; Alexis Lussier, “Une scène imaginaire en Nouvelle-France: Isaac Jogues et le martyre,” Voix et images 32, no. 3 (printemps 2007): 91–106, quotations at 92 [“fable historique,” “comme bien d’autres”]. On relics, see also Dominique Deslandres, “Des reliques comme vecteurs d’acculturation,” Western Society for French History Proceedings, 20 (1993): 93–108; Deslandres, “Signes de Dieu et légitimation de la présence française au Canada: Le ‘trafic’ des reliques ou la construction d’une histoire,” in Les signes de Dieu aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. Geneviève Demerson, Bernard Dompnier, and Jean-Pierre Massaut (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de Clermont II, 1993), 145–60.
69 Laurier Turgeon, “Les relations des Jésuites entre hagiographie et ethnographie: Traduire le récit de captivité du père Isaac Jogues,” in Regards croisés, 91–105, quotations at 93 [“zone de contact,” “un site de ce processus d’hybridation”]; Emma Anderson, “Blood, Fire, and ‘Baptism’: Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit ‘Martyr,’” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 125–58, quotations at 138 (unrecognized), 148 (apostates), 150 (true). See also Frank Lestringant, “Le martyre, un problème de symétrie: l’exemple des jésuites de Nouvelle-France,” in Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), ed. Charlotte Bouteille-Meister and Kjerstin Aukrust (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2010), 259–69; Lestringant, “Le tropisme du martyre dans les Relations jésuites en Nouvelle-France,” in De l’Orient à la Huronie: Du récit de pèlerinage au texte missionnaire, ed. Guy Poirier, Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, and François Paré (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011), 77–88.
70 This new interest in the global missionary identity of the Society of Jesus, with special reference to the Iberian empires, is exemplified by Paolo Broggio, Evangelizzare il mondo: Le missioni della Compagnia di Gesù tra Europa e America (secoli XVI–XVII) (Rome: Carocci, 2004); Evangelizzazione e globalizzazione: Le missioni gesuitiche nell'età moderna tra storia e storiografia, ed. Michela Catto, Guido Mongini, and Silvia Mostaccio ([Rome]: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 2010).
71 John W. O'Malley, “The Society of Jesus,” in A Companion to the Reformation World, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 223–36, quotation at 233 (in the article, the New France portion is a minuscule fifteen lines out of thirteen pages overall); Brockey, Journey to the East, 416; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For two such comparisons, see Allan R. Greer, “Towards a Comparative Study of Jesuit Missions and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Canada and Paraguay,” in Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, ed. Aparecida Vilaça and Robin M. Wright (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 21–32; Alina Ruiu, “Aller vers un monde inconnu: Les Jésuites français et les missions en Nouvelle-France et dans l'empire ottoman au XVIIe siècle,” in Lecture inédite de la modernité aux origines de la Nouvelle-France: Marie Guyart de l'Incarnation et les autres fondateurs religieux, ed. Raymond Brodeur, Dominique Deslandres, and Thérèse Nadeau-Lacour (Quebec City: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2009), 143–55.
72 Jean Delumeau, Un chemin d’histoire: Chrétienté et christianisation (Paris: Fayard, 1981); Delumeau, “Journeys of a Historian,” The Catholic Historical Review 96, no. 3 (July 2010): 435–48; Bernard Dompnier, “Mission lointaine et mission de l’intérieur chez les Capucins français de la première moitié du XVIIe siècle,” in Les réveils missionnaires en France du Moyen-Âge à nos jours (XIIe–XXe siècles): Actes du colloque de Lyon (29–31 mai 1980) organisé par la Société d'Histoire Ecclésiastique de la France et le concours de la Société d'Histoire du Protestantisme français, ed. Guy Duboscq and André Latreille (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 91–106; Dompnier, “La Compagnie de Jésus et la mission de l’intérieur,” in Les jésuites à l’âge baroque 1540–1640, ed. Luce Giard (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1996), 155–79; Dompnier, “La France du premier XVIIe siècle et les frontières de la mission,” in “Les frontières de la mission,” ed. Catherine Brice and Luca Codignola, special section of Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 109, no. 2 (1997): 621–52; Dompnier, “Mission lointaine et spiritualité sacerdotale au XVIIe siècle,” in L'espace missionnaire, 49–68; Dompnier, “L’administration des sacrements en terre protestante à la lumière des facultates et des dubia des missionnaires (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in Administrer les sacrements en Europe et au Nouveau Monde: La curie romaine et les dubia circa sacramenta,” ed. Broggio, Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, and Giovanni Pizzorusso, special section of Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 121, no. 1 (2009): 23–38.
73 Dominique Deslandres, “Le modèle français d’intégration socio-religieuse, 1600–1650: Missions intérieures et premières missions canadiennes” (PhD diss., Université de Montréal, 1990); Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003), quotation at 33 [“un gigantesque dessein convertisseur, intérieur et extérieur, qui vise, tout ensemble, à éduquer les fidèles français, à réunir les protestants à l’Église catholique, à convertir les infidèles et idolatres ‘des terres neuves et de la Nouvelle-France (...),’ à reconquérir Jérusalem, et ruiner ainsi l’empire turc”]. See also Deslandres, “Mission et altérité: Les missionnaires français et la définition de l‘’Autre’ au XVIIe siècle,” in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society: Montreal, May 1992/Actes du Dix-huitième Colloque de la Société d'histoire coloniale française: Montréal, Mai 1992, ed. James Stewart Pritchard (Cleveland: French Colonial Historical Society/La Société d’histoire coloniale française, 1993), 1–13; Deslandres, “Les missions françaises intérieures et lointaines, 1600–1650: Esquisse géo-historique,” in “Les frontières de la mission,” 505–38; Deslandres, “Le christianisme dans les Amériques,” in L’âge de raison (1620/30–1750), ed. Marc Venard (Paris: Desclée, 1997), 615–736, quotation at 671 [“tributaire de l’expérience acquise par les jésuites au cours de leurs missions à l’intérieur de la France, ces ‘Indes noires de l’Intérieur’“]; Deslandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World,” in The Jesuits: Culture, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 258–73; Deslandres, “Le diable en mission: Rôle du diable dans les missions en France et en Nouvelle-France,” in Les missions intérieures en France et en Italie du XVIe au XXe siècles: Actes du colloque de Chambéry (18–20 mars 1999), ed Christian Sorrel and Frédéric Meyer (Chambery: Institut d’études savoisiennes, Université de Savoie, 2001), 247–62; Deslandres, “La mission de Nouvelle-France et les modalités d’une migration spirituelle,” in Mémoires de Nouvelle-France: De France en Nouvelle-France, ed. Philippe Joutard, Thomas Wien, and Didier Poton (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 223–32; Deslandres, “L’impossible acculturation: le converti et le convertisseur inconvertible au XVIIe siècle,” in Convertir/Se convertir. Regards croisés sur l’histoire des missions chrétiennes, ed. Jan Borm, Bernard Cottret, and Jean-François Zorn (Paris: Nolin, 2006), 149–55. For Protestant conversions in New France, see Leslie Phyllis Choquette, “Religious Conversion in New France: The Case of Amerindians and Immigrants Compared,” Québec Studies 40 (Fall 2005/Winter 2006), 97–109 (based on the Jesuit relations).
74 Muriel Clair, “Entre vision et audition: La lumière dans les missions iroquoises au XVIIe siècle,” Anthropologies et sociétés 30, no. 3 (2006): 71–92, quotation at 71 [“la situation exceptionnelle de l'évangélisation des peuples du nord-est américain au 17e siècle” ]; Emmanuelle Friant, “‘Ils aiment bien leur chapelet’: Le discours jésuite sur la transmission du religieux aux Hurons par l’objet de piété (1634–1649),” Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique, Études d'histoire religieuse 77 (2011): 7–20; Letters from New France: The Upper Country, 1686–1783, ed. Joseph L. Peyser (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 229–30 (list of Jesuit missionaries); José António Brandão and Michael Shakir Nassaney, “A Capsule Social and Material History of Fort St. Joseph and its Inhabitants (1691–1763),” French Colonial History 7 (2006): 61–76; Brandão and Nassaney, “Suffering for Jesus: Penitential Practices at Fort St. Joseph (Niles, Michigan) during the French Regime,” The Catholic Historical Review 94, no. 3 (July 2008): 476–99.
75 Jean-Claude Laborie, “Le laboratoire épistolaire jésuite,” in Les normes du dire au XVIe siècle: Actes du colloque de Rouen (15–17 novembre 2001) organisé par le Centre d'études et de recherche Éditer/interpréter, ed. Jean-Claude Arnould and Gérard Milhe-Poutingon (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2004), 39–52; Caroline Montel-Glénisson, “La notion d’intime dans les relations des jésuites de la Nouvelle-France,” in Archive épistolaire et histoire: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, ed. Lucia Bergamasco and Mireille Bossis (Paris: Éditions Connaissances et Savoirs, 2007), 110–13; Adrien Paschoud, Le Monde amérindien au miroir des Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008); Paschoud, “Les cosmogonies amérindiennes au miroir du discours missionnaire jésuite: L’exemple des relations jésuites en Nouvelle-France (1632–1672),” in Nature et surnaturel: philosophie de la nature et métaphysique aux XVIe–XVIIIe siècles, ed. Vlad Alexandrescu and Robert Theis (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag), 2010, 101–12; Paschoud, “Réécritures hagiographiques: Jean-Joseph Surin et Mathias Tanner, lecteurs des Relations jésuites de la Nouvelle-France,” in De l'Orient à la Huronie, 123–36, quotations at 124 [“la machine éditoriale jésuite”], 134 [“vaste opération historiographique dont les jésuites sont à la fois les témoins et les acteurs”]; Haijo Jan Westra, “Références classiques implicites et explicites dans les écrits des Jésuites sur la Nouvelle-France,” in À la recherche d'un signe oublié: Le patrimoine latin du Québec et sa culture classique, ed. Jean-François Cottier, special issue of Tangence 92 (hiver 2010): 27–37.
76 Réal Ouellet, “Les Antilles et le Canada dans la perspective des missionnaires du XVIIe siècle,” in Regards croisés, 63–90; Ouellet, La Relation de voyage en Amérique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): Au carrefour des genres (Quebec City: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010); Écrire des récits de voyage (XVe–XVIIIe siècles): Esquisse d’une poétique en gestation; Actes du colloque tenu à Toronto du 4 au 6 mai 2006, ed. Marie-Christine Pioffet and Andreas Motsch (Quebec City: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2008); Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), quotation at 14; James L. Axtell, “Babel of Tongues: Communicating with the Indians in Eastern North America,” in The Language Encounter in the Americas, 1492–1800: A Collection of Essays, ed. Edward G. Gray and Norman S. Fiering (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 15–60; Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); René Latourelle, “Apprentissage des langues amérindiennes par les premiers missionnaires de la Nouvelle-France: Un cas exemplaire d’inculturation,” L’Église canadienne 32, no. 3 (mars 1999): 77–84; Pierre Berthiaume, “Babel, l’Amérique et les Jésuites,” in La France-Amérique, XVIe au XVIIIe siècle: Actes du 35e Colloque international d’études humanistes, ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998), 341–54; Catharine Randall, “Cathedrals of Ice: Translating the Jesuit Vocabulary of Conversion,” International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes, 23 (Spring 2002): 17–35; Joëlle Gardette, Les Innus et les Euro-Canadiens: Dialogue des cultures et rapport à l’autre à travers le temps, XVIIe–XXe siècles (Quebec City: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2008).
77 Allan R. Greer, “A Wandering Jesuit in Europe and America: Father Chaumonot Finds a Home,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 106–22, 282–86; Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, Breve relatione d'alcune missioni de' Padri della Compagnia di Giesù nella Nuoua Francia, ed. Francesco Guardiani (Ottawa: Legas, 2010); Germaine Warkentin, “Aristotle in New France: Louis Nicolas and the Making of the Codex canadensis,” French Colonial History 11 (2010): 71–107. See also the biographical studies by historians Marthe Faribault-Beauregard (1913–96), Léo-Paul Hébert, C.S.V. (1929–2012), and Barry Rodrigue; anthropologist Robert Launay; literary critics and historians Michel Caffier, Paul Perron, and András Tarnóc.
78 Roland Viau, Enfants du néant et mangeurs d’âmes: Guerre, culture et société en Iroquoisie ancienne (Montreal: Boréal, 1997); Viau, Femmes de personne: Sexes, genres et pouvoirs en Iroquoisie ancienne (Montreal: Boréal, 2000); Gilles Havard, La grande paix de Montréal de 1701: Les voies de la diplomatie franco-amérindienne (Montreal: Recherches amérindiennes au Québec, 1992); Havard, Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715 (Quebec City: Septentrion, and Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), quotation at 654 [“fers de lance de la Contre-Réforme”]; Havard, “Le rire des jésuites: Une archéologie du mimétisme dans la rencontre franco-amérindienne (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 62, no. 3 (mai–juin 2007): 539–73.
79 Marcel Moussette, “An Encounter in the Baroque Age: French and Amerindians in North America,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 4 (2003): 29–39; William A. Clark, S.J., “The Church at Nanrantsouak: Sébastien Râle, SJ, and the Wabanaki of Maine's Kennebek River,” The Catholic Historical Review 92, no. 3 (July 2006): 224–51, quotation at 238.
80 Allan R. Greer, “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003), 175–98, quotations at 176 (conversion), 191 (antecedents), 198 (interactions). In more traditional anthropological terms, Kanahwake Christianity had already been examined by David Blanchard, “...To the Other Side of the Sky: Catholicism at Kahnawake, 1667–1700,” Anthropologica, new ser., 24, no. 1 (1982): 77–102.
81 Râle to his brother [Pierre Râle], Narantsouak, October 12, 1723, in Lettres édifiantes, ed. Desbarats, 9–53, here 9–17, 29–30, quotation at 15 [“un missionnaire est heureux, lorsqu(e) (...) après dix ans d’un travail constant, il s'exprime élégamment”]. On the missionaries’ need to learn indigenous languages anew when moved from one mission to another, see Éva Guillorel, “Gérer la ‘confusion de Babel’: Politiques missionnaires et langues vernaculaires dans l’Est du Canada (XVIIe–XIXe siècles),” RHAF 66, no. 2 (automne 2012): 177–203, here 184n29. The Bible quotation is from 1 Cor., 13:9–11, King James Version.
82 Victor Egon Hanzeli, Sr., Missionary Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); John E. Bishop, “Qu'y a-t-il de si drôle dans la chasse au canard?: Ce que les ouvrages linguistiques nous disent de la rencontre entre les jésuites et les Nehiraw-Iriniw,” in À la recherche d'un signe oublié, 39–66, quotation at 42n8 [“la meilleure introduction au travail linguistique accompli par les missionnaires jésuites en Amérique du Nord française”].
83 John L. Steckley, “The Warrior and the Lineage: Jesuit Use of Iroquoian Images to Communicate Christianity,” Ethnohistory 39, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 478–509; De religione: Telling the Seventeenth Century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois, ed. Steckley (Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Steckley, Words of the Huron (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), quotation at xiii.
84 Bishop, “Qu’y a-t-il de si drôle”; Laura J. Murray, “Vocabularies of Native American Languages: A Literary and Historical Approach to an Elusive Genre,” American Quarterly 53, no. 4 (December 2001): 590–623; Jean-François Cottier, “Écrits latins en Nouvelle-France (1608–1763): Premier état de la question,” in À la recherche d'un signe oublié, 9–26; See also Silvy, Dictionnaire Montagnais-Français (ca. 1678–1684), ed. Lorenzo Angers, David E. Cooter, and Gérard McNulty (Montreal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1974).
85 Margaret Joan Leahey, “‘Comment peut un muet prescher l’évangile?’: Jesuit Missionaries and the Native Languages of New France,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 105–31, quotation at 115; Leahey, “Iconic Discourse: The Language of Images in Seventeenth-Century New France,” in Language Encounter in the Americas, 102–18; Micah True, “Maistre et Escolier: Amerindian Languages and Seventeenth-Century French Missionary Politics in the Jesuit Relations from New France,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 31, no. 1 (2009): 59–70.
86 Tracy Neal Leavelle, “'Bad Things' and 'Good Hearts': Mediation, Meaning, and the Language of Illinois Christianity,” Church History 76, no. 2 (June 2007): 363–94, here 366–70, 393, quotations at 365 (could not control), 394 (reminders); Brian Brazeau, Writing a New France, 1604–1632: Empire and Early Modern French Identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
87 Paul Shore, “The Historiography of the Society of Jesus,” in Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, 759–82, quotation at 770.
88 Monet, ““Canadian/North American Martyrs,” 130–32; Ruiu, “French and Canadian Jesuit History Writing,” 982–88.
89 Catherine M. Desbarats, “1616–1673; Les Jésuites, Relations des Jésuites,” in Monuments intellectuels de la Nouvelle-France et du Québec ancien: Aux origines d'une tradition culturelle, ed. Claude Corbo (Montreal: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 2014), 51–62, quotation at 58 [“leurs dictionnaires bilingues, leurs cartes, leurs autobiographies ou journaux spirituels, même leurs chants et prières en langues amérindiennes”]; Thomas M. Cohen and Emanuele Colombo, “Jesuit Missions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern History, 1350–1750, ed. Hamish M. Scott, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2: Cultures and Power, 254–79, quotation at 271 (intermittent, were fascinated); Black Robes and Buckskin: A Selection from the Jesuit Relations, ed. Catharine Randall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Adrien Paschoud, “Aborder les Relations Jésuites de la Nouvelle France (1632–1672): Enjeux et perspectives,” Arborescences: Revue d'études françaises 1, no. 2 (2012): 1–11; Klaus-Dieter Ertler, “Les Relations des jésuites et la construction de l'observateur européen face au monde indigène,” in Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas, ed. Marc André Bernier, Clorinda Donato, and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014): 276–90; True, “Is It Time for a New Edition.”
90 Allan R. Greer, “Christianity, Native American Appropriations of,” in The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph Calder Miller et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 100–102, quotation at 102; Neal B. Keating, “Iroquoian Religion during the Seventeenth Century,” in Cambridge History of Religions, 1:113–36, quotation at 136.
91 Deslandres, “French Catholicism in the Era of Exploration”; Codignola, “French Catholicism”; Luca Codignola, “The Issue of Tridentine Marriage in a Composite North Atlantic World: Doctrinal Strictures vs. Loose Practices, 1607–1738,” Journal of Early American History 5, no. 3 (2015): 201–70.
92 Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015); Karin Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). See also True, “‘Une Hiérusalem Bénite de Dieu’: Utopia and Travel in the Jesuit Relations from New France,” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 39, no. 76 (2012): 175–89; True, “Travel Writing, Ethnography, and the Colony-Centric Voyage of the Jesuit Relations from New France,” American Review of Canadian Studies 42, no. 1 (2012): 102–16; Vélez, “‘A sign that we are related to you’: The Transatlantic Gifts of the Hurons of the Jesuit Mission of Lorette, 1650–1750,” French Colonial History, 12 (2011): 31–44; Vélez, “Les voyages outre-mer d'un nom: De Loreto en Italie à la Jeune-Lorette au Canada,” in La Nouvelle-France et l'Atlantique, ed. Catherine M. Desbarats and Thomas Wien, special issue of RHAF 54, nos. 3–4 (hiver–printemps 2011): 119–44; Johanne Biron, “Les livres que les missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus ont apportés avec eux en Nouvelle-France: Écrire l’histoire d'une bibliothèque jésuite,” in De l’Orient à la Huronie, 165–84; Clair, “‘Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods’: The Christianization of Algonquian Nomads in the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1 (2014): 281–300, https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/1/2/article-p281_8.xml (accessed July 21, 2020) (on the expectations of the French readership).
93 Bronwen Catherine McShea, Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), xxii (Americentrism), 72 (patriotic), 193–222 (Paris), 268n69, 285nn38–41 (ARSI); Lozier, Flesh Reborn, 303.
94 Lozier, Flesh Reborn, 7.
95 Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), here 21–142; Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). See also Sophie White, “‘To Ensure that He Not Give Himself Over to the Indians’: Cleanliness, Frenchification, and Whiteness,” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 2 (2012): 111–49; Robert Michael Morrissey, “‘I Speak it Well’: Language, Cultural Understanding, and the End of a Missionary Middle Ground in Illinois Country, 1673–1712,” Early American Studies 9, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 617–48; Morrissey, “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695–1735,” WMQ 70, no. 1 (January 2013): 103–46; Morrissey, “The Terms of the Encounter: Language and Contested Visions of French Colonization in the Illinois Country, 1673–1702,” in French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, ed. Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, and Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2013), 43–75.
96 Jean-François Cottier, “Le latin comme outil de grammatisation des langues ‘sauvages’ en Nouvelle-France: À propos des notes du P. Louis André sur la langue algonquine outaouaise (introduction, édition du texte latin et traduction),” in Nova Gallia: Recherche sur les écrits latins de Nouvelle-France, ed. Cottier, special issue of Tangence 99 (Summer 2012): 99–122; Guillorel, “Gérer la confusion”; Sarah Rivett, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
97 Guy Laflèche, Paul Lejeune (1591–1664), missionnaire de Nouvelle-France, le premier linguiste et grammairien de l'innu (Laval: Les Éditions du Singulier, 2017).
98 Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage in North America: An Annotated Translation, ed. Micah True (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Laura M. Chmielewski, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: Exploration, Encounter, and the French New World (New York: Routledge, 2017). Authors include Berthiaume, Le Bras, Monet, and Westra, besides Steven M. Avella, David Buisseret, Mairi Cowan, John A. Gallucci, Tim Garrity, Carl Kupfer, Michael McCafferty, Nicholas Overgaard, Christopher M. Parsons, Aline Smesters, Éric Thierry, and Andréanne Vallée.
99 Marie-Christine Pioffet, “De l’ancienne à la nouvelle France: Le rayonnement de la Gallia christiana dans les Relations des jésuites,” Littératures classiques 76, no. 3 (2011): 155–66; Pioffet, “Le discours missionnaire comme scénographie d’un échange imaginaire entre serviteurs du Christ et Indiens d'Amérique,” in De l'Orient à la Huronie, 149–64; Claude La Charité, “Rabelais en Huronie: Les paroles gelée, dégelées, regelées,” in De l'Orient à la Huronie, 19–29; Kelly L. Watson, Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 119–48.
100 Lisa J.M. Poirier, Religion, Gender, and Kinship in Colonial New France (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016); Mary Dunn, “Neither One Thing Nor the Other: Discursive Polyvalence and Representations of Amerindian Women in the Jesuit Relations,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (2016): 179–96, https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/3/2/article-p179_1.xml (accessed July 21, 2020, quotations at 184 (even presuming); Dunn's review of Lisa J. M. Poirier, Religion, Gender, and Kinship, in Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017): 538–40, https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/4/3/article-p538_538.xml (accessed July 21, 2020, quotation at 539 (under-theorized); Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), quotations at 6 (multiple interpretations), 370 (range of perspectives); James Taylor Carson, “Brébeuf Was Never Martyred: Reimagining the Life and Death of Canada's First Saint,” The Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 2 (June 2016): 222–43, quotations at 226 (Parkman), 236 (Men of Iron) (Carson grants words of praise to E. Anderson and Steckley only); Rachel Major, “Les jésuites chez les Hurons en 1648–49,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies/Revue canadienne des études autochtones 26, no. 1 (2006): 53–69.
101 For a critical appraisal of Atlantic history, see Luca Codignola, “Ma che cosa è questo Atlantico?: Un modernista di fronte alla storiografia delle buone intenzioni,” Eunomia: Rivista semestrale di storia e politica internazionali, new ser., 5, no. 2 (2016): 57–106.
102 Yvon Le Bras, “L'Amérindien dans les Relations du Père Paul Lejeune (1632–41)” (PhD diss., Université Laval, 1992); Le Bras, “Du Canada aux 'Îles de l'Amérique' et à la 'Terre Ferme': L'Amérindien dans les Relations des jésuites Paul Lejeune, Jacques Bouton et Pierre Pelleprat,” in Textes missionnaires dans l'espace francophone, ed. Guy Poirier (Quebec City: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2016), I: Rencontre, réécriture, mémoire, 7–21; Jean-Claude Laborie, “Du Tupi au Huron: Quelques éléments pour une circulation des modèles missiologiques jésuites au nouveau monde,” in Éditer la Nouvelle-France, ed. Andreas Motsch and Grégoire Holtz (Quebec City: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 2011), 65–82.
103 Andreas Motsch, “La Chine et la Nouvelle-France comme laboratoire du savoir: L'impasse du figurisme et la stratégie missionnaire jésuite,” in De l'Orient à la Huronie, 215–27, quotation at 225 [“les Amérindiens n'avaient (...) peu à offrir en dehors des fourrures”], 226 [“que ce soit en Chine, en Amérique du Nord, en Amêrique du sud ou ailleurs”]; Codignola, “Holy See,” 216; Andrés I. Prieto, “The Perils of Accommodation: Jesuit Missionary Strategies in the Early Modern World,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4 (2017): 395–414, https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/4/3/article-p395_395.xml (accessed July 21, 2020).
104 Clair, “Le Manuscrit de 1652,” 50 [“spiritualité ascétique et abstraite”].
105 The earliest Mexican martyrs were three indigenous teenagers killed by their own relatives for having become Christians in 1527–29; the first Mexican to be beatified was one of the celebrated Nagasaki martyrs. (The Tlaxcala Martyrs were beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2017; Felipe de Jesús [1572–97], a Discalced Carmelite, was beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862.) See Asunción Lavrin, “Dying for Christ: Martyrdom in New Spain,” in Religious Transformations in the Early Modern America, ed. Stephanie L. Kirk and Sarah Rivett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 131–57, here 137 (Tlaxcala); Cornelius Conover, “Catholic Saints in Spain's Atlantic Empire,” in Empires of God, 87–105, here 87 (Felipe de Jesús). As a background to the contemporary Spanish debate, see Candida R. Moss, “The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern,” Church History 81, no. 3 (September 2012): 531–51.
106 Kellie Jean Hogue, “‘We are all related’: Kinship, Identity, and Pilgrimage in the Kateri Movement” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2012); Hogue, “A Saint of Their Own: Native Petitions Supporting the Canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, 1884–1885,” US Catholic Historian 32, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 25–44; Native Footsteps: Along the Path of Kateri Tekakwitha, ed. Mark G. Thiel and Christopher Vecsey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2012); Michael F. Steltenkamp, S.J., “American Indian Sainthood and the Catholic Church,” American Catholic Studies 104, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 95–106. Significantly, Pierre Cholenec's 1696 account of Tekakwitha's saintly life was republished at this time. See Cholenec, Kateri Tekakwitha: The Iroquois Saint (Merchantville, NJ: Arx Publishing, 2012).
107 Megan C. Armstrong, “Kateri Tekakwitha, St.,” in Cambridge Encyclopedia, ed. Worcester, 436–37; Kathleen Sprows Cummings, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 16–22, 78, 92.
108 E. Anderson, Death and Afterlife; Timothy G. Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014), quotations at 6 (the process), 76 (the claim); Claude Chauchetière, La vie de la bienheureuse Catherine Tegakouita dite à présent la saincte sauvagesse (Manate: De la Presse Cramoisy de Jean-Marie Shea, 1887) (originally written in 1681); Cholenec, Kateri Tekakwitha. Pearson's list of the twelve Canadian saints, which includes Marguerite Bourgeoys (in religion Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement), CND (1620–1700), the eight Canadian martyrs, Marie de l'Incarnation, Laval, and Tekakwitha, is at 201.
109 Les Récollets en Nouvelle-France, ed. Dubois; Codignola, “Les Capucins de l’Acadie”; Les Sulpiciens de Montréal, ed. Deslandres et al.; Henry Joseph Koren, C.S.Sp., Aventuriers de la Mission: Les spiritains en Acadie et en Amérique du Nord 1732–1839, ed. Jean Ernoult, C.S.Sp., and Paul Coulon, C.S.Sp. (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2002); Noël Baillargeon, Le Séminaire de Québec sous l’épiscopat de Mgr de Laval (Quebec City: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1972); Baillargeon, Le Séminaire de Québec de 1685 à 1760 (Quebec City: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1977); de Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siècle; de Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle. For Campeau's vol. 10 of MNF, see note 31.