Chapter 7 “I began to teach […]”: Emotion and Performance in Isaac Jogues’s Letter to Father Jean Filleau
John Gallucci
In the course of his short life, Isaac Jogues (1607–46), missionary to New France, martyr, and saint of the Catholic Church, wrote several valuable texts, of which perhaps the most important and dramatic is his letter to Jean Filleau (1573–1642), his superior in Paris.1 Written in August 1643 in the Dutch colony of Rensselaerswyck after a year of captivity among the Iroquois, Jogues’s letter is famous for its descriptions of ritual torture and indigenous religious beliefs. The letter has naturally contributed to the definition of Jogues as martyr, and it is from the perspective of Jogues the martyr that he is most commonly viewed. Known partially from extracts that have found their way into missionaries’ writings—in particular, Jérôme Lalemant’s (1593–1673) Relation (1647)2—and indirectly through translation, Jogues’s letter to Filleau has remained more a
1 I base my reading of Jogues’s letter to Filleau on the text in Lucien Campeau, ed., Monumenta Novae Franciae, 9 vols. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1967–2003), 5 (Mon- tréal: Bellarmin, 1990):593–625. Subsequent page references in the text are to quotations (translated into English) from vol. 5 of the Monumenta; references in the footnotes are to Campeau’s commentary and notes. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Latin and French texts are my own. At times, I have had recourse to the text of Jogues’s letter in Philippe Alegambe, Mortes illustres et gesta eorum de Societate Iesu (Rome: Varesius, 1657). Any such use of Alegambe is indicated in the notes. See also Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Rela- tions and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1601–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows, 1896–1901). For the overall superiority of Campeau over Thwaites, and too, for the need for a corrected version of Campeau, see Luca Codignola, “The Battle Is Over: Campeau’s Monumenta vs. Thwaites’s Jesuit Relations, 1602–1650,” Euro- pean Review of Native American Studies 10, no. 2 (1996): 3–10; and 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 (2014): 261–79. François Roustang’s French translation of the letter to Filleau includes valuable notes and textual commentary: see his Les jésuites de la Nouvelle-France (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), esp. 177–78. For the career of Lucien Campeau, see Pierre Trépanier, “Lucien Campeau, S.J. (1914–2003),” Les Cahiers des dix 57 (2003), 21–30. There is still a need for a critical edition of the Latin text of Jogues’s letter to Filleau. 2 Jérôme Lalemant, Relation de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable aux missions de pères de la Compagnie de Jésus en la Nouvelle France (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647).
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1 The Role of the Priest
As narrative, the letter describes a sequence of events that begins with the cap- ture of a group of French and Huron by the Iroquois in 1642. Brought by water and land routes to the Iroquois villages in the central region of New York State, the prisoners are tortured and maimed in excruciating ways. Three of the Hu- ron will be burnt alive; Jogues and two other Frenchmen, Guillaume Couture
3 For the various ways in which the letter to Filleau emerges in the Relations and in related texts, see Roustang, Les jésuites, 178; Guy Laflèche, Les saints martyrs canadiens, 2 vols. (Laval: Les Éditions du Singulier, 1988–89), 2:133; Campeau, Monumenta, 5:592–93. Jogues’s martyr- dom is referred to constantly in studies of New France. See, for example, Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic ii: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), 654–57; Allan Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 155–71; Laflèche, Les saints martyrs canadiens, vol. 1 (on Guy Laflèche’s work, see the review by Jack Warwick, “Détruire les mythes à coups de tomahawks,” Lettres québécoises: La revue de l’actualité lit- téraire 66 [1992]: 40–42); Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (1600–1650) (Paris: Fayard, 2003); Alexis Lussier, “Une scène imaginaire en Nouvelle-France: Isaac Jogues et le martyre,” Voix et images 32, no. 3 (2007): 91–106. More re- cent studies also examine Jogues’s martyrdom; see Timothy Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014); Pearson, “‘Nous avons esté fait un spectacle aux yeux du monde’: Performance, texte et création des martyrs au Canada, 1642– 1652,” in De l’Orient à la Huronie: Du récit de pèlerinage au texte missionnaire, ed. Guy Poirier, Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud, and François Paré (Laval: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2011), 103–22; Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnog- raphy in Seventeenth-Century New France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). 4 Campeau says that the letter is the “account of one’s inner self [état d’âme] that a Jesuit gives his superior” and is “ascetic and religious” in nature (Campeau, Monumenta, 5:592–93); Laflèche calls it Jogues’s “spiritual autobiography” (Laflèche, Les saints martyrs, 2:241n8); Pearson says that Jogues intended his letter “to serve as his confession for his spiritual director” (Pearson, Becoming Holy, 212n1).