Inhabiting New France: Bodies, Environment and the Sacred, c.1632-c.1700 Robin Macdonald PhD University of York History September 2015 2 Abstract The historiography of colonial and ‘religious’ encounters in New France has tended to focus on encounters between human beings, between ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised’ or ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’. This thesis will focus on encounters between people and environment. Drawing on recent anthropology, notably the work of Tim Ingold, it will argue that whilst bodies shaped environment, environment also could shape bodies – and their associated religious practices. Through the examination of a broad variety of source materials – in particular, the Jesuit Relations – this thesis will explore the myriad ways in which the sacred was created and experienced between c.1632 and c.1700. Beginning with the ocean crossing to New France – an area largely unexplored in the historiographical literature – it will argue that right from the outset of a missionary’s journey, his or her practices were shaped by encounters with both humans and non-humans, by weather or the stormy Ocean Sea. Reciprocally, it will argue, missionary bodies and practices could shape these environments. Moving next to the mission terrain, it will analyse a variety spaces – both environmental and imaginary – tracing the slow build up of belief through habitual practices. Finally, it will chart the movement of missionaries and missionary correspondence from New France back to France. It was not only missionaries, it will argue, who could experience and shape the colony, but their correspondents and readers in France. 3 Contents Abstract 2 List of Illustrations 4 Acknowledgements 5 Author’s Declaration 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: “A Floating Piece of Space”?: Sacred Vessels and Crossings to New France 26 Chapter 2: Habits in New France: Bodies, Clothing, and Conflict 88 Chapter 3: Making Sacred Landscapes: Portable Chapels and Processions 144 Chapter 4: Being Dead? Imagining the Sacred 196 Chapter 5: Writing and Translating the Sacred: From New France to France 249 Conclusion 318 List of Abbreviations 321 Bibliography 322 4 List of Illustrations 1. “Dieppe, La Manche ou Mer Britannique” (mid-1600s) 2. “Dieppe, La Manche ou La Mer Britannique” (detail) 3. “La sauuage d’Escosse” 4. “Guerrier Renard” 5. Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No.2) 6. “cabane descorse a lalgonchine” 7. “on fait la procession du saint sacrement” 8. Page from the Manuscript of 1652 9. Arch of triumph for Louis XIII’s royal entry to the Faubourg Saint-Jacques 10. “Mémoire concernant la nation Iroquoise” (detail) 11. Birch bark letters in storage frame 12. Birch bark letter to Charles Sain 5 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Simon Ditchfield and Mark Jenner. I could not have asked for two more supportive supervisors. Their guidance and encouragement have been invaluable throughout this project. The academic community here in York has also provided me with a wonderful space to test ideas and learn from others. I owe thanks to a number academics and postgraduate colleagues who have generously given their time to discuss all things early modern. In particular, I would like to thank the academic staff and students affiliated with the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and especially Helen Smith, whose advice and support has been invaluable. I would also like to thank the Department of History, in particular, Tara Alberts, John Cooper, Stuart Carroll, Lucy Sackville, and David Wootton. I am also grateful to scholars in the broader academic community who have kindly shared their ideas and expertise over the course of this project. I owe special thanks to members of the Groupe d’histoire de l’Atlantique Français, who welcomed me so warmly to Montreal during my time as a Graduate Research Trainee at McGill University. Catherine Desbarats, Dominque Deslandres, and Ollivier Hubert all gave generously of their time to discuss my work and share ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Allan Greer for helping me to organise the placement and for his helpful archival advice during my time in Canada. Margaret Carlyle, Andrew Dial, Emily Paskevics and Nele Sawallisch all made me feel at home in a new city. For their generous sharing of advice and research in person or via email, I would also like thank Megan Armstrong, John E. Bishop, Kevin Brousseau, Mikael Dumont, Jenny Hillman, and Claire Farago. 6 At the Archives des Jésuites au Canada, Joannie Levasseur provided invaluable help. I am also grateful to the staff and archivists at the British Library, the Archives de l’Archevêché de Quebec, the Archives des Ursulines de Quebec, the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, the Archives Départementales de Seine-Maritime, the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec in Montreal, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The staff at the interlending department of the University of York library were especially helpful in their sourcing of French- language texts. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council who provided me with a doctoral award to fund this project. Additionally, I would like to thank The Society for the Study of French History, who generously awarded me the Ralph Gibson Bursary to assist in funding my writing-up year. I would also like to thank the friends I have made during my time in York. Claire Canavan, Dana Galbraith, Sarah Goldsmith, Gaby Leddy, Lena Liapi, Frankie McGuire, Emilie Murphy, Jimmy Richardson, Andrew Stead, Lizzie Swann, and Nick Townson all provided friendship and laughter throughout this project. Special thanks must go to Dana, Emilie, and Sarah, for reading and commenting on sections of this text. Lastly, and certainly not least, I would like to thank my parents, Susan and Tom Macdonald, for their unfailing encouragement and support. This thesis is dedicated, with love, to my grandparents, Bettie and James Crawford, without whom none of this would have been possible. 7 Author’s Declaration This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or a diploma at any university, and is entirely my own work. Sections of Chapter 5 will be appearing as “Sensing Sacred Missives: Birch Bark Letters from Seventeenth-Century Missionaries in New France,” in Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300-1800, ed. Robin Macdonald, Emilie K. M. Murphy, and Elizabeth L. Swann (under contract with Ashgate). 8 Introduction ‘It is a fact’, wrote Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune in the annual Relation of 1657-58, ‘that habit [habitude] causes the sense of touch to rebel against too great a softness, finding its pleasure in things harder and rougher.’ Drawing on his vast experience both on the New France mission and at his then post as the French Provincial Superior in Paris, he continued, ‘I have known fathers who could not take their sleep on a bed, because they had become accustomed to sleep like the Natives [Sauuages]. If they were given,’ he asserted, ‘on returning from their Missions, a pallet or mattress, they were obliged, until they had regained their former habits [leur premiere habitude], to pass a portion of the night upon the paved floor of the room, in order to sleep for a little while more at their ease.’1 Le Jeune’s description of bodily adaptation to the ‘harder and rougher’ (‘plus dures et plus aspres’) circumstances of the mission is typical of missionary accounts from New France. Included in a comparative account of the ‘manners and customs’ of ‘the French, or the Europeans’ and those of Indigenous peoples (in Le Jeune’s words, ‘les sauvages’), the missionary’s description of European bodies styled them as being less robust than their North American counterparts, who, he asserted, found ‘sleep sweeter upon the earth for a bed, than many do upon down.’2 1 JR, 44: 281. Where Thwaites has translated ‘sauvages’ as ‘savages’, I have used the term ‘natives’. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the seventeenth-century French term, ‘sauvage’ had connotations of wildness, rather than ‘barbarity’ (as implied by the English term ‘savage’). As such, Thwaites’s translations have been amended throughout this thesis. All uses of the word ‘savage’, have been replaced with ‘native’. On the complexities of translating this term, see Nancy Senior’s “Translator’s Preface” to her recent translation of Louis Nicolas’s Natural History, in The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World/Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales, ed. François-Marc Gagnon, trans. Nancy Senior, and modernised by Réal Ouellet (Tulsa, OK; Montreal, QC: Gilcrease Museum; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 261-62. 2 JR, 44: 281. 9 Published in 1659, the above account provides a useful starting point for a thesis that reflects upon the complex entanglements of bodies, environment, and religious practices. Le Jeune’s words convey the ascetic ideals common to Jesuit writings of the period, but they also imply the malleability of bodies, which could be shaped by encounters with the environments they moved through.3 Histories of encounter in New France have tended to focus on encounters between people. Whilst older historiographical accounts of ‘contact’ portray the ‘meeting’ of European and Indigenous peoples as clashes of civilisation, historians have for some time now acknowledged the complexities of these encounters.4 As Richard White famously argued in his 1991 study, The Middle Ground, encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the pays d’en haut (the Great Lakes region of present-day North America) were processes of accommodation and mutual exchange.5 Drawing on White’s work and on the work of anthropologists, notably Bruce Trigger, historians of religion have also highlighted ‘religious’ syncretism and the ‘blending’ of European and Indigenous spiritual practices.6 Analysing these encounters is not 3 On Jesuit asceticism, see Peter A.