Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France Author(s): Allan Greer Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 323-348 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2674478 . Accessed: 08/03/2011 12:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=omohundro. 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Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The William and Mary Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiographyin New France Allan Greer For as many of you as have been baptizedinto Christ have put on Christ. / There is neitherJew nor Greek,there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in ChristJesus. -Gal. 3:27-28 T-| NHE French effort to Christianize the natives of seventeenth- centuryNorth Americacoincided with one of the last great peri- ods of European (especially French) hagiography.1Thus, when Catholic Franceboasted of its missionaryachievements, it spoke less of pagan nations converted to the True Faith than of saints vaulted into heaven.The Jesuit Fran~oisDu Creuxchose these revealingterms in ded- icating his Historia Canadensisto King Louis XIV: "YourNew France, Louis, has many saints of that very kind that the Apostle mentions every- where in his Epistles."2Like the annualJesuit Relationson which it was based, Du Creux'swork is studdedwith long digressionson the deeds of martyrsand ascetic visionaries,their edifying deaths, and their miracu- lous post-mortemintercessions; these biographicalinterjections interrupt the flow of the historicalnarrative, but they also impartan inner logic to the whole. Historiansmining the Catholic missionarysources in searchof rich veins of ethnographicdescription and historicalchronicle are well aware of the "sacredbiography" element, though they seldom reflecton it, pre- Allan Greer is a professor of history at the University of Toronto. A version of this article was presented at the Third Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997. For their encouragement and constructive crit- icism, I thank James Axtell, Alan Bewell, Jodi Bilinkoff, Paul Perron, Antonio Rubial Garcia, and Mariana Valverde. Gratitude is due also to Dauril Alden, Ascuncion Lavrin, Dr. Ernesto Maeder, and William Taylor for their kind and helpful responses to my inquiries. Finally, let me acknowledge the benefit I derived from stimulating discussions of earlier drafts of this article at McGill University, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Toronto, and the Newberry Library. 1 Henri Bremond, Histoire Iittiraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerresde religionjusqu" nosjours,ii vols. (Paris,1929-1933), 1:239-54. 2 Du Creux, Historia Canadensis (Paris, i664); Du Creux, The History of Canada or New France, 2 vols., trans. Percy J. Robinson, ed. James B. Conacher (Toronto, 1951), I:6. Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Series, Volume LVII, Number 2, April 2000 324 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY ferring to treat it as an impurity that can be extracted from the high- grade source material. But if missionary texts of the period are saturated in a hagiographic sensibility, as I believe they are in many cases and none more so than those produced by Jesuits, then surely it is important for researchers consulting them to take account of the narrative principles and genre conventions at work in these writings. Moreover, as this article hopes to demonstrate, the stories of saintly lives deserve examination in their own right as sites where notions of gender difference and racial hierarchy were enunciated, qualified, challenged, and inverted. In a general sense, the interweaving of history and biography is char- acteristic of the period. Protestant as well as Catholic authors of the early modern centuries felt duty bound to present their readers with figures of exemplary virtue when they chronicled the past or the present.3 In their choice of subjects, in the qualities they hold up for admiration, and in the way they shape their biographical data into a coherent, meaningful story, writers such as Du Creux display fundamental cultural ideals. Though they were representative of their time and can be understood as contributing in their way to the emergence of the modern self, the Jesuits of New France and their Protestant counterparts in New England drew on ancient literary traditions. Cotton Mather's gallery of worthy magis- trates, Magnalia Christi Americana, for example, harks back to Plutarch's Lives as it evokes the wisdom and strength of virtuous statesmen, while Du Creux taps into the similarly venerable genre of the saint's life.4 These Plutarchian and hagiographic styles of life narrative had different ways of imparting meaning and significance to individual experience. Moreover, they did not single out the same categories of subjects. Whereas Mather wrote mainly about powerful males, encouraging reader identification through the use of homely, realistic detail to bring even John Winthrop down to earth, Catholic hagiography encompassed a wide range of human types: women as well as men, the comparatively humble as well as the great, and, as will be seen presently, Indians as well as Europeans.5 3 Timothy Hampton, Writingfrom History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, i990); Thomas F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, eds., The Rhetoricsof Life- Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biographyfrom Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1995). 4 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, I975); Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Seif. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,Mass., i989). 5 In focusing on Magnalia Christi Americana as a point of contrast with French hagiography, I have no wish to suggest that Mather's work embodies the full range of life- writing in colonial New England. In addition to the funeral elegy and the spiritual autobi- ography there was, of course, a Protestant version of hagiography. John Eliot and Daniel SAINTS IN NEW FRANCE 325 According to the foremost students of the genre, most of them medievalists, hagiography should be understood as a literature of arche- types. The saint's life is recounted through "assimilation to type."6 Incidents and circumstances appear not to chart the building of character through the accretion of experiences, as in a modern biography, but rather as elements in a system of correspondences, one in which formal similarities link the subject to established saints of earlier centuries and, beyond them, to that ultimate Christian model, the life of Jesus. Thus, it can be misleading to treat hagiography as an imperfect version of ethnog- raphy or historiography; hagiography follows a different paradigm, one which presupposes a distinct set of purposes, methodologies, and criteria of significance. In its own way, hagiography can be extremely rigorous, and never more so than in the seventeenth century when the Bollandists, partaking of the rationalist atmosphere pervading intellectual life in the age of Descartes, endeavored to purge from the record of the Lives of the saints the wild stories of improbable miracles and interchangeable stock plots that characterized the Golden Legend of the Middle Ages.7 Baroque saints were rarely magic makers during their lifetimes, though after death they might be persuaded by the prayers of the faithful to intercede with God to bring about cures and other "extraordinary events. What I call "colonial hagiography" constitutes a variant on the Baroque pattern, one devoted to men and women seen to be marked by God's favor in overseas outposts of Christianity such as New France.8 Gookin even authored personal profiles of pious Indians that displayed some of the quali- ties found in Jesuit texts on saintly natives. Yet the hagiographic genre was much more highly developed in New France, where it dominated the field of biographical literature to the virtual exclusion of other styles. Hence, there is no period biography of such eminently worthy secular figures as Samuel de Champlain to set beside Cotton Mather's portrait of Winthrop. 6 Richard Kieckhefer, "Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition," in Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley, 1988), 32. See also Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography, trans. V. M. Crawford (London, i962); Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology,Folklore and History (Cambridge, 1983); Andr6 Vauchez, La saintetd en Occident aux dernierssiecles du Moyen Age (Rome, i988); and Michel de Certeau, "A Variant: Hagio-Graphical Edification," in his The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, i988), 269-83.