Mary Dunn is a historian of early modern Christianity. Her area of expertise is in the history of Catholicism in New France, that area of North America annexed to the French empire from the mid-sixteenth century to 1763. Within this area, she has published on female religious orders, motherhood, saints and sanctity, women's religious writing, the Jesuit Relations, and most recently sickness and disability. Her third monograph project is a history of the foundlings received from 1800-1845 by the Hospitaller nuns of the Hotel-Dieu of Quebec. She is the author of From Mother to Son: Selected Letters from Marie de l'Incarnation to Claude Martin (Oxford, 2015), The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition (Fordham, 2016), Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Narratives of Sickness and Disability in Early Modern New France (Princeton, 2022), and co-editor (with Brenna Moore) of Religious Intimacies (Indiana, 2020). To all of her work, she brings a self-conscious attention to issues of theory and method and a commitment to asking big questions that get to the heart of what religion is and why history matters. Address: 3800 Lindell Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63108
This essay builds on conversations begun by the JAAR in 2019 on the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith t... more This essay builds on conversations begun by the JAAR in 2019 on the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith to the study of religion. Specifically, in this essay I take up and elaborate on Heather Blair's tentative proposal for thinking about religious studies as a kind of play. Beginning with Blair and engaging with the work of Sam Gill, Tyler Roberts, Robert Orsi and others, I put forward a strong argument for adopting a playful approach to the study of religion. A programmatic alternative to reading religion against the grain and between the lines, a ludic approach to religious studies enables the scholar to engage with religion in ways that fruitfully combine at least provisional commitment to its rules with ironic disavowal, inviting the scholar to play between the incommensurate epistemologies of enchanted religious worlds, on the one hand, and the disenchanted modern academy, on the other. It is here, I argue, in this frictive space between these mutually exclusive and logically incompatible positions that religious studies finds its niche (or should), trafficking-and delighting-in the creative insights generated by the oscillation between fit and no-fit.
It is hard to imagine the rhetorical dexterity and scholarly finesse it takes to transform the fa... more It is hard to imagine the rhetorical dexterity and scholarly finesse it takes to transform the facts of a nineteenth-century church council—particularly one described as “lumbering and fumbling” (119) and marked by an “excruciating tedium” (163)— into a gripping good read. Yet, with Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John O’Malley has done just that. In his new book, O’Malley takes us from the early years of Pius IX’s papacy (which began with indications of a promising liberalism), through the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, and the infamous Syllabus of Errors, to the convocation of the First Vatican Council on 8 December 1869 as an expression of hardened resistance against the problems of rationalism, materialism, and religious indifference posed by the modern world. With characteristic economy and clarity, O’Malley tells the story of Vatican I and the making of the ultramontane church—and, most importantly, why it matters. “ ‘The past,’ ” he reminds us, citing Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, both in the epigraph to the book and in its final sentence, “ ‘is never dead. It’s not even past.’ ” To what extent and in which ways the specter of Vatican I haunts the Catholic Church of today are questions that linger at the margins of the book, questions never answered directly by the author but posed, persistently, to the reader. Vatican I, which joins David Kertzer’s The Pope Who Would Be King (2018), John McGreevy’s American Jesuits and the World (2016), and Nancy Schultz’s Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle (2011) to fill out the picture of nineteenth-century Catholicism,
Situated in the original context of their composition, the Jesuit Relations illuminate something ... more Situated in the original context of their composition, the Jesuit Relations illuminate something not just of Jesuit discourse as Thomas Worcester has argued, but Jesuit practice too, revealing the ways in which sickness and disease functioned as missionary strategy in New France. In the deft hands of the Jesuits, sickness and disease were opportunities for the conversion of the dying, occasions for the practice of Christian virtue, and invitations for dramatic displays of divine power. It was the sickbed that called both for the cultivation of patience, constancy, and holy resignation among the suffering sick and for the practice of charity among those who tended them. Moreover, it was at the bedside of the sick and the dying where the most eloquent arguments in defense of the Christian faith were made, giving sound evidence of the omnipotence of the Christian God.
In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the clois... more In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business , her aging father, and-what jars the modern reader-her eleven-year-old son. For years, Marie had deferred her desire to enter religious life, held back only on account of her young son Claude. But, over time, her inclinations had intensified until finally "life in the world [became] unbearable" for her.
This article confirms what others have argued about the bifurcated representation of Amerindian w... more This article confirms what others have argued about the bifurcated representation of Amerindian women in the Jesuit Relations (aggressive, insubordinate, prideful, and licentious on the one hand and docile, obedient, humble, and chaste, on the other) but extends the analysis of gendered discourse at work in the text to argue that the Relations persist in characterizing both types of Amerindian women as virile in excess of the limits of prescribed femininity. Attention to the stubborn persistence of the virile in Jesuit representations of Amerindian women suggests that the encounter between French Jesuit gender norms and the gendered ideals native to the indigenous populations of colonial Canada is best understood as an encounter between a range of competing discourses about gender and gestures toward a polyvalence of gendered discourses at play in colonial texts more generally.
Claude Martin’s Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully... more Claude Martin’s Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography that Claude’s voice in the text is “but an echo” of his mother’s own. A close reading, however, suggests that Claude so dominates the account of his mother’s life that the Vie emerges as an instance of hagiography and apology that renders Marie the model of the Counter-Reformation saint, the paradigm of post-Tridentine Catholic devotion, and the obedient daughter of a patriarchal ecclesiastical hierarchy in an effort to draw the boundaries of female religious identity in early-modern New France.
The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie... more The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie de l'Incarnation and her perplexing decision to abandon her young son Claude in favor of religious life. The author argues that filtered through the lens of Kohutian self-psychology, Marie de l'Incarnation emerges as a pathological narcissist and the decision to abandon Claude symptomatic of a narcissistic grandiosity.
Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian ... more Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian mission at Tadoussac, attesting to the 'very exemplary life (vie tres exemplaire)'and 'great fervour (grande ferveur)' of Christian converts who 'had been nourished in brutality (avoient este nourris dans la brutalite)'. The French, she went on, 'cried with joy to see wolves become lambs and beasts children of God (pleuroient de joye de voir des loups devenus agneaux et des bestes enfans de Dieu)'.1 Renderings of the indigenous Americans of New France as alternately and simultaneously 'wolves (loups)' - perfidious, insolent, barbarous - and 'lambs (agneaux)' - noble, submissive, docile - mark Marie de l'Incarnation's transatlantic correspondence as a rather conventional and hardly surprising instance of early modern colonial discourse.2 Dramatized in the Valladolid debate of 1550, articulated in the Jesuit Relations, typical to the rhetoric of American Puritans, this bifurcated image of the American sauvage proves a conspicuous - and well-studied - feature of early modern colonial texts.3There is, therefore, little to be gained at this stage in the postcolonial game from looking, again, at what Marie de l'Incarnation writes about the savage Other of seventeenth-century New France. If, however, we reorient the frame of analysis to consider not the content but the consequence of Marie's representations of the Amerindian, the work performed by such familiar tropes in the articulation of a distinctive brand of colonial identity comes into focus. In what follows, I argue that Homi Bhabha's model of ambivalent colonial discourse illuminates the ways in which Marie de l'Incarnation's epistolary corpus discursively produces a colonial identity that escapes the neat binaries of self and other. Taking as my body of evidence the extant letters sent by Marie from Quebec to her son Claude in France, I argue in particular that Bhabha's notions of stereotype, mimicry, and hybridity draw attention to the articulation of a colonial identity that takes shape not just in the interstices between colonizer and colonized but through the dynamic interplay of a range of colonial interests, as 'neither the one thing nor the other', 'split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference'.4Born in Tours in 1599 (just one year after the resolution of the French wars of religion and not quite thirty years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent), Marie de l'Incarnation (nee Guyart) migrated to the nascent colony of New France in 1639 to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World.5 There she would establish a school for the purpose of educating Native American girls, translate catechisms into indigenous languages, and serve some eighteen years as superior, negotiating with bishops, contracting with businessmen, and managing the affairs of her community of women. From New France, Marie would also carry on an extensive correspondence with her son, Claude, whom she had abandoned at the tender age of eleven to enter religious life. The letters exchanged between mother and son over the course of some thirty years (1640 to 1671) reveal much about the early history of New France, the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century, and - not least of all - an early modern anthropology of the savage Other.Like other early modern Europeans, Marie de l'Incarnation struggled to fit the native populations within a biblical worldview imported from France in which the place of the indigenous American was subject to debate. For Europeans both at home and abroad, the existence of New World natives gave rise to a series of questions: Were these curious people irrational beasts or human beings included within the sphere of biblical revelation? Did they represent an earlier stage in human development? A degenerate race? Were they, like the Europeans themselves, sons of Noah? …
Over the course of the seventeenth century, thirty-three instances of miraculous intercession att... more Over the course of the seventeenth century, thirty-three instances of miraculous intercession attributed to Saint Anne were recorded and preserved at the church of Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap, Quebec. An analysis of these reports of miraculous intercession that attends to both the narrative and performative dimensions of miracle stories suggests that the events held an important place within the emerging colonial community, at once conveying and constructing an understanding of the community as governed by the providence of God, aligned with French national interests, and ordered under the authority of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. Résumé : Au cours du dix-septième siècle, trente-trois cas d'intercession miraculeuse attribuée à Sainte-Anne ont été consignés et conservés à l'église de Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap, à Québec. Quand elle s'attarde aux dimensions narrative et performative de ces récits de miracles, l'analyse de ces rapports d'intercession miraculeuse suggère que ces événements ont occupé une importante place au sein de la communauté coloniale émergente, symbolisant et fortifiant tout à la fois une conception de la communauté comme étant gouvernée par la Divine Providence, réglée sur les intérêts nationaux français et soumise à l'autorité de l'É glise catholique post-tridentine.
This essay builds on conversations begun by the JAAR in 2019 on the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith t... more This essay builds on conversations begun by the JAAR in 2019 on the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith to the study of religion. Specifically, in this essay I take up and elaborate on Heather Blair's tentative proposal for thinking about religious studies as a kind of play. Beginning with Blair and engaging with the work of Sam Gill, Tyler Roberts, Robert Orsi and others, I put forward a strong argument for adopting a playful approach to the study of religion. A programmatic alternative to reading religion against the grain and between the lines, a ludic approach to religious studies enables the scholar to engage with religion in ways that fruitfully combine at least provisional commitment to its rules with ironic disavowal, inviting the scholar to play between the incommensurate epistemologies of enchanted religious worlds, on the one hand, and the disenchanted modern academy, on the other. It is here, I argue, in this frictive space between these mutually exclusive and logically incompatible positions that religious studies finds its niche (or should), trafficking-and delighting-in the creative insights generated by the oscillation between fit and no-fit.
It is hard to imagine the rhetorical dexterity and scholarly finesse it takes to transform the fa... more It is hard to imagine the rhetorical dexterity and scholarly finesse it takes to transform the facts of a nineteenth-century church council—particularly one described as “lumbering and fumbling” (119) and marked by an “excruciating tedium” (163)— into a gripping good read. Yet, with Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church, John O’Malley has done just that. In his new book, O’Malley takes us from the early years of Pius IX’s papacy (which began with indications of a promising liberalism), through the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception, and the infamous Syllabus of Errors, to the convocation of the First Vatican Council on 8 December 1869 as an expression of hardened resistance against the problems of rationalism, materialism, and religious indifference posed by the modern world. With characteristic economy and clarity, O’Malley tells the story of Vatican I and the making of the ultramontane church—and, most importantly, why it matters. “ ‘The past,’ ” he reminds us, citing Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, both in the epigraph to the book and in its final sentence, “ ‘is never dead. It’s not even past.’ ” To what extent and in which ways the specter of Vatican I haunts the Catholic Church of today are questions that linger at the margins of the book, questions never answered directly by the author but posed, persistently, to the reader. Vatican I, which joins David Kertzer’s The Pope Who Would Be King (2018), John McGreevy’s American Jesuits and the World (2016), and Nancy Schultz’s Mrs. Mattingly’s Miracle (2011) to fill out the picture of nineteenth-century Catholicism,
Situated in the original context of their composition, the Jesuit Relations illuminate something ... more Situated in the original context of their composition, the Jesuit Relations illuminate something not just of Jesuit discourse as Thomas Worcester has argued, but Jesuit practice too, revealing the ways in which sickness and disease functioned as missionary strategy in New France. In the deft hands of the Jesuits, sickness and disease were opportunities for the conversion of the dying, occasions for the practice of Christian virtue, and invitations for dramatic displays of divine power. It was the sickbed that called both for the cultivation of patience, constancy, and holy resignation among the suffering sick and for the practice of charity among those who tended them. Moreover, it was at the bedside of the sick and the dying where the most eloquent arguments in defense of the Christian faith were made, giving sound evidence of the omnipotence of the Christian God.
In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the clois... more In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business , her aging father, and-what jars the modern reader-her eleven-year-old son. For years, Marie had deferred her desire to enter religious life, held back only on account of her young son Claude. But, over time, her inclinations had intensified until finally "life in the world [became] unbearable" for her.
This article confirms what others have argued about the bifurcated representation of Amerindian w... more This article confirms what others have argued about the bifurcated representation of Amerindian women in the Jesuit Relations (aggressive, insubordinate, prideful, and licentious on the one hand and docile, obedient, humble, and chaste, on the other) but extends the analysis of gendered discourse at work in the text to argue that the Relations persist in characterizing both types of Amerindian women as virile in excess of the limits of prescribed femininity. Attention to the stubborn persistence of the virile in Jesuit representations of Amerindian women suggests that the encounter between French Jesuit gender norms and the gendered ideals native to the indigenous populations of colonial Canada is best understood as an encounter between a range of competing discourses about gender and gestures toward a polyvalence of gendered discourses at play in colonial texts more generally.
Claude Martin’s Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully... more Claude Martin’s Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography that Claude’s voice in the text is “but an echo” of his mother’s own. A close reading, however, suggests that Claude so dominates the account of his mother’s life that the Vie emerges as an instance of hagiography and apology that renders Marie the model of the Counter-Reformation saint, the paradigm of post-Tridentine Catholic devotion, and the obedient daughter of a patriarchal ecclesiastical hierarchy in an effort to draw the boundaries of female religious identity in early-modern New France.
The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie... more The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie de l'Incarnation and her perplexing decision to abandon her young son Claude in favor of religious life. The author argues that filtered through the lens of Kohutian self-psychology, Marie de l'Incarnation emerges as a pathological narcissist and the decision to abandon Claude symptomatic of a narcissistic grandiosity.
Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian ... more Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian mission at Tadoussac, attesting to the 'very exemplary life (vie tres exemplaire)'and 'great fervour (grande ferveur)' of Christian converts who 'had been nourished in brutality (avoient este nourris dans la brutalite)'. The French, she went on, 'cried with joy to see wolves become lambs and beasts children of God (pleuroient de joye de voir des loups devenus agneaux et des bestes enfans de Dieu)'.1 Renderings of the indigenous Americans of New France as alternately and simultaneously 'wolves (loups)' - perfidious, insolent, barbarous - and 'lambs (agneaux)' - noble, submissive, docile - mark Marie de l'Incarnation's transatlantic correspondence as a rather conventional and hardly surprising instance of early modern colonial discourse.2 Dramatized in the Valladolid debate of 1550, articulated in the Jesuit Relations, typical to the rhetoric of American Puritans, this bifurcated image of the American sauvage proves a conspicuous - and well-studied - feature of early modern colonial texts.3There is, therefore, little to be gained at this stage in the postcolonial game from looking, again, at what Marie de l'Incarnation writes about the savage Other of seventeenth-century New France. If, however, we reorient the frame of analysis to consider not the content but the consequence of Marie's representations of the Amerindian, the work performed by such familiar tropes in the articulation of a distinctive brand of colonial identity comes into focus. In what follows, I argue that Homi Bhabha's model of ambivalent colonial discourse illuminates the ways in which Marie de l'Incarnation's epistolary corpus discursively produces a colonial identity that escapes the neat binaries of self and other. Taking as my body of evidence the extant letters sent by Marie from Quebec to her son Claude in France, I argue in particular that Bhabha's notions of stereotype, mimicry, and hybridity draw attention to the articulation of a colonial identity that takes shape not just in the interstices between colonizer and colonized but through the dynamic interplay of a range of colonial interests, as 'neither the one thing nor the other', 'split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference'.4Born in Tours in 1599 (just one year after the resolution of the French wars of religion and not quite thirty years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent), Marie de l'Incarnation (nee Guyart) migrated to the nascent colony of New France in 1639 to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World.5 There she would establish a school for the purpose of educating Native American girls, translate catechisms into indigenous languages, and serve some eighteen years as superior, negotiating with bishops, contracting with businessmen, and managing the affairs of her community of women. From New France, Marie would also carry on an extensive correspondence with her son, Claude, whom she had abandoned at the tender age of eleven to enter religious life. The letters exchanged between mother and son over the course of some thirty years (1640 to 1671) reveal much about the early history of New France, the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century, and - not least of all - an early modern anthropology of the savage Other.Like other early modern Europeans, Marie de l'Incarnation struggled to fit the native populations within a biblical worldview imported from France in which the place of the indigenous American was subject to debate. For Europeans both at home and abroad, the existence of New World natives gave rise to a series of questions: Were these curious people irrational beasts or human beings included within the sphere of biblical revelation? Did they represent an earlier stage in human development? A degenerate race? Were they, like the Europeans themselves, sons of Noah? …
Over the course of the seventeenth century, thirty-three instances of miraculous intercession att... more Over the course of the seventeenth century, thirty-three instances of miraculous intercession attributed to Saint Anne were recorded and preserved at the church of Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap, Quebec. An analysis of these reports of miraculous intercession that attends to both the narrative and performative dimensions of miracle stories suggests that the events held an important place within the emerging colonial community, at once conveying and constructing an understanding of the community as governed by the providence of God, aligned with French national interests, and ordered under the authority of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. Résumé : Au cours du dix-septième siècle, trente-trois cas d'intercession miraculeuse attribuée à Sainte-Anne ont été consignés et conservés à l'église de Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap, à Québec. Quand elle s'attarde aux dimensions narrative et performative de ces récits de miracles, l'analyse de ces rapports d'intercession miraculeuse suggère que ces événements ont occupé une importante place au sein de la communauté coloniale émergente, symbolisant et fortifiant tout à la fois une conception de la communauté comme étant gouvernée par la Divine Providence, réglée sur les intérêts nationaux français et soumise à l'autorité de l'É glise catholique post-tridentine.
The university began in the Middle Ages as an extension of Catholic monasticism, an intellectual ... more The university began in the Middle Ages as an extension of Catholic monasticism, an intellectual world separate and apart from the practice of everyday life. In many ways, advanced scholarship retains something of its original monastic flavor. Academics are taught to keep a respectable distance from their subjects, to aim for objectivity, to cultivate detachment. But what are we missing when we constrain scholarship within these normative dimensions? What else might we learn-about the past, about others, about even ourselves-if we let down our guard and sidle up close to and alongside our subjects of study? In dialogue with her most recent work on Catholic narratives of sickness and disability in early modern French North America, Dunn articulates a vision for a more humane kind of scholarship beyond the ivory tower, a kind of scholarship that sits at the juncture of the personal and the professional, lived experience and archival record, scholarly practice and everyday life.
In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, France, into t... more In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, France, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business, her aging father and-what jars the modern reader-her eleven-year-old son, Claude Martin. Marie's entry into religious life had been a long time coming. In the decade since the death of her husband, the young widow who would become the celebrated mystic Marie de l'Incarnation, had redoubled her religious devotions, frequenting the sacraments, praying constantly, and intensifying her practices of self-mortification. It was only Claude-and her sense of maternal responsibility toward him-that held Marie back. Finally, she could stand it no longer. "Life in the world [had become] unbearable" (Martin, 1677: 156). God giving her to believe that "He would take care of what I wanted to leave out of love for Him," Marie abandoned Claude for the cloister-against the wishes of her family, the admonitions of her neighbors, and her own persistent misgivings (Martin, 1677: 168). The separation wasn't easy. "My son came with me, crying bitterly" Marie writes in the Relation of 1654 of the day of her entry into religious life. "Seeing him, it seemed to me that I was being split in two" (De L'Incarnation, 1929b: 271). Marie, however, adjusted quickly to the rhythm of the cloister, finding in "the rules, the ceremonies, the enclosure, the vows" profound spiritual tranquility (De L'Incarnation, 1929b: 290). For Claude, the going was rougher. The boy was troubled, distraught, and doggedly persistent in his attempts to attract Marie's attention and persuade her to come home. Despite the rule of the cloister which, according to the terms agreed upon by the Council of Trent (1545-1563), mandated the strict enclosure of all professed religious women, Claude found every opportunity to catch a glimpse of his estranged mother. He came crying to the convent parlor; he squeezed through the slats of the communion rail; he even snuck into the cloistered courtyard, retreating "backwards to see if you could see me" (Oury, 1971: 837). On at least one occasion, Claude brought along reinforcements, "a troop of little children [who]...came with you to the windows of our refectory, screaming and screeching that I be given back to you." "I could hear," Marie recalled years later, "your voice distinct from the others, crying pitiably that your mother be given back to you and that you wanted to see her" (Oury, 1971: 837). As it takes shape in the Relations of 1633 and 1654, Claude's Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, and nearly thirty years of correspondence between mother and son, the abandonment is figured as a sacrifice performed in submission to the will of God and in imitation of Christ (Dunn, 2016). "I loved my son with a very great love," Marie explains in the Relation of 1654, "and leaving him constituted my sacrifice" (De l'Incarnation, 1929b: 273). Carried out against her own inclinations and against the powerful pull of her maternal affection, the abandonment (a term freighted with dense spiritual significance in seventeenth-century France) was painful for Marie-an act of self-immolation on the same order of Christ's own crucifixion. That Marie would interpret the abandonment as a sacrifice coerced in imitatio Christi was not, however, foreordained. There are cultural, historical, and religious reasons that inclined (maybe even constrained) Marie to presume the incompatibility between her maternal obligations and her spiritual ambitions-and cultural, historical, and religious reasons that inclined (maybe even constrained) her to presume that her best shot at realizing those ambitions required abandoning her beloved son. One of these reasons is surely the weight of a Catholic
I know of no other way to begin than with a story. It was January 27, 2017. The date doesn't real... more I know of no other way to begin than with a story. It was January 27, 2017. The date doesn't really matter, except that I remember it and that it was my brother's forty-second birthday. I remember, too, that it was a sunny day-one of those cold, blindingly bright winter days-and I remember sitting in the waiting room before the procedure, inarticulately apprehensive that something might really be wrong against all statistical odds. I remember shivering on the stretcher before the anesthesia was delivered and the nurse inclined above me who reassured me that everything was going to be fine. And then I remember this: the doctor at the foot of my bed in the recovery room and the blunt announcement, "It's cancer." I was groggy, the anesthesia just wearing off, and still dressed in one of those cheap hospital gowns that snaps at the shoulder. My belongings were neatly folded and tucked away in the plastic bag on the chair to my left, exactly where I had left them before. The curtains were drawn but the nurses and doctors bustling nearby must have heard. "It's cancer." Given my age (forty), lifestyle (healthy), and family history (none), the diagnosis came as a shock. In what world was it possible that I could have cancer? Over and above the litany of questions I had about treatment, prognosis, and post-operative surveillance, I wrestled with a flood of other, more piercing questions that drove straight into the heart of my sense of self. What did cancer at forty say about my past? About my future? About my understanding of myself as a vigorous mother of four with an emergent professional profile smack dab in the prime of life? With the diagnosis, came my immediate conscription into the biomedical system, a conscription for which (let me be clear) I am deeply and thoroughly grateful, but which 1
In Religion, Gender, and Kinship In Colonial New France, Lisa Poirier takes up the life histories... more In Religion, Gender, and Kinship In Colonial New France, Lisa Poirier takes up the life histories of four figures-French translator Etienne Brûlé, Wendat convert Joseph Chihoatenhwa, his daughter Thérèse Oionhaton, and French migrant Marie Rollet Hébert-to illustrate the "processes of transformation, reorientation, and revaluation" (6) wrought by the colonial encounter between French and Wendat in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Poirier's intention is to demonstrate how the "intercultural complexities and opacities" (5) that marked these first few decades of encounter gave rise to "new orientations [...] that can only be called 'religious'" (5). Poirier certainly succeeds in illuminating for her reader the various ways in which cultural misunderstandings, miscalculations, and misinterpretations confounded the first few decades of contact between the French and the Wendat. She ably demonstrates how French explorer Samuel de Champlain, for example, failed to appreciate the purpose of indigenous warfare, the function of the ritual torture of captives, the dimensions of trade, and the practice of fictive kinship; how native Christians valued baptism as a means of ritual aliianee and sought to incorporate Jesuit sacred power into traditional practices; how Jesuit warnings about the fires of hell were lost on Wendat men who took torture as an occasion for the display of courage; how Wendat women converted to Christianity for reasons other than those anticipated by the Jesuits, "creatively respond[ing] to the cultural disequilibrium in which they found themselves by drawing upon the traditional modalities of life" (171). Poirier also capably illuminates the ways in which figures like Brûlé, Chihoatenhwa, Oionhaton, and Hébert were dislocated from their cultures of origin and crafted new identities for themselves on the contested boundaries between cultures-a point made most persuasively, perhaps, in Poirier's account of the murdered Brûlé's ultimate exclusion both from the Wendat Feast of the Dead and the consecrated burial grounds of the French Jesuits. Poirier's thorough treatment of Brûlé and Chihoatenhwa (which, unfortunately, does not extend to Oionhaton and Hébert) deftly illustrates the ways in which colonial encounters gave rise to hybrid identities as French and Wendat alike navigated the early decades of colonial contact and negotiated techniques of survival, sometimes with devastating personal consequences. It seems to me that Homi Bhabha's richly-developed concept of hybridity would have usefully supported Poirier's arguments here.
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr (eds), Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Mo... more Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr (eds), Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. vii + 244, p/b. $21.00, ISBN: 978-0-226-43632-6.Women's place in the religious history of early modern Europe has, until recent years, been muted at best and silenced at worst by the din of the dominant historiographical discourse (a point made clear by the editors' juxtaposition of the standard narrative of religious history in early modern Europe with women's 'alternate history' (p. 4)). Despite their virtual absence from the meta-narrative of early modern European history, women 'participated fully and critically in the religious history of the age' (p. 4). The Other Voices series, as Daniel Bornstein puts it, 'programmatically attacks the monolithic solidarity of the traditional canon and aspires to construct by its side a new canon, built of women's works' (p. 48). Teaching ...
Religion, we have known for some time now, is more than a matter of belief. It is also a matter o... more Religion, we have known for some time now, is more than a matter of belief. It is also a matter of what people do and how people live both alone and in relationship with each other, the gods, the saints, the dead, angels, demons, animals, places, and things. Scholarship, however, remains oddly tethered to meaning as the interpretive key that unlocks the mystery of religion. Whether imagined as wish-fulfillment, ultimate concern, or a system of symbols, modern conceptions of religion continue to privilege belief, as if religious adherents had only brains and not bodies. In response to this scholarly dissonance, this course, in lockstep with recent moves in the humanities that engage the full range of embodied senses as media of knowing, invites students to ask not just what religion means, but what religion sounds like, smells like, tastes like, feels like, and looks like. Conceived in conjunction with "Ways of Hearing, Ways of Knowing: Listening for the Sounds of Religion," a two-day workshop funded by the John Foley family slated for October 2020, this course bridges disciplinary, confessional, and historical boundaries to encourage students to think deeply and critically about the rich sensorium of religion. COURSE OBJECTIVES 1. To identify and understand key moments in the turn to the body in the study of religion and theology; 2. To develop students' abilities to think, read, and speak critically about theology and the study of religion; 3. To build conversations across the disciplines of the history of Christianity, constructive theology, and the study of religion; 4. To practice applying the tools of contemporary religious studies to students' own subdisciplines; 5. To refine students' skills in academic writing. COURSE REQUIREMENTS See Appendix A for detailed description of course requirements 1. Attendance, preparation, and active engagement in class (20%);
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