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Becoming Holy in Early Canada

Author : Timothy G. Pearson

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : 375 pages

File Size : 49,76 MB

Release : 2014-09-01

Category : History

ISBN : 0773596461

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Book Description

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in holy figures in Canada. From the reputations of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI as prolific saint-makers to the canonization of two figures associated with Canada - Brother André Bessette in 2010 and Kateri Tekakwitha in 2012 - saints are suddenly in the news and a topic of conversation. In Becoming Holy in Early Canada, Timothy Pearson explores the roots of sanctity in Canada to discover why reputations for holiness developed in the early colonial period and how saints were made in the local and immediate contexts of everyday life. Pearson weaves together the histories of well-known figures such as Marie de l'Incarnation with those of largely forgotten local saints such as lay brother and carpenter Didace Pelletier and the Algonquin martyr Joseph Onaharé. Adopting an approach that draws on performance theory, ritual studies, and lived religion, he unravels the expectations, interactions, and negotiations that constituted holy performances. Because holy reputations developed over the course of individuals' lifetimes and in after-death relationships with local faith communities through belief in miracles, holy lives are best read as local, embedded, and contextualized histories. Placing colonial holy figures between the poles of local expectation and the universal Catholic theology of sanctity, Becoming Holy in Early Canada shows how reputations developed and individuals became local saints long before they came to the attention of the church in Rome.



The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs

Author : Emma Anderson

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 474 pages

File Size : 23,93 MB

Release : 2013-11-18

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0674726162

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Book Description

In the 1640s, eight Jesuit missionaries met their deaths at the hands of native antagonists. With their collective canonization in 1930, these men became North America's first saints. Emma Anderson untangles the complexities of these seminal acts of violence and their ever-changing legacy across the centuries. While exploring how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, she also seeks to comprehend the motivations of those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs. In tracing the creation and evolution of the cult of the martyrs across the centuries, Anderson reveals the ways in which both believers and detractors have honored andpreserved the memory of the martyrs in this "afterlife," and how their powerful story has been continually reinterpreted in the collective imagination. As rival shrines rose on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border, these figures would both unite and deeply divide natives and non-natives, francophones and anglophones, Protestants and Catholics, Canadians and Americans, forging a legacy as controversial as it has been enduring.



A Touch of Fire

Author : Thomas M. Carr Jr

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : 309 pages

File Size : 36,67 MB

Release : 2020-07-16

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 0228002354

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Book Description

Marie-André Duplessis (1687-1760) guided the Augustinian sisters at the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec - the oldest hospital north of Mexico - where she was elected mother superior six times. Although often overshadowed by colonial nuns who became foundresses or saints, she was a powerhouse during the last decades of the French regime and an accomplished woman of letters. She has been credited with Canada’s first literary narrative, Canada’s first music manual, and the first book by a Canadian woman printed during her own lifetime. In A Touch of Fire, the first biography of Duplessis, Thomas Carr analyzes how she navigated, in peace and war, the unstable, male-dominated colonial world of New France. Through a study of Duplessis's correspondence, her writings, and the rich Hôtel-Dieu archives, Carr details how she channelled the fire of her commitment to the hospital in order to advance its interests, preserve its history, and inspire her sister nuns. Duplessis chronicled New France as she wrote for and about her institution. Her administrative correspondence reveals her managerial successes and failures, and her private letters reshaped her friendship with a childhood Jansenist friend, Marie-Catherine Hecquet. Carr also delves into her relationship with her sister Geneviève Duplessis, who joined her in the cloister and became her managerial and spiritual partner. The addition of Duplessis's last letters provides a dramatic insider's view into the female experience of the siege and capture of Quebec in 1759. A Touch of Fire examines the life and work of an enterprising leader and major woman author of early Canada.



From Mother to Son

Author : mère Marie de l'Incarnation

Publisher : AAR Religions in Translation

Page : 257 pages

File Size : 35,95 MB

Release : 2014

Category : History

ISBN : 0199386579

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Book Description

Marie de l'Incarnation (1599 - 1672), renowned French mystic and founder of the Ursulines in Canada, abandoned her son, Claude Martin, when he was a mere eleven years old to dedicate herself completely to a consecrated religious life. In 1639, Marie migrated to the struggling French colony at Quebec to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World. Over the course of the next thirty-one years, the relationship between Marie and Claude would take shape by means of a trans-Atlantic correspondence in which mother and son shared advice and counsel, concerns and anxieties, and joys and frustrations. From Mother to Son presents annotated translations of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters exchanged by Marie and her son between 1640 and 1671. These letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting the letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, a relationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family. In providing a contemporary translation of Marie's letters to Claude, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a history of New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular. Dunn expertly contextualizes the correspondence within the broader cultural, historical, intellectual, and theological currents of the seventeenth century as well as within modern scholarship on Marie de l'Incarnation. From Mother to Son offers a fascinating portrait of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn provides a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in the modern Christian West.



Missions Begin with Blood

Author : Brandon Bayne

Publisher : Fordham University Press

Page : 187 pages

File Size : 28,16 MB

Release : 2021-10-26

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0823294218

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Book Description

Winner, 2022 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. Whether petitioning superiors for support, preparing to extirpate Native “idolatries,” or protecting their conversions from critics, Jesuits found power in their persecution and victory in their victimization. This book correlates these tales of sacrifice to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how martyrological idioms worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, missionaries invoked an agricultural metaphor that reconfigured suffering into seed that, when watered by sweat and blood, would one day bring a rich harvest of Indigenous Christianity.



The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque

Author : John D. Lyons

Publisher :

Page : 907 pages

File Size : 49,27 MB

Release : 2019

Category : Art

ISBN : 0190678445

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Book Description

Baroque, the cultural period extending from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, created some of the world's most striking monuments, music, artworks, and literature. This Handbook goes beyond all existing studies by presenting Baroque not only as a style, but also as a global cultural phenomenon arising in response to enormous religious, political, and technological changes.



Not Quite Us

Author : Kevin P. Anderson

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : pages

File Size : 33,27 MB

Release : 2019-04-08

Category : History

ISBN : 0773557555

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Book Description

In twentieth-century Canada, mainline Protestants, fundamentalists, liberal nationalists, monarchists, conservative Anglophiles, and left-wing intellectuals had one thing in common: they all subscribed to a centuries-old world view that Catholicism was an authoritarian, regressive, untrustworthy, and foreign force that did not fit into a democratic, British nation like Canada. Analyzing the connections between anti-Catholicism and national identity in English Canada, Not Quite Us examines the consistency of anti-Catholic tropes in the public and private discourses of intellectuals, politicians, and clergymen, such as Arthur Lower, Eugene Forsey, Harold Innis, C.E. Silcox, F.R. Scott, George Drew, and Emily Murphy, along with those of private Canadians. Challenging the misconception that an allegedly secular, civic, and more tolerant nationalism that emerged excised its Protestant and British cast, Kevin Anderson determines that this nationalist narrative was itself steeped in an exclusionary Anglo-Protestant understanding of history and values. He shows that over time, as these ideas were dispersed through editorials, cartoons, correspondence, literature, and lectures, they influenced Canadians' intimate perceptions of themselves and their connection to Britain, the ethno-religious composition of the nation, the place of religion in public life, and national unity. Anti-Catholicism helped shape what it means to be "Canadian" in the twentieth century. Not Quite Us documents how equating Protestantism with democracy and individualism permeated ideas of national identity and continues to define Canada into the twenty-first century.



Scandal in the Parish

Author : Karen E. Carter

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : pages

File Size : 49,52 MB

Release : 2019-05-15

Category : History

ISBN : 0773557679

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Book Description

In 1770, the priest Nicolas Vernier was accused of neglecting church services, inappropriate behaviour in the confessional, financial improprieties, and affairs with the village schoolmistresses. In a contentious church court case, parishioners described all of their priest's wrongdoings, and in turn, he detailed many of theirs. Ultimately, Vernier finished his career as a cathedral canon in another diocese. Scandal in the Parish recounts Vernier's story and many similar eighteenth-century cases. In fascinating detail that reveals essential facets of rural religion during the Catholic Reformation period, Karen Carter considers French lay people's relationship with their parish curé, who governed and influenced so much of their religious practice. Although the priest's role as purveyor of God's grace through the sacraments was secure as long as he performed his duties appropriately, priests who were unable to navigate the pressures and high expectations put on them by their superiors and parishioners risked broken relationships, public disturbances of the peace, and even prosecution. These scandals, Carter demonstrates, tell us much about rural parish life, the processes of negotiation and accommodation between curés and their parishioners, and ongoing religious reforms and enforcement throughout the eighteenth century. An engaging venture into the world of the parish that highlights the centrality of the priest-parishioner relationship, Scandal in the Parish reveals the attitudes and practices of ordinary people who were active agents in their religious and spiritual lives.



Patriot and Priest

Author : Annette Chapman-Adisho

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : 246 pages

File Size : 21,81 MB

Release : 2019-12-12

Category : History

ISBN : 0773559876

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Book Description

In 1790, the French revolutionary government reformed the Catholic Church and demanded that clerics swear an oath of allegiance to the nation and its vision for French Catholicism. Although half of France's parish clergy refused to accept the state-sponsored reforms, others became embroiled in this decade-long ecclesiastical experiment. This included Jean-Baptiste Volfius, a patriot, priest, and professor who embraced the changes in France and believed in the revolution's potential to create a purer church. Patriot and Priest presents a social and intellectual history of the French constitutional church in the Côte-d'Or and the career of Volfius, who became its bishop in 1791, as he struggled to create and run the church. Annette Chapman-Adisho addresses the daily experience of the constitutional clergy over the course of ten years, exploring the interactions between priests and local and national authorities, the response of the laity to the divisions in the French Catholic Church, the evolution of these issues over time, and the eventual reconciliation of the clergy following the Napoleonic Concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1801. Using a rich collection of archival sources, this book demonstrates that although the constitutional church was ultimately a failed project, its legacy had a lasting impact on the catholic Church in France. Tracing the social, political, and theological history of this reform effort, Patriot and Priest offers new insights into the French Revolution and its impact on French Catholicism.



Protestant Liberty

Author : James M. Forbes

Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Page : 172 pages

File Size : 29,62 MB

Release : 2022-08-15

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0228012783

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Book Description

Tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism dominated politics in nineteenth-century Canada, occasionally erupting into violence. While some liberal politicians and community leaders believed that equal treatment of Protestants and Catholics would defuse these ancient quarrels, other Protestant liberals perceived a battle for the soul of the nation. Protestant Liberty offers a new interpretation of nineteenth-century liberalism by re-examining the role of religion in Canadian politics. While this era’s liberal thought is often characterized as being neutral toward religion, James Forbes argues that the origins of Canadian liberalism were firmly rooted in the British tradition of Protestantism and were based on the premise of guarding against the advance of supposedly illiberal faiths, especially Catholicism. After the union of Upper Canada with predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada in 1840, this Protestant ideal of liberty came into conflict with a more neutral alternative that sought to strip liberalism of its religious associations in order to appeal to Catholic voters and allies. In a decisive break from their Protestant heritage, these liberals redefined their ideology in secular-materialist terms by emphasizing free trade and private property over faith and culture. In tracing how the Confederation generation competed to establish a unifying vision for the nation, Protestant Liberty reveals religion and religious differences at the centre of this story.