2000/04/01 by Allan Greer · 47 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Race (biology) #Colonialism #History #Gender studies #Art #Sociology #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.2307/2674478
published in The William and Mary Quarterly 57(2), 323 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
openalex publication_date 2000/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
T| NHE French effort to Christianize the natives of seventeenthcentury North America coincided with one of the last great periods of European (especially French) hagiography.1 Thus, when Catholic France boasted of its missionary achievements, it spoke less of pagan nations converted to the True Faith than of saints vaulted into heaven. The Jesuit Fran~ois Du Creux chose these revealing terms in dedicating his Historia Canadensis to King Louis XIV: Your New France, Louis, has many saints of that very kind that the Apostle mentions everywhere in his Epistles.2 Like the annual Jesuit Relations on which it was based, Du Creux's work is studded with long digressions on the deeds of martyrs and ascetic visionaries, their edifying deaths, and their miraculous post-mortem intercessions; these biographical interjections interrupt the flow of the historical narrative, but they also impart an inner logic to the whole. Historians mining the Catholic missionary sources in search of rich veins of ethnographic description and historical chronicle are well aware of the sacred biography element, though they seldom reflect on it, pre-