2013/11/27 by Micah True · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment #Historical and Literary Studies #Globe #Relation (database) #Reading (process) #History #Newspaper #Classics #Literature #Media studies #Law #Sociology #Political science #Art #Psychology #Computer science
paper · doi:10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0097
openalex publication_date 2013/11/27 · openalex created_date 2021/03/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
As Jesuit missionaries fanned out across the globe during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, they sent accounts of their work and of the cultures that they encountered back to Europe. Initially conceived as mandatory annual reports for circulation only within the Society of Jesus, such texts sometimes came to be published, serving to inform Europe’s reading public of events in distant places and helping to rally spiritual and material support for the missions, which were a key part of the Catholic Reformation. The famed Jesuit Relations from New France are among the best known of these published reports, at least partly due to the unparalleled regularity and longevity of the series. Beginning in 1632, a new installment appeared every year, without interruption, until external pressures forced cessation of publication in 1673. Several similar texts that were published prior to 1632 are also sometimes considered part of the corpus. As required of all such missions, the superior in New France assembled each year’s Relation on the basis of letters from missionaries in what is now Quebec, Ontario, and upstate New York. The manuscripts were then sent to France on the merchant ships that departed the colony each autumn, where, upon reaching Paris, they were edited again and published. The available evidence suggests that the Relations were widely read and much appreciated by France’s reading public. In the early 21st century, the texts serve as prime examples of the relation or récit de voyage, a genre inspired by travel that was popular in 17th-century France, with some 1,500 texts published by the end of the century. And because the Jesuits enjoyed a monopoly on mission activity in New France for several decades, coinciding with the publication of the Relations, the texts also are the single most important source of ethnohistorical information on the Iroquoian and Algonquian cultures that the missionaries encountered, as well as on contact between Indigenous and French cultures in New France. Eight different missionaries signed the texts over the course of the published series, although the longtime mission superior and compiler of the Relations, Paul Le Jeune, often overshadows the others in scholarship.