8
Robin Macdonald
I.
Amongst the papers of the Jesuit historian Camille de Rochemonteix (now held at the Archives des jésuites au Canada) is a letter penned in 1894 by Henri Omont, archivist and philologist at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.1 ‘Your work on the missions in the Americas’, Omont wrote, ‘will without a doubt prompt your interest in two very fragile documents which you will permit me to signal to you’.2 These documents were two letters, ‘written on birch bark [écorce de bouleau]’: the first, penned in 1647 by Jesuit missionary Father Joseph Poncet from his posting at the Wendat mission in New France to Dom Claude Martin in Paris, and the second, composed in 1676 by a group of Indigenous girls and young women at the Ursuline seminary of Quebec and sent to Monsieur Charles Sain, receveur général des finances in Bourges.3 Rochemonteix’s reply is no longer extant, but presumably Omont’s letter piqued his interest, for in December of the same year, he received a second letter. This missive was from one ‘A. Prempain’ and included transcriptions of the birch bark letters.4 Although Prempain had managed to fully transcribe the second letter, he had only deciphered a few words of the first. After listing the phrases he had been able to make out, he explained:
This is all one can glean that makes any sense. The low-quality ink has worn away and one can only decipher a few words here and there. To be able to read them, one needs good light and instruments. Monsieur Omont tells me that there is only one way to glean information from what remains of this artefact [monument]. Pick out the words that one can just about read, just about guess… lay them out one by one on paper, leaving gaps between them, [and] then with the help of these words, construct [construire] sentences that will fit around them, and that make sense. This very tiring work would take a long time; and then, where would the authenticity be of a letter constructed [fabriqué] in this way[?]5
Although Prempain conceded that it was possible to construct logical sentences that ‘[made] sense’, he challenged the authenticity of this approach. The letter alone, he implied, had little historical meaning, except as a tangible ‘monument’ of the New France mission.
Prempain’s letter raises important questions about the ways in which archivists and historians have catalogued and studied materials relating to the New France mission. For what reasons, for instance, do certain documents appear in edited collections, whilst others remain in manuscript alone? In this case, the letters’ unusual material form – that is, that they were birch bark letters – seems to have informed their storage and categorisation. Although they were written almost thirty years apart (in 1647 and 1676, respectively), they were stored together in a double wooden frame, which opens like a book (see Fig. 8.1).6 This storage solution was implemented soon after the letters’ acquisition by the Bibliothèque nationale (when Omont wrote to Rochemonteix in 1894, they were still ‘at the framer’s [shop]’).7 The frame protected these ‘fragile documents’ (Omont’s words) from careless researchers who might damage them, but it also ensured that they were stored in a manner more suited to display than study: encased in glass, they could be looked at, but not touched.8 That neither of these letters was included in any of the expansive, late-nineteenth-century edited source collections relating to the New France mission implies that the editors of these collections understood texts and objects to be in separate conceptual categories.9 Since many historians rely on these collections for research, the birch bark letters stored in Paris have been largely passed over in historical analyses.10 By contrast, this chapter foregrounds letters written on birch bark and argues that their physical form – the reason for their relative exclusion from historiographical accounts – was integral to the ways in which they were sensed and understood.
In recent years, scholars have become attuned to the ways in which the materiality of texts of all kinds, including letters, can shape their meanings.11 Reading is now understood to be an embodied practice. Readers’ physical experiences can affect their understandings of texts and vice versa.12 Scholars of religion, too, have fruitfully examined complex entanglements of bodies and texts. Julia Boss’s analysis of the Manuscript of 1652 (a book containing diverse accounts of the lives and deaths of the ‘North American Martyrs’) provides an evocative examination of the ways in which holy figures could be embodied by the manuscripts describing their lives. Some hagiographic texts, Boss reminds us, were written in blood, and were thus literal fusions of body and manuscript. In a colony with very few relics, texts not only authenticated sacred objects, but could simultaneously become them, functioning as ‘physical site[s] of saintly holiness’.13 The circulation and collective reading of these texts, moreover, could create ‘imagined’ Catholic communities, connecting people on both sides of the Atlantic.14
For early modern Europeans, birch bark letters were rare artefacts, and objects made from this material could often be found in cabinets of curiosities.15 Any examination of their meanings must therefore consider early modern European cultures of collecting, which were facilitated by the invasion and colonisation of the Americas and elsewhere. Owing to Jesuit missionaries’ sophisticated communication networks and privileged access to specimens and curiosities, they were often involved in conveying these objects to Europe.16 Practices of collecting were also rhetorically significant in printed relations of exploration and colonisation. As Neil Kenny has argued, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel narratives frequently presented themselves as ‘collections’, and included lists of ‘real’ objects, as well as information ‘recueilli’ (gathered/collected) by travellers.17 Readers’ engagements with early modern missionary letters were therefore shaped not only by hagiographic traditions, but by early modern collecting practices. Why write a letter on birch bark (rather than paper) if not to stimulate the sensory curiosity of its recipient?
Figure 8.1Birch bark letters in storage frame. Poncet’s letter to Martin, 1647 (top), Indigenous seminarians’ letter to Sain, 1676 (bottom)
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
This essay draws together and builds upon historiographies of both mission narratives and cultures of collecting in order to analyse the ways in which readers in France sensed the letters that arrived from the New France mission. Rather than focusing solely on ‘making [narrative] sense’ of texts (as Prempain sought to do in the letter with which I began this chapter), I argue that a letter’s discourse – and, by extension, missionary discourse – was supported not only by its materiality, but also by the sensory experiences of its authors, bearers, and readers. Since there is no direct evidence of the ways in which birch bark letters were read – and sensed – in the seventeenth century, I begin with a brief examination of the rhetorical functions of letters’ materiality in printed missionary accounts. This is followed by a discussion of the ways in which bodies, particularly those of letter bearers, were entangled with the objects they carried, co-creating meanings. In order to examine readers’ experiences of birch bark letters, the final section draws together examples of reader reception. Birch bark letters, I argue, were sensory synecdoches – little pieces of New France – that enabled their recipients to sense, experience, and gain a feeling of ownership over the colony, without ever leaving the metropole.18
II.
The materiality of letters was rhetorically important in narratives of the New France mission.19 Letters or parts of letters were often printed in the Jesuits’ Relations, annual accounts of missionary activity published in Paris between 1632 and 1673. The Relations were composed by the mission superior in Quebec, using letters he had received from missionaries in the field, before being sent to Paris for further editing and publication.20 Although few birch bark letters survive today, references to this type of missive can be found in a variety of missionary documents. As well as birch bark, these sources detail a number of other paper substitutes (including gunpowder wrapping paper) that were used when paper was in short supply – one of the many hardships and privations described by missionaries in the field.21
Descriptions of the conditions in which all kinds of letters were composed were intended to shape their readers’ experiences. A series of fragments that appeared in the Relation of 1660–1661, for instance, gave detailed descriptions of the dire conditions of several Frenchmen held captive in villages of the Haudenosaunee.22 A young soldier, François Hertel, who was being held prisoner in a Mohawk village, was the author of one of these fragments. Hertel had been tortured, and his hands and fingers had been burned and mutilated.23 ‘My Father’, he wrote to Jesuit Father Simon Le Moine:
[…] bless the hand that writes to you, which has had one finger burnt in a Calumet as reparation to the Majesty of God, whom I have offended. The other hand has a thumb cut off, - but do not tell my poor Mother.24
Another Frenchman, a fellow captive of Hertel, opened his letter to Le Moine in a similar fashion: ‘I have scarcely any fingers left’, he wrote, ‘so do not be surprised that I write so badly’.25 The men’s bodily suffering was confirmed by their letters, which were poorly penned and grubby.
Although these might appear to be highly personal evocations of hardship, they clearly conform to contemporary standards of hagiographic writing. Indeed, there are similarities between these letters and a letter written a number of years earlier (1644) by Jesuit missionary Father Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani, when he too had been a captive of the Haudenosaunee. ‘The letter is badly written’, Bressani wrote,
and quite soiled, because, in addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it only has one finger on his right hand; and it is difficult to avoid staining the paper with the blood which flows from his wounds, not yet healed; he uses arquebus powder for ink and the earth for a table.26
This letter, which was printed in Bressani’s Breve Relatione (1653), is not simply about the trials of letter writing in inhospitable environments; it is filled with the rich symbolism of martyrdom. But the missionary carefully manipulated hagiographic tropes. Unlike some holy texts, the account was not deliberately written in blood, but was inadvertently ‘soiled’. Rather than representing his blood as a symbol of his passion for the faith, the missionary portrayed it as worldly and unclean. Paradoxically, this display of humility only served to confirm the missionary author’s saintliness. All of the above letters appeared in print, but their meanings were shaped by descriptions of their soiled materiality. Readers of the printed Relations were encouraged to imagine receipt of these letters – stained and physically repellent – in order to elicit empathetic, sensory responses.
III.
Since the only means of sending letters was on board the ships that brought supplies to the colony and returned to France with trade goods, letters from New France were infrequent and subject to the hazards of the crossing.27 Letter writers ran the risk of their correspondence being lost during the long transatlantic voyage; ships could be wrecked in storms or captured by enemy vessels. Furthermore, the messengers who carried these letters could be robbed or simply lose the letters out of carelessness.28 Choosing a reliable letter bearer was therefore important.
When possible, missionaries placed their letters in the care of trusted missionary colleagues, who often had first-hand knowledge of the events described therein. This knowledge enabled them to verbally supplement a missive’s written content.29 But missionary authors also recognised the benefits of sending their letters with Indigenous travellers.30 The 1636 Relation, for instance, included a fragment of a letter written by Fathers Charles Garnier and Pierre Chastellain. ‘The bearers [porteurs] of this’, they wrote, ‘will tell you, better than we can, the name of the place where they met us’.31 The letter’s authors here rely on the knowledge of Indigenous letter bearers to correctly pass on (and pronounce) the name of the place where the missive was written. Additionally, the printed Relation presents the text of the letter in italics (as was often the case with printed letters or letter fragments included in these accounts), signaling the letter’s existence as an object simultaneously part of – and separate from – the Relation itself.32 The letter’s text was important, but so too was its materiality.
When Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani returned to France in 1650, he carried a letter by Mother Marie de l’Incarnation, the first superior of the Ursuline seminary at Quebec, to her son Claude Martin.33 Marie’s letter included a description of Bressani’s body, which was presented as an object of awe-inspiring curiosity that could be investigated using the senses. ‘You will see a living Martyr’, she wrote, ‘of whose sufferings you have heard, especially of his captivity in the country of the Iroquois’.34 This was an opportunity, Marie implied, for Claude to acquire visual proof of the sacrifices made in New France for the holy faith, sacrifices which he had – up until this point – only heard about in texts, such as the Relations. (Hearing had connotations of unreliability here: the word ‘bruit’ could imply ‘rumour’).35 The missionary’s body – and his evident physical suffering on the mission – thus authenticated textual and reported missionary discourse. Claude’s visual experiences, Marie’s letter implied, would confirm the reports he had heard. But his ‘investigation’ of Bressani’s body had to be a covert one. ‘Without seeming to’, Marie urged her son, ‘look at his [Bressani’s] hands; you will see them mutilated, and almost without one finger which is whole’.36 Marie’s warning to Claude that his observation of Bressani had to be discreet implied a need to respect the missionary’s holy person. Indigenous individuals taken to Europe (often against their will) were, in contrast, frequently ‘displayed’ in port towns and at court.37 Many Europeans viewed these people as objects of study, like those that could be seen in cabinets of curiosity.38 What one could and could not be seen to investigate, therefore, depended on who was the object of investigation.
The letter described above was one of Marie’s shorter letters to Claude; we might speculate that she believed the missionary’s body needed little additional explanation, except an initial guide to interpretation. Two weeks previously, she had written to her son to inform him that she had sent a letter with each of the missionaries who was returning to France that winter. ‘Please receive these saintly figures’, she implored him, ‘as though they were living Martyrs, who have undertaken [spiritual] works, and suffered incredible hardships [croix incroïables] for those who have not experienced the Huron mission’.39 Missionary bodies, Marie implied, were to be exalted because of the ‘incredible hardships’ that they had experienced, hardships that other Europeans could only imagine. Jesuit priests would have prepared for deployment using Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.40 In an oft-quoted passage in the fifth exercise of the first week (the ‘meditation on hell’), the exercitant is required to imagine themself in the ‘length, breadth, and depth of hell’ through guided meditation on each of the five senses.41 But French missionaries in Canada recognised the limitations of this preparation. In Canada, Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Bruyas stated, ‘One must expect to have all his senses martyred daily’.42 After five years on the mission terrain he wryly conceded that there was ‘a great difference between meditating on the [C]anada mission in one’s oratory, and finding oneself Exercising the duties of a [C]anadian missionary’.43 Mother Cécile de Sainte-Croix, an Ursuline nun who travelled to New France in 1639 as part of the first group of nuns to settle in the colony, shared Bruyas’s sentiment. ‘It has often crossed my mind’, she wrote, with some humour, to the superior of the convent at Dieppe, ‘that experiencing the hardships of the sea is a very different thing from only hearing about them’.44 Imagining New France, these accounts implied, was no substitute for being there.
While missionary bodies provided living examples of missionary discourse, however, these bodies were simultaneously authorised by the texts they carried. Marie’s instruction, ‘Please receive these saintly figures’, is evocative of the letters of authentication that accompanied and legitimised relics. Two days after Marie sent her letter describing ‘these saintly figures’, the nun sent Claude relics of the Canadian martyrs, accompanied by another letter. ‘It is by the Reverend Father Bonnin’, she wrote, ‘faithful witness to the sufferings of our Saintly Martyrs that I send you their relics’.45 In this account Bonnin was the authenticator; he legitimised the relics and, if necessary, could provide testimony as to their origins. The missionary’s authority to do so was simultaneously established by the letter he carried. Missionary letter bearers, then, were not only intermediaries between correspondents, but co-created meanings with the objects they delivered.
In some cases, the bodily absence of a letter bearer could be rhetorically significant. Writing to Father Barthélemy Vimont from Wendake in 1640, Father Jérome Lalemant told the superior of the death of Joseph Chihouatenhoua, a pious convert. ‘I was preparing to write to Your Reverence for the last time in this current year, by the hand of Joseph Chihouatenhoua, our good Christian: and now the same paper of which he should have been the bearer is used to carry to Your Reverence news of his death’.46 Joseph Chihouatenhoua was regarded by the missionaries as an exemplary convert. In Lalemant’s account, the letter recounting his death is styled as an almost-contact relic (it was the paper he almost carried). ‘No doubt this death’, Lalemant asserted, ‘although sudden for this good and excellent Christian, did not take him unprepared’, for not only was he ‘continually in the grace of God’, but he had also commended his soul to God that very morning, as was his custom.47 Lalemant wrote that on the afternoon of his death, Joseph had gone to the woods ‘to cut some sticks of Cedar to finish the canoe which was to carry him to Kébec’ (with the missionary’s letter).48 The unfinished task signified a life cut short, a journey not taken, a letter undelivered. In Lalemant’s narrative, texts and bodies intertwined. Whilst accounts of missionary captivity stress the haptic contact of authors with their letters, what strikes the reader here is the absence of contact with the letter’s subject. In a colony in which there were not yet any martyrs (the first ‘martyrdom’ was not recorded until two years later, in 1642), the evocation of the sacred in everyday, bodily actions (as described in missionary texts) was vitally important for the establishment of a Catholic culture.49
IV.
The birch bark letters with which I opened this essay performed dual functions: on the one hand, they related the events of the mission, and on the other, they were ‘curiosities’, small pieces of the colony sent in recompense for financial and spiritual support. The recipients of both letters were important advocates of the New France mission. As the son of Marie de l’Incarnation, Claude Martin had a personal interest in the colony and was acquainted with a number of its missionaries, including Joseph-Antoine Poncet de la Rivière (known as Joseph Poncet), who wrote him a birch bark letter in 1647 from Wendake.50 Claude would also become the editor of Marie de l’Incarnation’s Vie after her death in 1672, and his editorial work would ensure his mother’s place as one of the most well-known chroniclers of the New France mission.51 The recipient of the second letter, the receveur général Charles Sain, was also a staunch supporter of the mission. He was the principal benefactor of a small chapel in the Ursuline church that was dedicated to the Child Jesus on 29 November 1671.52 Over the years Sain sent numerous adornments for the chapel: paintings, gilded candlesticks, gilded figures of the Child Jesus made from wax and wood, gilded vases, bouquets, hangings, dye for making tapestries, and ornamental candlesticks.53
The birch bark letter sent to Sain in 1676 was likely a recompense for these benefactions. Written in the Wendat language with a French parallel translation on the same piece of bark (see Fig. 8.2),54 the letter identified its authors as ‘very humble servants the Hurons, Gaspesians, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, Algonquins, Montagnais, and Odawa’.55 Although in a single hand, it is clear that the letter was intended to be viewed as a collective effort, and the young women asked their correspondent to ‘Take courage: continue to have compassion for us. [And] in particular pray continually to God that he gives us the grace to believe well so that we can see you in heaven after our death’.56 Writing letters, as Fay Bound Alberti argues, was a social undertaking that engaged author and correspondent in ‘a relationship of obligation and expectation’.57 The birch bark letter written to Sain was no different. The ‘gift’ of this object was presumably intended to foster a sense of connection between the receveur général and the seminary’s pupils. The affective words used in this short note of thanks were likely meant to encourage Sain to continue making donations to the seminary (‘continue to have compassion for us’), and – of course – to prompt him to pray for the mission’s success (‘pray continually to God that he give us the grace to believe well’). In response for his generosity, Sain was given not only gratitude (as expressed in the letter’s content), but a material recompense, in the form of the birch bark letter.
Figure 8.2Indigenous seminarians’ letter to Sain, 1676
Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France
Sain’s letter was thus imbued with spiritual meaning, but it was also a ‘curiosity’. Owing to missionaries’ privileged access to the ‘wonder’ of the so-called New World (and their extensive correspondence networks), they often supplied rare specimens to correspondents in France.58 In 1687, Jesuit missionary Father Thierry Beschefer sent ‘Pieces of bark on which figures have been marked by teeth’ to the French collector, Cabart de Villermont.59 Birch bark biting is an Indigenous art form, but Beschefer neglected to describe the intricate designs that would likely have adorned the bark (these may have been human figures, animals, or flora).60 In contrast to the supposedly holy touch of suffering Jesuits, the human contact with these objects may have been viewed by Europeans as animalistic, since the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were widely – and erroneously – believed to be cannibals. As Constance Classen and David Howes have argued, the ‘actual uses’ of objects were unimportant; their principal function was to ‘confirm Western representations of non-Western cultures and serve as a springboard for the Western imagination’.61 Furthermore, teeth played an important role in missionary rhetoric. In accounts of torture they were often used to ‘crush’ fingers or to tear out nails.62 Like contact relics, the pieces of bark received by Villermont enabled him to touch – by extension and without danger – the bodies of those who had made the incisions.63
In this context, birch bark letters might be viewed as pieces of the ‘rude’ North American landscape, ‘tamed’ by the inclusion of writing, one of the supposedly civilised traits that missionaries believed set Europeans apart from those they regarded as ‘barbarians’.64 In 1635, for example, Jesuit missionary Father Jean de Brébeuf described the practice of learning Indigenous languages through writing on birch bark. ‘All the French who are here have eagerly applied themselves to it’, he enthused, ‘reviving the ancient usage of writing on birch bark, for want of paper’.65 Although Jesuit rhetoric here styled material shortage as a (European) cultural renaissance, however, Indigenous people in North America had long used birch bark as a support for scribal production.66
Like the birch bark itself, the inclusion of text from the Wendat language in Sain’s letter also lent this ‘curiosity’ an air of authenticity. Without the assistance of the French translation, the receveur général would not have understood the meaning of the words written on the letter. The principal purpose of the Wendat text, therefore, seems to have been to emphasise that the letter had been composed by Indigenous seminarians. But the inclusion of these ‘novel’ words might also have prompted new sensory experiences for the reader or listener.
Since there is no textual evidence of Sain’s responses to the letters he received, it is helpful to briefly consider some comparative examples. Writing to Mother Marie-Gillette Roland, a sister of the Visitation, on 4 September 1640, Marie de l’Incarnation greeted her in Anishinâbemowin (a language Marie would have known as ‘Algonquin’).67 ‘I received great consolation reading your letter’, Marie wrote. She continued:
Ni-Misens, criȣek ȣasa ȣapicha entaien aiega eapitch Khisadkihirariȣi Khiȣaparmir, sȣugaȣiechimir. Ni-Misens, miȣitch Kasasadkihatch Dieu, Kihisadkihir. That is what came out. That is to say in our language: My Sister even though you are very far away, nonetheless I still love you, more than if I could see you. I firmly embrace you, my sister, and because you love God, that is why I love you.68
In this letter, Marie explained that she ‘could not resist’ greeting her sister in this way ‘and saying to her almost exactly [a peu près] what we usually say to our dear Neophytes’.69 Through imagined verbal communication with her sister, Marie envisioned herself closer to her. Conversely, her love of her sisters in France could also be demonstrated through her love of the Indigenous girls she instructed in the seminary. By imagining her sisters in the place of the seminarians (and greeting them as she would the young women), she embraced them textually, reaching out across time and space (given the distance the letter had to travel it would be many weeks before her sister read her words).70 Marie’s statement that an Anishinâbemowin greeting suddenly ‘burst out’ of her (‘ce qui m’a echapé’), suggests her familiarity with local culture. She had, she implied, quickly become accustomed to speaking Anishinâbemowin, ‘our language’, as she called it. The repetition of ‘our’ (‘our dear Neophytes’, ‘our language’) was here used to appropriate Indigenous culture and even individuals (i.e., converts). This verbal image of a nun moved (by her correspondent’s letter) to exclaim ‘en savage’ (i.e. in a Native tongue), is reminiscent of mystical accounts of vows pronounced during or after mystical visions.
Marie’s juxtaposition of Catholic imagery with the Anishinâbemowin language would have been unfamiliar – and jarring – to her correspondent. In the context of the description that follows, of the nun sitting amongst Indigenous women (whose clothes, Marie exclaimed, ‘do not smell as good as those of the Ladies of France!’), the reader is invited to laugh at the unexpected scene.71 Punctuated with a jaunty exclamation mark, the nun’s statement appears to have been a joke intended to imply European cultural superiority. The evocation of the unpleasant smell, and thus bodily ‘uncleanliness’, of the Indigenous women she described also denoted their supposed barbarity.72 Whilst the nuns were happy to learn – and appropriate – Indigenous languages, the evocation of smell is here used to imply cultural difference.73 ‘Our Reverend Fathers’, Marie’s letter continued, ‘although great doctors’ (‘quoique grands docteurs’) learned with the nuns and did so ‘with incredible affection and docility’.74 This description is reminiscent of some of the nun’s descriptions of well-behaved, pious seminarians, and pokes affectionate fun at the learned priests who, through their language learning, were once again pupils (and whose demeanour reflected this change in status).75 Many early modern Europeans believed that language shaped identity; speaking an Indigenous language could therefore render an individual ‘wild’.76 But Marie pre-empted any such reading by her correspondent, asserting that when she had lived in France she had ‘never troubled myself to read a history book’. Now, however, she had to read and meditate on all sorts of things ‘en sauvage’.77 For Marie, language learning had become a gateway to all kinds of new knowledge.
How then might these Indigenous-language texts have been perceived by readers who did not understand them? Given the communal lifestyle of early modern conventual orders, it is likely that Marie’s letter would have been read aloud. Missionaries expected their letters to be shared, particularly when time – and sometimes, lack of paper – prevented them from writing to all those whom they wished to send tidings.78 The practice of sending ‘circulars’ (letters which ‘circulated’ around religious orders to update the community on the latest events) also encouraged a culture of communal reading.79 Like Sain when he encountered the Wendat words in his letter from the Ursulines, Marie de l’Incarnation’s sisters at the Visitandine convent would likely have struggled to pronounce the Anishinâbemowin phrases she had penned for – and to – them (when the letter was published in 1681, a margin note explained how the unfamiliar character ‘ȣ’ should be pronounced).80 They may have been impressed by her ability to learn a language so different from their own. Perhaps they found the sounds strange or even amusing. Jesuit missionaries, for instance, acknowledged that their own mispronunciation of Indigenous languages often made them the subject of ridicule among those they sought to convert.81 Any attempt at pronunciation, however, would no doubt have led to a bodily awareness that the language in front of them required the mouth to form words in ways to which they were unaccustomed.82
Evidence of the collective enjoyment and affective qualities of letters can be found in abundance in seventeenth-century correspondence. Letters could be shown to the recipient’s friends and networks (commercial, intellectual, and so on). The letters of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626–1696), famous for her prolific, almost fifty-year-long correspondence with her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné, comtesse de Grignon, provide useful insights into the public enjoyment of letters. A close friend of Madame de La Fayette and La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné often read and composed letters with some of Paris’s most renowned literary figures. ‘I have never seen anything so funny as what you write about that’, Madame de Sévigné praised her daughter’s description of the disastrous Lenten sermon of a Minim at Aix, ‘I read it to M. de la Rochefoucauld, who laughed heartily’.83 ‘We laughed til we cried’, the marquise enthused as she recounted reading another letter, ‘about that girl who sang at the top of her voice in church that bawdy song she was confessing to have sung elsewhere’.84 We can imagine the sisters of the Visitation of Tours taking similar enjoyment from Mother Marie’s letter to Mother Marie-Gillette.
Letters from New France could therefore allow their recipients in France to live vicariously through their correspondents. To some, Canada seemed inhospitable; its winter climate ‘rude’ and unforgiving. In a 1645 letter to her son, Marie de l’Incarnation wrote that before learning that Canada was a country, she had thought that it was a term that had been invented to frighten children.85 Madame de Sévigné, upon finding out that her daughter’s husband had not been offered the governorship of Canada as his wife had hoped, wrote to her daughter to console her. ‘Look at Canada as a good thing no longer available’, she advised, ‘But whatever your philosophy leads you to suppose, it’s a dreary business to live in another climate with people you would hate to know in this one’.86 As a woman of letters, Madame de Sévigné was not opposed to learning about other countries, but she preferred to do so from the comfort of her Parisian hôtel. In the same letter to her daughter, she asserted, ‘“We belong to all countries” – that is from Montaigne, but while saying that he was very glad to be in his own home’.87 Written correspondence could therefore allow a person to learn about Canada without ever leaving French soil. Yet, since there was often no way of verifying a letter’s content, recipients had to trust that the information they had been given was accurate and authentic. Natural histories and other books written about the New World provided a source of reference, but like Montaigne’s essays, many of these were written without any first-hand experience of the distant lands they described.
In contrast to other forms of communication, such as travel narratives, birch bark letters offered the ultimate ‘proof’ of their contents’ authenticity. They were – quite literally – small pieces of Canada that enabled an individual to experience the mission terrain, whether or not they could read the written text. Simultaneously relations and curiosities, they could provide not only textual information (in the form of body-witness accounts) but novel sensory experiences: the textual evocation of sensation (e.g. bad smells); the sensory investigation of the object; the speaking or hearing of unfamiliar sounds. Since birch bark letters would have been unfamiliar to most early modern French women and men, it is likely they stimulated a certain amount of sensory curiosity (they could be opened, smoothed out, held, smelled, passed around, displayed, regarded, and so on). Early modern curiosities were often examined using a hands-on, investigative approach: holding an object to gauge its weight, for instance, might allow a curious individual to learn more about it than she would if she were to only look at it.88 But while letters (both birch bark and paper) gave the illusion of experiencing New France, they represented – as sensory synecdoches – only a small part of the whole.
Furthermore, the ability to touch – and the ability to bestow the right to touch – was a privilege that revealed dynamics of power between individuals (particularly private collectors and the guests who they permitted to handle objects from their collections).89 Possessing a birch bark letter may have held connotations of ownership of the New France mission. In the French language, hands and possession were intimately linked. When a fiefdom ‘changed hands’, the Thresor de la langue françoyse (1606) noted, its lord and owner changed.90 The subentry for ‘to change hands’ (‘changer de main’) continued, ‘we say I have it in hand, that is to say, in my power, hold, and possession’.91 ‘Careful’, Charles Sain might have warned, as he handed his newly acquired birch bark letter to one of his acquaintances, ‘feel how fragile it is’. Touch has long been associated with proof; in scripture, ‘doubting’ Thomas was invited to touch Christ in order to prove his resurrection.92 Although Joseph Poncet’s 1647 letter to Claude Martin is almost indecipherable, it is nonetheless possible to glean meaning through its form and paratextual elements (in this case, text added after the letter’s receipt). The letter is marked (in the same hand that recorded the letter’s entrance into the collection of the library of Saint-Germain-des-Près in 1653), ‘Dominus meus & Deus meus’, the phrase that Thomas uttered in John’s Gospel after he was invited to touch Christ’s wounds.93 Read in this context, birch bark letters authenticate the texts they support and embody. Having received tangible proof of the ‘successes’ (that is, the conversions) of the New France mission, Charles Sain and its other benefactors could rest safe in the knowledge that their money was being put to good use.
V.
In conclusion, since scholars of New France rely heavily on nineteenth-century source collections, attending to the editorial choices of their compilers – and, in particular, to their omissions – is important. Nineteenth-century scholars viewed birch bark letters as objects, rather than texts, and, as a result, these sources have been largely excluded from historiographical accounts. Attending to the materiality of these texts, however, highlights the sensory complexities of communicating across the early modern Atlantic World.
Letter writers were well aware of the significance not only of their words, but also of the writing materials they employed, and of the bearers who carried their missives. Further research, however, is necessary in order to examine the roles of letter bearers, in particular Indigenous letter bearers, in early modern correspondence networks.94 For those receiving letters from Canada, the materiality of these missives would likely have been even more significant when they were unable to read their textual contents. Very few would have been able to read Indigenous languages, and some may also have been illiterate (a circumstance not uncommon in the early modern world). The study of materiality, therefore, has wide-ranging implications for the history of transatlantic reader reception. While many missionary letters described their own first-hand experiences of the mission, others were subtler, combining text and form to create sensory curiosities for their recipients, and functioning as material recompenses for financial support. Although missionary conveyers of sacred missives retained the power to bestow these little pieces of New France, their recipients were nonetheless permitted to possess small, sensible samples of the colonial terrain.
Notes
During the writing of this essay, Robin Macdonald was the recipient of an Australian Research Council Post Doctoral Fellowship (project number CE110001011) at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Western Australia.
1 Henri Omont (1857–1940) graduated from the École des Chartres in 1881 when he was hired by the Bibliothèque nationale to work in the department of printed books. The following year, he began working in the manuscripts department, and became curator in 1899. See Bernard Joassart, ‘Henri Omont et les Bollandistes: Correspondance’, Analecta Bollandiana 123 (2005), 378.
2 Henri Omont to [Camille de Rochemonteix], Paris, 27 September 1894, Archives des jésuites au Canada [AJC], Fonds Rochemonteix, 4013, 359. All translations of this letter are my own. The original French reads: ‘Vos études sur les missions en Amérique vous feront sans doute trouver quelque intérêt à deux documents tres [sic] fragiles que vous me permettrez de vous signaler’.
3 Joseph Poncet to Dom Claude Martin, Sainte-Marie-des-Hurons, 28 June 1647 and ‘Lettre de remerciements de jeunes Huronnes “à M. Sain, receveur général des finances à Bourges”’, October 1676, Bibliothèque nationale de France [BNF], Nouvelles acquisitions françaises [NAF], 6561. The Receveur général collected direct taxes (taille, capitation, and vingtièmes). See Roland E. Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, vol. 2, The Organs of State and Society, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 207. The letter to Sain gives no place of authorship, but Natalie Zemon Davis identifies it as a letter written by Indigenous seminarians at the Ursuline convent. See Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 96. This seems likely, since Sain donated generously to the convent. I use ‘Wendat’ and ‘Wendake’ (instead of ‘Huron’ and ‘Huronia’), except when quoting. These terms were used by seventeenth-century Wendat people. See Georges E. Sioui, Huron-Wendat: The Heritage of the Circle, trans. Jane Brierley (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 3.
4 Despite an extensive search, I have been unable to identify Prempain.
5 A. Prempain to [Camille de Rochemonteix], Tuesday 11 December 1894, AJC, Fonds Rochemonteix, 4013, 361–63. My emphases. ‘Voilà tous ce qu’on peut recueillir de suivi qui offre un sens. L’encre de mauvaise qualité s’est effacée, et on n’aperçoit plus çà et là que quelques mots de loin en loin. Pour pouvoir les lire, il faut un beau soleil et des instruments. M. Omont me dit qu’il n’y a qu’un moyen de tirer parti de ce qui reste de ce monument[.] Relever les mots qu’on peut à moitié lire, à moitié deviner… les étaler un à un sur le papier, en laissant entre eux des intervalles, puis à l’aide de ces mots, construire des phrases où ils entreront et qui aient un sens[.]Ce travail très-fatiguant durerait longtemps; puis ou serait l’authenticité d’une lettre fabriqué de cette manière’.
6 The letters had previously been held at the library of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près, the motherhouse of the Congrégation de Saint-Maur, the Benedictine order to which Claude Martin belonged.
7 Omont to [Rochemonteix], Paris, 27 September 1894, 360: ‘chez l’encadreur’.
8 This mirrors the nineteenth-century emphasis on looking at, but not touching, museum collections. This ‘hands-off’ approach was also geared towards preservation of rare objects, one of museums’ principal functions in the period. See Constance Classen and David Howes, ‘The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts’, in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums, and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 208.
9 The letters are absent from the following major edited source collections: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), hereafter, JR; Lucien Campeau, ed., Monumenta Novæ Franciæ, 9 vols. (Rome/Montreal: Institutum Historicum Soc. Iesu/Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1989–2003), hereafter, MNF.
10 Although the birch bark letter written from the Ursuline seminary appears as an image in Natalie Zemon Davis’s Women on the Margins, Davis provides no analysis of this object, which has an illustrative, rather than an analytical, function.
11 Roger Chartier, ‘Meaningful Forms’, Times Literary Supplement (London), 6 October 1989, Issue 4514, Liber 1, 8; on the materiality of letters in early modern England, see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); James Daybell and Peter Hinds, ‘Introduction: Material Matters’, Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730, ed. James Daybell and Peter Hinds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1.
12 For an examination of reading as a bodily practice, see Helen Smith, ‘“More swete vnto the eare / than holsome for ye mynde”: Embodying Early Modern Women’s Reading’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly 73 (2010): 413–32.
13 Julia Boss, ‘Writing a Relic: The Uses of Hagiography in New France’, in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 222–29 (quotation at 229).
14 Boss, ‘Writing a Relic’, 213. Karin Vélez makes a similar argument for gift exchange between the Wendat Christians of Lorette and other Catholic communities in Canada and Europe. See Vélez. ‘“A Sign That We Are Related to You”: The Transatlantic Gifts of the Hurons of the Jesuit Mission of Lorette, 1650–1750’, French Colonial History 12 (2011): 31–44. For a nuanced discussion of these gifts, see Muriel Clair, ‘La Chapelle de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette’, in Les arts en Nouvelle-France, ed. Laurier Lacroix (Quebec: Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec/Les Publications du Quebec, 2012), 72–84.
15 See, for example, Claude Du Molinet, Le Cabinet de la Bibliotheque de Sainte Genevieve: Divisé en deux parties: Contenant les Antiquitez de la Réligion des Chrétiens, des Egyptiens, & des Romans; des Tombeaux, des Poids & des Médailles; des Monnoyes, des Pierres antiques gravées, & des Mineraux; des Talismans, des Lampes antiques, des Animaux les plus rares & les plus singuliers, des Coquilles les plus considérables, des Fruits étrangers, & quelques Plantes exquises (Paris, 1692), 33.
16 On the utility of Jesuit correspondence networks for the communication of scientific knowledge, for example, see Steven J. Harris, ‘Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science’, Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996), esp. 289.
17 Neil Kenny, ‘La collection comme mode discursif dans les relations de voyage françaises aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, French Studies 65 (2011), 360, 361, 365.
18 My thanks to Mark Jenner for suggesting the use of the term synecdoche to describe these letters and for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
19 To the best of my knowledge, the letters examined in this essay are the only two extant examples of birch bark letters from the seventeenth century. For mentions of birch bark letters in missionary accounts, see Marie de l’Incarnation to Dom Raymond de S. Bernard, Tours, end 1638, in Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672): Correspondance, ed. Dom Guy Oury (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971), Lettre XXX, 68, hereafter MI, Corr.; Louis Nicolas, The Natural History of the New World, trans. by Nancy Senior, in The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World, ed. with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, trans. by Nancy Senior, modernization by Réal Ouellet (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 299; JR, 32: 165; JR, 41: 167; JR, 47: 83–85.
20 On the editorial process for the Relations, see Allan Greer, ‘Introduction’, in The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St-Martin’s, 2000), 14.
21 For an example of a letter written on gunpowder wrapping paper, see JR, 47: 85–87.
22 JR, 47: 83–93. On the role of bodily ‘fragmentation’ in the Jesuit ‘martyrs’’ memorialisation, see Boss, ‘Writing a Relic’, 225–26.
23 This practice ensured that captives were identifiable and was intended to prevent them from using weapons against their captors. See Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 66.
24 JR, 47: 85.
25 JR, 47: 87.
26 JR, 39: 55. Italics in original.
27 The first ships from France set sail in March and the last, in May. They might spend a month or more at the port of Quebec before returning to France. The last vessels usually left in October, and sometimes as late as November. See Jane E. Harrison, Until Next Year: Letter-Writing and the Mails in Canada, 1640–1830 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1987), 55. See also Harrison, ‘The Intercourse of Letters: Transatlantic Correspondence in Early Canada, 1640–1812’ (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2000), TSpace. Available at: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/14534/1/NQ53759.pdf.
28 The messenger who carried the letters that comprised the Copie de deux lettres, published in place of the 1655 Relation (which had been lost at sea), was robbed by highwaymen on the road from La Rochelle to Paris. See Copie de deux lettres envoieés de la Novvelle France, Au Pere Procureur des Missions de la Compagnie de Iesvs en ces contrées (Paris, 1656), 6.
29 The importance of a letter’s bearer stretches back to biblical times. See Alain Boureau, ‘The Letter-Writing Norm, a Mediaeval Invention’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Christopher Woodall (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), 27.
30 Relatively little work has been done on the roles of Indigenous people in early modern North American correspondence networks. For a notable exception, see Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), for instance, 45–75.
31 JR, 9: 251. Italics in original.
32 Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Novvelle France en l’année 1636: Enuoyée au R. Pere Provincial de la Compagnie de Iesvs en la Prouince de France: Par le P. Paul le Ieune de la mesme Compagnie, Superieur de la Residence de Kébec (Paris, 1637), 233–34.
33 Marie famously ‘abandoned’ her young son Claude when she joined the Ursulines at Tours in 1631 (she professed in 1633). Claude later followed his mother into a religious vocation and became a Benedictine. For an account of Marie’s life, see Davis, Women on the Margins, ‘New Worlds: Marie de l’Incarnation’, 63–139. For a biographical account of Claude’s life, see Guy-Marie Oury, Dom Claude Martin: Le Fils de Marie de l’Incarnation (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1983).
34 Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, Quebec, 30 October 1650, MI, Corr., Lettre CXXXI, 406. My translation and emphasis. All translations from Marie’s correspondence are my own. ‘Vous verrez un Martyr vivant, des souffrances duquel vous avez cy-devant entendu parler, sur tout de sa captivité au païs des Hiroquois’.
35 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1694), s.v. “bruit.”
36 Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, 30 October 1650, 406. ‘Sans faire semblant de rien, regardez ses mains; vous les verrez mutilées, et presque sans aucun doigt qui soit entier’. Cfr. Emma Anderson’s discussion of Isaac Jogues’s meeting with Anne of Austria in ‘Blood, Fire, and “Baptism”: Three Perspectives on the Death of Jean de Brébeuf, Seventeenth-Century Jesuit “Martyr”’, in Native Americans, Christianity and the Reshaping of American Religious Landscapes, ed. Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 131.
37 For examples, see Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), in particular, 12–14.
38 Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 9. For a discussion of bodies in cultures of collecting from the sixteenth century onwards, see Peter C. Mancall, ‘Collecting Americans: The Anglo-American experience from Cabot to NAGPRA’, in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 192–213.
39 Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, Quebec, 17 September 1650, MI, Corr., Lettre CXXIX, 403. My emphasis. ‘Recevez, s’il vous plaist, ces saints Personnages comme autant de Martyrs vivans, qui ont entrepris des travaux, et souffert des croix incroïables à ceux qui n’ont pas l’expérience des Missions Huronnes’.
40 Nuns in New France also performed the Exercises. See Mutius Vitelleschi to Marie de l’Incarnation, Rome, 7 January 1640, MNF, Vol. 4, Les grandes épreuves (1638–1640), Doc. 110, 444.
41 Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, in Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. by George E. Ganss with the collaboration of Parmananda R. Divarkar, Edward J. Malatesta, and Martin E. Palmer (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 141.
42 JR, 51: 137.
43 JR, 51: 137.
44 Cécile de Sainte-Croix to the superior of the Ursulines at Dieppe, Quebec, 2 September 1639, MI, Corr., Appendix II, 951–52. My translation. ‘Il m’a, dis je, souvent passé par l’esprit que c’est autre chose d’expérimenter les incommoditez de la mer que d’en ouïr parler seulement’.
45 Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, Quebec, 19 September 1650, MI, Corr., Lettre CXXX, 405. ‘C’est par le Révérend Père Bonnin fidèle témoin des souffrances de nos Saints Martyrs que je vous envoie de leurs reliques’.
46 JR, 20: 77–79.
47 JR, 20: 79–81.
48 JR, 20: 81.
49 On the importance of local, lived Catholicism in the creation of holy persons in New France, see Timothy G. Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 7–10. Julia Boss speculates that the colonists’ limited access to relics may have made them more open to the notion that a book could be a holy site. Boss, ‘Writing a Relic’, 228–29.
50 Poncet had been one of Claude’s teachers during the latter’s time at the Jesuit college in Orléans (1633–36), and sailed to New France in the same fleet as Marie de l’Incarnation. See Marie de l’Incarnation, Relation de 1654, in Dom Albert Jamet, ed. Écrits spirituels et historiques (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1930), 2: 299.
51 See Claude Martin, La Vie de la venerable Mere Marie de l’Incarnation: Premiere superieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France: Tirée de ses lettres et de ses Ecrits (Paris, 1677). On Claude’s role in the production of Marie’s life narrative, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and the Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 59–64.
52 Musée du Québec, Trésors des communautés religieuses de la ville de Québec, exhibition catalogue (1973), 68 and 79.
53 Annales du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec, 1639–1822, Archives du Monastère des Ursulines de Québec [AMUQ], 1/E,1,1,3,2,1 (page 33). Sain’s name also appears in the Ursuline’s Registre des dons, 1640–1815, AMUQ, 1/E,3,4,6,1, f.9r-v. My thanks to Marie-Andrée Fortier, archivist at the AMUQ for locating this reference for me.
54 I am very grateful to John L. Steckley for confirming that this letter is written in Wendat and for kindly providing me with an English translation of the Wendat text. Personal correspondence, 14 November 2016.
55 ‘Lettre de remerciements de jeunes Huronnes’, October 1676. My translation from the French text. ‘tres humbles filles servantes les huronnes, Gaspésienne, d’onnontagué d’oiogȣen, algonquines, montagesses, et ȣtaoises’.
56 ‘Lettre de remerciements de jeunes Huronnes’, October 1676. My translation from the French text. ‘Prenez courage continuez à avoir compassion de nous mais sur tout priez continuellement Dieu quil nous donne la grâce de bien croire afin que nous vous voyons au ciel apres nostre mort’.
57 Fay Bound, ‘Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England’, Literature and History 11, (2002), 10.
58 See, for instance, MI, Corr., Lettre XLVIII, 114. On missionary correspondence networks and the development of Jesuit science, see Harris, ‘Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science’, 287–318.
59 JR, 63: 291. The original French (on page 290) reads: ‘Des écorces figures avec les dens’. On Villermont see, Augustin Val, Dictionnaire critique de biographie et d’histoire errata et supplement pour tous les dictionnaires historiques d’après des documents authentiques inédites (Paris: Henri Plon, 1867), 1271.
60 Few academic works have been devoted to birch bark. For an early example, see Frank G. Speck, Montagnais Art in Birch-Bark: A Circumpolar Trait (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1937). On birch bark biting, see 74–80.
61 Classen and Howes, ‘The Museum as Sensescape’, 203.
62 See, for example, JR, 5: 29. Whilst, broadly speaking, the early modern Church tended to condemn curiosity, which could lead to all manner of sins, there was recognition that curiosity could be accommodated and even exploited. See Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), in particular, chapter 2: ‘Institutions: Church’.
63 On experience without danger see Classen and Howes, ‘The Museum as Sensescape’, 203. Classen and Howes here draw on Nicholas Thomas’s Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
64 Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune identified the three stages through which humanity had apparently passed before reaching its ‘civilised’ peak: at first, men required only the basic necessities, then, they learned to combine the ‘tasteful and the necessary’, and finally, they began to contemplate science in order to perfect the human condition. JR, 7: 7–9. Cfr. José de Acosta’s three categories of barbarism, which ranked cultures according to whether or not they had formed urban societies or established writing systems. For an explanation of this model, see Simon Ditchfield, ‘What Did Natural History Have To Do With Salvation? José de Acosta SJ (1540–1600) in the Americas’, in God’s Bounty? The Churches of the Natural World, Studies in Church History 46 (2006), 157–59.
65 JR, 8: 131–33. Presumably Brébeuf was referring to the Greek and Roman usage of papyrus, rather than birch bark.
66 Whilst Indigenous North American cultures prior to European colonisation have often been described as ‘oral’, many scholars now challenge this designation, highlighting the long history of sign-making present in the archaeological record. See Germaine Warkentin, ‘In Search of the “Word of the Other”: Aboriginal Sign Systems and the History of the Book in Canada’, Book History 2 (1999), 3–4. Birch bark scrolls are used in sacred ceremonial practices of the Anishinâbe Midewiwin. See, for example, Michael Angel, Preserving the Sacred: Historical Perspectives on the Ojibwa Midewiwin (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2002); Joan M. Vastokas, ‘Interpreting Birch Bark Scrolls’, The Papers of the Algonquian Conference/Actes du Congrès des Algonquinistes 15 (1984), 425–44.
67 I would like to thank Kevin Brousseau for identifying this language as Anishinâbemowin and for kindly providing me with an analysis of the sentences. Personal correspondence with Kevin Brousseau, 21 September 2015. Marie would have referred to this language as ‘Algonquin’. The missions in the seventeenth-century Saint Lawrence Valley were frequented by Anishinâbe (‘Algonquin’) and Nêhiraw (‘Montagnais’) people; extant linguistic sources from the region therefore tend to be in Anishinâbemowin (‘Algonquin’) and Nêhirawêwin (‘Montagnais’). These two communities were closely linked: intermarriage was common and bilingualism was also likely to have been frequent. Personal correspondence with John E. Bishop, 21 September 2015. I am grateful to John for sharing his expertise. The dialects of the Nêhiraw Iriniw are referred to by some linguists as ‘Nêhirawêwin’ (‘Montagnais’ was the term employed by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French people). See John E. Bishop and Kevin Brousseau, ‘The End of the Jesuit Lexicographic Tradition in Nêhirawêwin: Jean-Baptiste de la Brosse and his Compilation of the Radicum Montanarum Silva (1766–1772)’, Historiographia Linguistica 38 (2011), 293n1.
68 Marie de l’Incarnation to Mother Marie-Gillette Roland, Quebec, 4 September 1640, MI, Corr., Lettre XLVI, 108. ‘J’ay reçu une singulière consolation à la lecture de votre lettre. Ni-Misens, criȣek ȣasa ȣapicha entaien aiega eapitch Khisadkihirariȣi Khiȣaparmir, sȣugaȣiechimir. Ni-Misens, miȣitch Kasasadkihatch Dieu, Kihisadkihir. Voilà qui m’est échapé. C’est à dire en notre langue: Ma Sœur encore que vous soiez bien loin, néanmoins je vous aime toujours, plus que si je vous voiois. Je vous embrasse fortement, ma Sœur, et parce que vous aimez Dieu, c’est pour cela que je vous aime’.
69 Marie de l’Incarnation to Mother Marie-Gillette Roland, 4 September 1640, 108. ‘lui dire à peu près ce que nous disons ordinairement à nos chères Néophites’.
70 Julia Boss argues that reading the same hagiographic narratives on both sides of the Atlantic could create an ‘imagined community’. See Boss, ‘Writing a Relic’, 305.
71 On incongruity and the humour of the unexpected, see Guy Halsall, ‘Funny Foreigners: Laughing with the Barbarians in Late Antiquity’, in Guy Halsall, ed. Humour, History, and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89–90.
72 When new students arrived they were washed (many wore protective grease) and clothed in French garments. See Marie de l’Incarnation to a lady of quality, Quebec, 3 September 1640, MI, Corr., Lettre XLIII, 97.
73 The attribution of a foul odour to a particular social or cultural group is usually a sign of animosity, and rarely a conclusion drawn from actual sense perception. See Constance Classen, ‘The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories’, American Anthropological Association 20 (1992), 134.
74 Marie de l’Incarnation to Mother Marie-Gillette Roland, 4 September 1640, 108. ‘ils le font avec une affection et docilité incroiable’.
75 See, for example, Marie’s description of a particularly pious young seminarian, who – though she was barely old enough to speak – said her prayers with fervour in both her mother tongue and in French. Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, Quebec, 29 August – 10 September 1646, MI, Corr., Lettre XCVII, 286–87. In a recent book, Masters and Servants, Micah True argues that while missionaries, as educators and priests, were ‘masters’ and ‘teachers’, they were simultaneously ‘students’, who learned Indigenous languages and cultural norms from those they sought to convert. See Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 6.
76 See Sara E. Melzer, Colonizer or Colonized? The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 116.
77 Marie de l’Incarnation to Marie-Gillette Roland, 4 September 1640, MI, Corr., Lettre XLVI, 108: ‘en France je ne me fusse jamais donné la peine de lire une histoire; et maintenant il faut que je lise et médite toute sorte de choses en sauvage’.
78 ‘I ought to write to many Fathers in your Province;’ wrote Jesuit Father Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot to Philippe Nappi, Superior of the Professed House in Rome, in 1640, ‘but the paper and the time fail me’. JR, 18: 33.
79 During meals in the refectory, for instance, one of the nuns would be charged with reading devotional texts or sacred histories. See Jérome Lalemant, Constitutions et Règlements des Premières Ursulines de Québec (1647), ed. Soeur Gabrielle Lapointe (Québec, 1974), esp. Chapter 20, ‘Des choses appartenant au refectoir’, 166–73.
80 As this note affirms, the letter represents ‘ou’, the Greek ligature for the letters ‘o’ and ‘u’. See Claude Martin, Lettres de la venerable Mere Marie de l’Incarnation, premiere superieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France: Divisées en deux parties (Paris, 1681), 335.
81 On the mocking of Jesuit missionary Father Paul Le Jeune for his inability to pronounce Montagnais, see Marie-Christine Pioffet, ‘Le Rire de Paul Lejeune: Du rire jaune à l’humour noir’, Nouvelles Études Francophones 22 (2007), 125.
82 Brébeuf wrote of the Wendat language: ‘The greater part of their words are composed of vowels. They have no labial letters. This is probably the reason why they all open their lips so awkwardly, and why we can scarce understand them when they whistle or when they speak low’. JR, 10: 117.
83 Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignon, Paris, Wednesday 1 April 1671. Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters, trans. by Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 83.
84 As discerning critics of both theatre and literature, it is no wonder that Madame de Sévigné and her daughter frequently described and critiqued sermons and church-related ‘performances’. Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignon, Les Rochers, Sunday 12 January 1676. Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters, 177.
85 Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, Quebec, 3 October 1645, MI, Corr., Lettre XCIV, 270.
86 Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignon, Paris, Wednesday 6 April 1672. Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters, 134. It was Louis de Bouade, Comte de Frontenac, who became Governor General in 1672. See W.J. Eccles, Canada Under Louis XIV, 1663–1701 (Toronto, ON: McLelland and Steward, 1964), 77.
87 Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignon, Paris, Wednesday 6 April 1672. Madame de Sévigné, Selected Letters, 134. My emphasis.
88 Constance Classen, ‘Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum’, Journal of Social History 40 (2007), 900.
89 Classen, ‘Museum Manners’, 898.
90 Thresor de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne… (Paris, 1606), s.v. “main.”
91 Thresor de la langue françoyse, s.v. “changer de main.” My translation. ‘on dit ie l’ay en main, c’est-à-dire, en ma puissance, tenuë et possession’.
92 Classen, ‘Museum Manners’, 900. Whether or not Thomas took up the invitation to touch is unclear. See Subha Mukherji’s essay in this volume.
93 John 20: 27–28. This inscription appears on the top right had corner of the address leaf (the address is now almost completely faded). In the centre of the same side of this letter, just below the address, the date of the object’s entrance into the collection is recorded. This inscription reads: ‘Bibliotheca S. Germani à pratis die 21. apriles 1653.-’
94 For a notable exception relating to early New England, see Grandjean, American Passage, esp. 45–75.