It is fitting that this review of Emma Anderson's The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs is being written on November 1st, All Saints Day. For the story she tells with equal measures of historical insight, literary imagination, and moral conviction is ultimately concerned with sorting out saints—those recognized, those overlooked, those barely remembered. It is a story of communal memory and contested memory, of pasts continually reinvented to meet current needs. And it is a story that cuts across boundaries of time, theology, nation, and race.

Within the span of a few years in 1640s New France, eight Jesuits were killed by native assailants. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and six other lesser known missionaries met violent ends while ministering to Mohawk and Wendat peoples. Anderson effectively contextualizes their fates within Jesuit martyrdom ideology, Wendat religious divisions over Catholicism, and Iroquois notions of soul return and sacrifice. From the beginning, there were multiple perspectives on the meaning of their deaths, a pattern she is keen to trace all the way into the twenty-first century. Most of her attention is riveted upon those in the church (mostly Catholics but eventually some protestants as well) who fashioned and refashioned the missionaries' legacy, up to and beyond their canonization as North America's first Catholic saints in 1930. But she also remains attuned to other points of view, especially native voices from within and outside the church who have long expressed critiques of the dominant narrative.

The cult of the North American martyrs got going immediately, thanks to the writings of fellow Jesuit Paul Ragueneau and the mystical piety of a young Augustinian sister, Catherine de Saint-Augustin. Ragueneau gathered the textual materials necessary to argue for canonization, particularly for Brébeuf, while Catherine de Saint-Augustin's visions illustrated the ongoing spiritual power of Brébeuf's blood and bones. Whatever the merits of their case, the choice to frame “only European deaths as ‘martyrdoms,’” in Anderson's view, “makes a wholly unjustified distinction between the sufferings of the eight missionaries and the unrecognized agonies of the far more numerous group of native Catholic captives” (69). Here and throughout her work, Anderson does not hesitate to weigh in on what she considers matters of justice. Her sympathies lie clearly on the side of natives, whether as overlooked participants in the historical drama, unrecognized Catholic saints, inappropriately demonized torturers, or whole peoples subjected to centuries of suffering and struggle.

Successive chapters richly describe and persuasively interpret the communal memory of the martyrs across the past 350 years. Anderson spares no detail in mapping the twists and turns of their afterlife. While the fall of New France and the French Revolution in the eighteenth century diminished interest, the rise of a Quebecois clerico-nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century gave them new life. The slain Jesuits were now read as early exemplars of a French Canadian Catholic national identity. To be French Canadian was to be a faithful Catholic, an equivalency that lasted into post-World War II Quebec. Ironically, in the late nineteenth century, the martyrs got an even bigger boost for their possible canonization from Catholics and history buffs on the other side of the US border. Because three of the missionaries had been killed in upstate New York, American Catholic interest developed in finding this sacred space and memorializing it appropriately. A shrine was built at Auriesville and a campaign was mounted to accord them the church's highest honor. While Americans promoted those martyred on their soil, French Canadians did the same, and a not always friendly rivalry ensued. Success for both camps came in 1930 with the canonization of all eight men, yet divisions remained.

One might imagine Anderson's account ending at that high point but she found much more to tell and devotes more than half her volume to the martyrs' afterlife in the last seventy-five years. Beginning in the 1940s, a third camp of venerators emerged, English Canadian nationalists (mostly protestants and mostly in Ontario) who portrayed the martyrs in tourism and in schools as heroic pioneers “who had successfully stood up to the ‘red menace’ of their own time: the Iroquois” (167). Their efforts made memory of the martyrs “progressively more Anglicized and Protestantized” (212). They also shifted the spatial center of remembrance from Quebec to a new shrine at Midland in northwestern Ontario, the place where the “Canadian” martyrs had fallen. Recent decades have witnessed contests over martyr relics, native remains, and visual representations of the seventeenth-century events. Through it all, Auriesville and Midland became important pilgrimage sites, a fact to which Anderson can personally attest since she became a participant observer with ultraconservative Catholics who regularly make their way to the New York shrine and with one of the ethnic Catholic groups who find at Midland an appealing multicultural, ecumenical message. These two places embody the ongoing malleability of the martyrs' memory. But they also demonstrate its ongoing symbolic power to shape the identities and spiritualities of persons far removed from the woods of early America.

In her final pages, Anderson returns to those woods to consider once more who among those who perished should be considered martyrs and perhaps saints. With the same literary craft and moral passion that infuses much of her volume, she concludes that “consistency and logic would seem to demand that either all those Catholics [European and native] who fell together during the dark decade of the 1640s are martyrs, or none are” (369). Some scholars will be put off by this and other judgments that transcend the historical. They may likewise bristle when she hides none-too-well her appreciation or disdain for particular figures in her long narrative. There is no mistaking her for an impartial, detached commentator. But with that said, all should acknowledge the considerable analytical and literary skill Anderson demonstrates on almost every page. She writes in her prologue that she wants “to evoke as well as to inform” (12) and to capture the drama and emotion with which these events occurred and have been remembered. In all that she has surely succeeded. If at times it is hard to avoid the impression that she has overindulged her novelistic tendencies and been too willing to fill in the gaps in the historical evidence, perhaps that is just one more sign of the power of the North American martyrs and their native counterparts to capture the imagination of those who encounter them.