This interesting book identifies thirty-eight people in New France who after their death were locally recognized as saints. Their sanctity was witnessed in surviving documents, and sometimes their relics were treasured and their heavenly intercessions were sought. Many have been largely forgotten, but in some cases their cults continued, or reemerged later. Thirteen have been canonized by Rome. By contrast, since 1763, when New France came under British jurisdiction, there has been only one canonized Canadian saint.
Timothy Pearson gives substantial attention to about a dozen of these holy people of New France, and argues that each gained his or her reputation for sanctity via one of four patterns of Christian discipleship. The first pattern, before 1650, was dying for the faith at the hands of First Nations enemies. As martyrdoms waned, the next “primary trope of colonial holiness” was heroic charitable service, such as administering schools or hospitals. Advanced asceticism and the working of miracles were two other paths to sainthood.
A retrospective hagiographic discourse was required to interpret the evidence favorably for a candidate's sanctity. For instance, if a group of Mohawks killed a Christian, a narrative was required to show that the death was a martyrdom. On the one hand, when First Nations converts died at First Nations hands, settler writers were generally reluctant to see pure religious persecution. Missionaries, on the other hand, were readily pictured as the victims of Indigenous anti-Christian zeal. It's doubtful, of course, that the writers of the time were working from any fine insight into the motivations or values of First Nations peoples.
Pearson displays an impressive command of the relevant sources. The Jesuit Relations are an obvious trove, but he also draws on letters, colonial histories, pious biographies, annals, testimonials of miracles, and images. He respects the distinctiveness of the sources but also lets them shed light on one another. He recognizes that interpreting the documents is problematic, not only because they often reflect faulty memories and hearsay, but also because they are prone to snap magnetically into hagiographic templates. As a result, he seldom tries to gain access to the historical saints through the second-hand reports. He's generally more interested in the reports themselves.
The author's approach has been shaped by performance theory and the anthropological literature of ritual associated with Diana Taylor, Victor Turner, and Roy Rappaport. These insights can be stimulating, and they help Pearson connect the Catholic conventions and traditions of holiness with their instances and models in the historical context. Thus Pearson understands the ascetics as “performing” holiness, and the martyrs as engaging in a “ritual.” This language suggests intentionality; the theorists see performance and ritual as ways of expressing and constructing personal and social identity. Accordingly, the author states on several occasions that his martyrs, ministers of charity, ascetics, and miracle-workers were intentionally setting out to be recognized as saints. At this point we seem to be dealing with a methodological premise rather than biographical data.
Indeed, so unrelenting is the language of performance and ritual that sometimes Pearson seems to treat his saints like building-blocks in an anthropological framework. He might not entirely disagree. He might respond that, to be sure, his real subject is not individuals and events, but holiness as a pervasive, adaptive cultural system that defined and integrated social meanings in New France. He's interested in saints not as historical individuals but as the human face of community ideals and the shared bonds of social allegiances. His objective is to “bridge the gap between history and anthropology” (12). The book makes a strong case for this point of view, and notably contributes to our understanding of the period. But the danger is that Pearson's anthropological sources are disposing him to identify and stress the structural and ideological similarities in the hagiographical discourse, and to minimize or overlook differences. In other words, his categories of interpretation can function as filters rather than descriptors. For instance, Bishop Laval, a very prominent canonized saint of New France who fits none of Pearson's categories comfortably, is virtually ignored.
This minimizing of differences appears in other ways in the book. The customs and values of various First Nations groups over a period of more than a century, the diverse voices of the multi-authored Jesuit Relations, and the complex world of Roman Catholic teaching and practice tend to be homogenized. Often Pearson draws, from an ambiguous historical record, the inferences that will support a tidy interpretation; these are marked with phrases like “we can perhaps venture,” “likely,” “unlikely,” “it is [is not] difficult to imagine,” “might have,” “may have,” “would have,” “almost certainly,” “no doubt.” As a result of this tendency to generalize, the reader sometimes feels that the missionaries are being represented as “the embodiment of Christian European civilization” and First Nations peoples as “faceless collectivities”, as Allan Greer observed about the received historiography of New France (in Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits [New York: Oxford University, 2006], ix).
Nevertheless, some very illuminating sections of the book do deal with unique serendipities, quite apart from performances and rituals, and show the important role that they could play in the making of a saint. For instance, some creative research leads Pearson to connect Didace Pelletier, a Canadian-born Récollet brother who worked several miracles after his death, with the Ursuline sister who most ardently championed his cult. They had grown up in the same small parish, and the paths of their families continued to cross in other ways.
This book does not really fill a gap between history and anthropology, as Pearson proposes; it points to their different interests. Does one read the hagiographic discourse of New France as the product of the interplay of complex particular circumstances and relationships in a specific historical context, or as a means by which sanctity, as a pervasive normative cultural system, “actively embraced the colony and its people” (193)? Pearson evidently prefers the latter, but, perhaps inadvertently, gives evidence for the former.
