Allan Greer has described this book as a “dual biography” of the famous Blessed Catherine Tekakwitha and her hagiographer, the Jesuit priest Claude Chauchetière. Greer's shorthand description does not convey the fact that his book also explores the historical context of these fascinating personages with particular sensitivity to their changing geographical locations and their attempts to locate themselves fully in these new places and contexts. His method produces a nuanced understanding of his subjects' respective religious orientations, and of the ways in which these orientations change as they undertake and complete their journeys.

In the first chapter of Mohawk Saint, Greer provides an account of how Chauchetière came to write about Tekakwitha, and explores both the historical context of colonialism and the literary genre of hagiography that shaped the production of his text. While the titles of the next three chapters map the movements of Greer's subjects, within these chapters the author attends to the historical, sociological, and religious meanings generated by Tekakwitha's journey from Gandaouagué to Kahnawake and by Chauchetière's journey from Poitiers to Kahnawake. For example, in chapter 4, titled “Kahnawake,” the settlement described as “the outer edge of their respective worlds,” Greer illustrates the ways in which that place became a site of transformation for both Tekakwitha and Chauchetière.

Greer's empathy for his subjects is evident in his sensitive portrayals of the motivations and struggles of Chauchetière, and of Jesuit missionaries to New France in general. However, his sensitivity to missionaries does not preclude an equal sensitivity to the contexts and concerns of the First Nations inhabitants of the New World. His pivotal chapter centers around the actions of Tekakwitha and the indigenous women in the community created at Kahnawake, their shared practices of bodily mortification, and the potential meanings of the rituals they performed. In exploring the multiple contexts in which intercultural exchanges at Kahnawake occurred, Greer addresses the contested notion of conversion. Interrogating the too-convenient label of “convert,” Greer finds a much more complex negotiation of boundaries between cultures. He describes, in the case of Tekakwitha and her female friends, a creative refiguring of French approaches to relationships with sacred power. Finally, he examines the meanings bestowed on the life and death of Tekakwitha for both indigenous and colonial communities.

In the closing chapters of this book, Greer explores the emergence of the religious cult, which looked to Catherine Tekakwitha for healing, and the later hagiography by Cholenec, which focused on Tekakwitha's virginity. In examining these phenomena, Greer attends to the creation and negotiation of colonial understandings of “the other,” focusing particularly on discourses of “savagery” and of sexuality. Finally, after briefly touching on eighteenth-century literary treatments of Tekakwitha, Greer closes with an epilogue that surveys nineteenth- and twentieth-century appropriation of and devotion to Tekakwitha as saint and symbol.

This book provides the finest scholarly treatment to date of Catherine (Kateri) Tekakwitha. It was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and the Annibel Jenkins Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. No university library should be without it. It is sufficiently accessible for undergraduates, and sufficiently sophisticated for specialists.