Emma Anderson's The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs is an ambitious book. Spanning some four hundred years, Death and Afterlife begins at “the conventional endpoint of the traditional hagiographic narrative” (5), tracing the martyrs' “continual remembering and reinvention in the popular, protean collective imagination” (6) from the moments of their deaths up to the present day. In seven evocatively rendered chapters, Anderson explores “multiple interpretations of the … deaths and legacies” (6) of René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de la Lande, Antoine Daniel, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Nöel Chabanel, illuminating the complex and multivalent circumstances that attended the variously motivated deaths of these eight Frenchmen, the mid-nineteenth-century deployment of the cult of the martyrs in the service of national identities on both sides of the Canadian-US border, and the persistent marginalization (and repeated victimization) of native traditionalists and Catholics alike wrought through hagiographic narrative, imagery, and ritual.

Animating Anderson's history of the North American martyrs is the recognition that “truth's very power and purity lie in its modest acknowledgement of its own partiality and in its reluctance to claim a false and hectoring universality” (370). Indeed, asserts Anderson, “the fact that these eight deaths … were seen from a range of perspectives as they were unfolding must be pivotal to any responsible interpretation of them” (370). It is to the elucidation of this “range of perspectives” that Anderson dedicates her first chapter (in harmony with Timothy Pearson's recent Becoming Holy in Early Canada, among others), ably untangling the thickly braided context within which Jesuit missionaries encountered the indigenous peoples of North America. Native notions of soul return, ritual sacrifice, and physical incorporation, Anderson insists, are just as critical to understanding these deaths as are Christian ideals of martyrdom.

Anderson hews closely to the principle of truth's partiality throughout the book, exposing the fractures and fissures, the incongruities and intersections, the points of conflict and sites of collaboration, that characterize the cult of the martyrs over the long course of its four-hundred-year history. If the deaths of these eight Frenchmen were, from the beginning, “hybrid events” forged out of “both mutual incomprehension and subtle flashes of profound understanding” (53), the history of their reception in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century North America is one marked by a persistent polyphony—sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, but always multiple.

Anderson's best—that is, most analytically nuanced and historiographically astute—chapters are without a doubt those dealing specifically with seventeenth-century interpretations of these eight deaths (her treatment of the “spiritual love triangle” [55] between Paul Ragueneau, Jean de Brébeuf, and Catherine de Saint-Augustin deserves particular praise). Subsequent chapters wander a bit and are less firmly anchored in relevant secondary scholarship. This is, however, to be expected given the extensive historical reach and bold ambition of Anderson's work. Attempting to at once “evoke as well as inform” (since, Anderson explains, “trenchant analysis need not preclude vivid description, nor thinking eclipse sensing and feeling”), Anderson succeeds in making “the past palpable” (12). The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs will be a valuable addition to any university library and a priceless resource for students and scholars alike who are interested in colonial encounters, North American Catholicism, and the cult of the saints.