In The Jesuit Relations: A Biography, Micah True of the University of Alberta successfully cements his reputation as “Mr. Jesuit Relations.” His consistent scholarly focus, throughout his career, has been the study of the Jesuit Relations “themselves.” As True himself puts it: “The present study aims not to extol yet again the well-established historical importance, documentary value, or rhetorical richness of the Jesuits Relations, but rather to tell the story of this series of annual reports from their earliest beginnings to the present, with particular emphasis on episodes that have not been part of scholarly accounts of these texts” (5–6). Thus, whereas other scholars use the Relations (sometimes uncritically, as True – very tactfully – shows) as sources for their own secondary works, True’s own chosen subject is the Relations in and for themselves. How were they constructed, and for what purpose? Who wrote them? Who edited them? Does a dawning appreciation of how much appears to have been edited, added, or changed in Paris change the persistent, though perhaps naive view of the Relations as clear, guileless windows into the colonial world? To what degree can we see other colonial actors, from Indigenous peoples to female religious, as playing a role in the composition or the popularization of the Relations? Moreover, how have the homely physical circumstances – the “packaging” of these primary documents – their publication in three volumes published in1858 by the Canadian government, their propagation from 1896 to 1901 by Rueben Gold Thwaites, and more recently by Canadian Jesuit scholar Lucien Campeau – influenced scholars’ perceptions of what, exactly, the Jesuit Relations “are?” These questions form the heart of True’s research. They were inaugurated in his first book, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), extended in a number of excellent journal articles, and culminate in this work: The Jesuit Relations: A Biography. True has chosen his scholarly focus well, for these are questions that virtually no one else in the field – save Luca Codignola – has been asking.
Readers of this book will likely be reminded of Princeton University Press’s series “The Lives of Great Religious Books,” which tell the story of the inception, creation, and cultural life of landmark books such as Teresa of Avila’s “Life” (Carlos Eire, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2019) and Thomas Jefferson’s deliberately mutilated Bible, from which the Deist-leaning founding father had carefully excised all the miracles (Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2020).
Not only does True demonstrate a dizzying range of new ways of thinking about and appreciating the Relations as sources in A Biography but he also relates this material in a way that is consistently interesting and thought-provoking. The opening vignettes that ground each chapter situate True’s arguments historically and geographically: introducing an admirable human dimension to each case study. Moreover, although True’s topic forces him to rely on quite a lot of technical information and arguments, his excellent writing style and disciplined pace ensures that this does not become tedious or overly tendentious.
True demonstrates considerable discipline in sticking strictly to the topic in each of his seven beautifully conceived chapters, each of which provides a unique perspective on the Relations. There’s something in here for every scholarly taste. True’s examination of editorial control and the final shaping of the annual Relations in Paris and his history of how the Relations have been read and perceived from the seventeenth-century to the present are the chapters that most clearly speak to his desire to analyse the evolution of how the Relations were produced. But True will likely win himself an important new readership by exploring contributions to the Relations by laymen (like Christophe Regnaut in chapter 3), Indigenous peoples (like Joseph Chihoatenhwa in chapter 4), and female religious (like Marie de l’Incarnation in chapter 5).
The Jesuit Relations: A Biography is smoothly and clearly written, and its research is impeccable. Its cool, nuanced, and understated tone is distinctive and elegant. Occasionally, I felt that True’s spare underplays his own contributions and conclusions to the extent that the unobservant reader might miss them entirely. True’s modesty is matched by his unfailing fairness to the many historians whose work he references, even when he uses their scholarship to illustrate a commonplace lack of understanding of how one of their most important colonial sources was shaped and composed. Perhaps this is because his point is not made in malice, but merely to indicate the degree to which these seminal writings have largely escaped stringent examination, even by specialists.
In this work, Micah True has held himself to the highest standards of scholarly research and writing. Well-conceived, beautifully apportioned, and well executed, The Jesuit Relations: A Biography deserves a wide readership: it is a wonderful book filled with fascinating insights.
