Friday, January 8, 2010: 2:50 PM
Elizabeth Ballroom C (Hyatt)
On March 16th, 1649, Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf was captured during an Iroquois raid and subjected to four hours of torture before being killed. It was left to Brébeuf’s bereft survivors, like their predecessors in the early Church, to redeem this violent demise by infusing it with religious meaning. This presentation will explore early perceptions of the deceased missionary as a martyr within and outside his Jesuit community, detailing how Brébeuf’s Superior, Paul Ragueneau, acting as the Saint Paul to Brébeuf’s Jesus, would utilize relics, thanatological narratives, mystical visions, and visual imagery to position his fallen colleague as the patron and protector of a colony which felt itself to be under continuous attack from enemies both aboriginal and infernal.
Brébeuf’s bones would be critical to the martyr’s cult forming around him. A moving reminder of his corporeal suffering, his relics also were seen as preserving the religious unity of the embattled colonial body politic by vanquishing not simply physical disease, but spiritual “maladies.” His powered bones, slipped into soups or beverages, banished aboriginal paganism and Protestant heresy alike. The recovery of Brébeuf’s body also inspired the creation of his “textual relics:” canonical accounts of his violent death which married the emotional elaboration of each injury with the explication of why he should officially be recognized as a saint and martyr. In authoring these “relics,” Ragueneau imaginatively transposed conceptions of Christian martyrdom formulated under Roman persecution to the seventeenth-century North American context (where they were often ill-fitting) and re-framed the intra-aboriginal war which had consumed Brébeuf as the deliberate religious persecution of the Jesuits by enemies both earthly and unearthly. Ragueneau’s formulations would influence centuries of future hagiography, framing a concept of New World martyrdom which reified the European-aboriginal encounter as one between saintly passivity and demonic violence.
Brébeuf’s bones would be critical to the martyr’s cult forming around him. A moving reminder of his corporeal suffering, his relics also were seen as preserving the religious unity of the embattled colonial body politic by vanquishing not simply physical disease, but spiritual “maladies.” His powered bones, slipped into soups or beverages, banished aboriginal paganism and Protestant heresy alike. The recovery of Brébeuf’s body also inspired the creation of his “textual relics:” canonical accounts of his violent death which married the emotional elaboration of each injury with the explication of why he should officially be recognized as a saint and martyr. In authoring these “relics,” Ragueneau imaginatively transposed conceptions of Christian martyrdom formulated under Roman persecution to the seventeenth-century North American context (where they were often ill-fitting) and re-framed the intra-aboriginal war which had consumed Brébeuf as the deliberate religious persecution of the Jesuits by enemies both earthly and unearthly. Ragueneau’s formulations would influence centuries of future hagiography, framing a concept of New World martyrdom which reified the European-aboriginal encounter as one between saintly passivity and demonic violence.
See more of: "A Spectacle unto the World": Suffering, Pain, and Martyrdom in Colonial North America
See more of: AHA Sessions
See more of: AHA Sessions