Les Guerrières de Dieu in the French Ursuline Missionary Archives

Abstract

Marie de l’Incarnation’s letters and mission reports advanced a particular ideotype of the Ursuline missionary as “warrior of God” and were received and disseminated as exempla in several seventeenth-century French religious texts. One of these was an anthology entitled La Gloire de Ste. Ursule (The Glory of St. Ursula) (1656), a collection of summaries of French Ursuline spiritual biographies, including those from New France, authored by an unknown Jesuit. Like other biographical texts on the continent, La Gloire promoted a revised narrative of the Ursuline lineage from contemplatives in action to “guerrières de Dieu (warriors of God)”: saintly warriors armed with heroic virtues in their combined mission of interior contemplation and active apostolate at the frontiers of local, national, and Atlantic catholicity. According to La Gloire, these femmes fortes, Amazons, Canadoises, and spiritual warriors were both mystics devoted to their interior spiritual battles and monastic discipline and christianizing and civilizing teachers, preachers, missionaries and defenders of a reformed, united, transnational Catholicism, as counterparts to their Jesuit associates. This article reveals how narratives created or revised in the French Atlantic World were received and disseminated for religio-political purposes on the continent. It illuminates the communication network between metropole and periphery and demonstrates how narratives from New France functioned in the historical context of mid-to-late seventeenth-century France.