Suffering for Jesus: Penitential Practices at Fort St. Joseph (Niles, Michigan) During the French Regime

Abstract

Scholarship on New France often emphasizes the factors that motivated the establishment of the colony, including the desire to promulgate the spread of Catholicism to Native peoples. However, the place of religion in the lives of the French inhabitants in the far-flung outposts in the North American interior is difficult to assess. Recent excavations at Fort St. Joseph, an eighteenth-century mission-garrison-trading post complex in the western Great Lakes, uncovered an unusual religious artifact tentatively identified as a cilice, an instrument of self-mortification used by the devout for a variety of penitential purposes. The authors seek to verify that identification, describe the various uses of the cilice in Catholic penitential practice, and draw some tentative conclusions about what the use of a cilice suggests about religious life at the fort on the edge of the French empire. Depending on who might have used it, the cilice reflects an enduring and vibrant French Catholic faith on the frontier, or the adoption by Native peoples of that same faith.