Overview

Marie de l'Incarnation (1599 - 1672), renowned French mystic and founder of the Ursulines in Canada, abandoned her son, Claude Martin, when he was a mere eleven years old to dedicate herself completely to a consecrated religious life.In 1639, Marie migrated to the struggling French colony at Quebec to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World. Over the course of the next thirty-one years, the relationship between Marie and Claude would take shape by means of a trans-Atlantic correspondence in which mother and son shared advice and counsel, concerns and anxieties, and joys and frustrations. From Mother to Son presents annotated translations of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters exchanged by Marie and her son between 1640 and 1671. These letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting the letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, a relationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family.In providing a contemporary translation of Marie's letters to Claude, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a history of New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular. Dunn expertly contextualizes the correspondence within the broader cultural, historical, intellectual, and theological currents of the seventeenth century as well as within modern scholarship on Marie de l'Incarnation.From Mother to Son offers a fascinating portrait of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn provides a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in the modern Christian West.

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9780199386574

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Reviews

This truly extraordinary collection of letters between Marie de lIncarnation and her son, Claude Martin, could not have been curated, translated, and introduced to the English-speaking world more expertly. Dunns introduction is brilliant, promoting a richer awareness of how mystical journeys are deeply enmeshed in earthly relationships in this case, relationships between France and the New World, Catholics and Iroquois, and most provocatively and indeed startlingly, between a mother and the son she abandons. I cannot think of a more bracing and exciting set of documents that will enrich our understanding of early modern Christianity and the field of religion more broadly. A must read. Brenna Morre, author of Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1945) Here is an elegant and well-researched translation of selected letters from the Teresa of the New World to her son. It provides the English public with a precious view, from the inside, on the history of New France, on the religious and socio-economic encounter of the Amerindian as well as the spiritual state of the first French to settle on the North American continent in the seventeenth century. Dominique Deslandres, Universite de Montreal Lucid and lively, Mary Dunn's translation of the letters of Marie de l'Incarnation to her son Claude provide compelling evidence for family relations, female spirituality, and life among the indigenous peoples of New France in the seventeenth century. A real treasure! Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeeth-Century Lives

Author Information

Mary Dunn is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Christianity at St. Louis University. Her research is primarily focused in seventeenth-century France and New France.

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