The devil in new France: Jesuit demonology, 1611-50

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 40-62

  Goddard, Peter A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34249042025     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.78.1.40     Document Type: Review

References (101)

1. François de Toulouse, Jésus Christ ou le parfait missionnaire (Paris 1662), 44
2. R.G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. (1896-1901; New York: Pagent Book Company 1959), 2: 77
3. Additional material from Monumenta Novae Francia, 6 vols. (Montreal and Rome: Editions Bellarmin 1968-)
4. For the Jesuit mission to New France, see C. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976)
5. M. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 3 vols. (Montreal: Fides 1963-), vols. 2-3
6. or his shorter work The Beginnings of New France, 1542-1663, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto 1973), vol.1
7. Campeau, La mission des jésuites chez les Hurons, 1634-1650 (Montreal and Rome: Editions Bellarmin 1987)
8. For the Montagnais, an Algonquian people with whom French Jesuits became involved from 1626, and the Huron, Iroquoian peoples of the Great Lakes Region, see E. Tooker, An Ethnography of the Huron Indians, 1615-1650 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press 1964)
9. B. Trigger, Children of Aataensic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1976), 503
10. K. Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge 1991), 17-21, 29
11. W. Eccles, France in America, 2nd ed. (Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside 1990), 45
12. J.B. Callicott, 'Traditional American Indian and Western European Attitudes toward Nature: An Overview,' in M. Oelschlaeger, ed., Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press 1995), 193-219
13. F. Parkman, France and England in North America, 2 vols. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States 1983), 1: 487
14. R. Muchembled, ed., Magie et sorcéllerie en Europe du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin 1994), 102
15. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, ed. L.J. Puhl (Chicago: Loyola University Press 1951), 60-2; medititations, 140-142
16. M.-C. Pioffet, 'L'arc et l'épée: Les images de la guerre chez le jésuite Paul Le Jeune,' Rhétorique et conquête missionnaire: Le jésuite Paul Lejeune, ed. R. Ouellet (Sillery: Editions Septentrion 1993), 41-52
17. J. Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press 1985), 91-93
18. Sixteenth-century Jesuit worldview is investigated in A.L. Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988)
19. and J.W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1993)
20. See E. Pagels, The Origin of Satan (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995)
21. F. Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press 1994)
22. The best survey of early modern diabolism is found in J.B. Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986), 25-126
23. Russell provides useful background in Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984)
24. Pierre Berthiaume has recently investigated the missionary Paul Le Jeune's involvement with the Montagnais 'sorcerer' Carigonan in the winter of 1633-4. P. Berthiaume, 'Le missionnaire dépossédé,' paper presented to 'Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multi-Disciplinary Perspective 1530-1700,' Victoria University, Toronto, March 1996
25. J.C. Baroja, 'Witchcraft and Catholic Theology,' in B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), 38
26. R. Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil 1980)
27. Russell, Mephistopheles, 83
28. Russell, Lucifer, 274-86
29. Mephistopheles, 24-50
30. J. Bossy, 'Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,' in E. Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 229-234
31. The term 'idolatry' embraces both worship of an intermediary and a wrong idea of God. See M. Halbertal and A. Margalit, Idolatry, trans. N. Goldblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1992), for an investigation of ideas of idolatry in the Judeo-Christian tradition
32. F. Cervantes, The Idea of the Devil and the Problem of the Indian: The Case of Mexico in the Sixteenth Century (London: Institute of Latin American Studies 1991), 11-19
33. See also C.M. Eire, The War against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), 23-55
34. Cervantes, Devil in the New World
35. Fray Andrés de Olmos, Tratado de hechicerias y sortilegios, trans. G. Baudot (1553; Mexico City: Misión Arqueologica y Etnologica Francese en Mexico 1979)
36. D.T. Reff, 'The "Predicament of Culture" and Spanish Missionary Accounts of the Tepehuan and Pueblo Revolts,' Ethnohistory 42 (1995): 63-90
37. Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, ed. E. O'Gorman (1590; Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica 1962). Acosta's demonology is most prominent in Book v, where American idolatry is described as a function of 'la soberbia y invidia del demonio' (217-79)
38. First French edition: Histoire naturelle et morale des indes tant orientales qu'occidentales: Traduite en français par Robert Regnault (Paris 1598). See also C. Bernand and S. Gruzinski, De l'idolâtrie: Une archéologie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Seuil 1987), 146-94
39. and Cervantes, Idea of the Devil, 20-25
40. S. Houdard, Les sciences du diable: Quatre discours sur la sorcellerie (Paris: Editions du Cerf 1992)
41. Bernard and Gruzinski, De l'idolâtrie, 75-88
42. See also J. Delumeau, La peur en Occident (Paris: Fayard 1975), 335-342
43. P. de Lancre, Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais Anges et Demons où il est amplement traicté des Sorciers & de la Sorcelerie (Paris 1612), 17
44. N. Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987), 3-18
45. W.W. Meisner, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), 100
46. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, 45
47. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Point 141, in Puhl, 61: 'Consider how [the Devil] summons innumerable demons, and scatters them, some to one city and some to another, throughout the whole world, so that no province, no place, no state of life is overlooked.'
48. or N. Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (St Alban's: Paladin Press 1975), 65-76
49. J.C. Baroja, The World of the Witches (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson 1964), 41-44
50. J.H. Elliott, 'Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact,' in F. Chiapelli, ed., Images of America in Europe, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1976), 1: 16
51. J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 138-139
52. For seventeenth-century theology, see M.-C. Varichaud, La Conversion au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette 1975)
53. J. Deslyons, Traitez singuliers et nouveaux contre le paganisme du Roy-boit (Paris 1670), 218
54. The focus on sin can be found in a wide range of Jesuit authors, particularly the spiritualist school identified by Henri Bremond in Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 11 vols. (1923; Paris: Armand Colin 1967), 5: La conquête mystique: L'École du Père Lallemant et la tradition mystique dans la Compagnie de Jésus
55. See P. Champion, La vie du père Jean Rigoleuc de la Compagnie de Jesus: Avec ses traitez de dévotion et ses lettres spirituelles (Paris 1686), 305ff, for a description of the 'state of sin and passion.'
56. E. Bauny, Somme des pechez (Paris 1628), contains a 900-page catalogue
57. In February 1599 Marthe Brossier was examined for alleged demonic possession at the Abbey of Ste Geneviève in Paris. Despite the lack of convincing symptoms of supernatural turbulence, and evidence that her condition was in fact epilepsy, a team of five Capuchin priests and five medical doctors found her to be possessed by three devils. She duly underwent a highly publicized exorcism. Henri IV was sceptical, however, and demanded that Brossier be examined by royal physicians, who found that her disorders had nothing of the supernatural about them. In calling for an examination by his doctors, Henri antagonized the ultra-Catholic opposition, who used this evidence of the king's disregard for ecclesiastical practice to mobilize resistance to the Edict of Nantes. See M. Marescot, Discours véritable sur le faict de Marthe Brossier de Romorantin, prétendue démoniaque (Paris 1599)
58. C.E. Williams, The French Oratorians and Absolutism, 1611-1641 (New York: Lang 1988), 34-5
59. D.P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1981), 33-42
60. Compare M. Carmona, Les diables de Loudun (Paris: Fayard 1988), 18-45
61. J. de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, trans. W. Young (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources 1964), 360-364
62. Compare Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers, 195-363
63. P. Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), 48-62
64. François de Toulouse, Le missionaire apostolique ou Sermons utiles à ceux qui s'employent aux missions, pour retirer les hommes du peché & les porter à la penitence, 12 vols. (Paris 1666-7), 1: 47-87
65. D.P. Walker, The Decline of Hell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964), 4-8
66. R. Briggs, Communities of Belief: Social and Cultural Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989), 47-53
67. L. Daston, 'Wunder, Naturgesetze und die wissenschaftliche Revolution des 17 Jahrhunderts,' Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen (1991): 99-122
68. For 'renaissance naturalism,' see W.L. Hine, 'Marin Mersenne: Renaissance Naturalism and Renaissance Magic,' in B. Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 165-176
69. François de Dainville, La géographie des humanistes (Paris: Editions Beauchesne 1940)
70. Acosta, Historia, Libro i, cap. 16-25
71. S.J. Harris, 'Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition,' Science in Context 3 (1989): 29-65
72. Jesuit Relations, 6: 145
73. As we can see in the trickle of immigration to official destinations, the concentration of exoticism in the Near East and the Orient, and the minor role of New France in emerging 'public' discourse. For the Catholic world's lack of interest in Canada, see L. Codignola, 'The Holy See and the Conversion of the Indians in French and British North America, 1486-1760,' in K.O. Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness (Durham: University of North Carolina Press 1995), 195-242
74. Jesuits themselves did not make Canada their first choice very often; rather, they were lured by the missions to China and the Indies. See D. Deslandres, 'Missions et altérité: Les missionaires français et la définition de l'"autre" au xviie siècle,' Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (1993): 5-10
75. The 'spiritual leader' of the Canada missionary movement, Louis Lallement, believed that the Canadian mission field 'est plus féconde en travauxs & en croix; elle est moins éclatante, & contribue plus que les autres à la sanctification de ces missionnaires.' Lallement, La doctrine spirituelle de Louis Lallement, ed. P. Champion (1685; Avignon 1781), 10
76. See N. Duran, Relations des insignes progrez de la Religion Chrestienne faits au Paraguay ... trans. J. Machaud (Paris 1638)
77. Bernardino de Sahagún, A History of Ancient Mexico, trans. F.R. Bandelier (1547-77; Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Publishers 1971), 21-24
78. Jesuit Relations, 5: 231
79. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 294-302
80. Compare J.-B. Thiers, Traité des superstitions, (1689; Paris: Editions le sycomore 1984)
81. Thiers, less a 'homme de terrain' than the Jesuit missionaries, went much further in linking superstitions with diabolism: 'c'est avec grande raison que Dieu a fait défense aux hommes dans le Décalogue de se servir d'aucune Superstition, puisqu'ils ne peuvent en user qu'auparavant ils n'ayent fait un pacte exprès, ou du moins tacite, avec le Démon. Car qui dit Superstition, dit de nécessité pacte avec le Démon' (56). R.J.W. Evans explains such hostility towards illicit superstition and magic as a corollary to reformed Catholicism's reliance on 'white magic.' The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979), 344-345
82. Jesuit Relations, Ibid., 257
83. J. Delumeau, Le péché et la peur (Paris: Fayard 1983), 369-530
84. Instructional aids ('Daouzek Taolen') were developed for the Breton missions c. 1650. See M. Le Nobletz and J. Maunoir, Daouzek Taolen Ann Tad Maner (Tours 1887), a collection of the engravings used in the field. Je remercie le Père Roger Tandonnet, sj, de la Bibliothèque des Fontaines, Chantilly, pour cette référence
85. F.-M. Gagnon, La conversion par l'image (Montreal: Editions Bellarmin 1975)
86. For parallels between the missions to New France and the 'missions à l'intérieur,' see A. Croix, 'Missions, Hurons et Bas-Bretons au xviie siècle,' Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l'ouest 95 (1988): 487-498
87. Jesuit Relations, 11: 89
88. Lalemant's lengthy description, and condemnation, of Huron ritual practice is found in The Jesuit Relations, 17: 145-215. Lalemant, of the Jesuit superieurs perhaps the least of a 'homme de terrain,' resembles the demonologue J.-B. Thiers, whose 1689 Traicté des superstitions deciphered the range of folk traditions as an absolute expression of fealty to the Devil
89. they may have alluded to what M. Foucault describes as the 'unreason of the imagination.' Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (New York: Vintage 1965)
90. A. Soman, 'La décriminalisation de la sorcéllerie en France,' Histoire, économie et société 4 (1985): 179-203
91. R. Ferland, Les Relations des jésuites: Un art de la persuasion (Québec: Editions de la Huit 1992), 103-108
92. Jesuit Relations, 10: 77
93. Jesuit Relations, Ibid., 17: 167
94. Jesuit Relations, Ibid., 16: 187
95. Jesuit Relations, Ibid., 39: 141
96. For example, the Recollets (Franciscans) in the Gaspésie in the 1670s stressed diabolism in Indian life. Chrestien LeClerq, Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie (Paris 1691), 332-5
97. Tension in missionary relations in northern Mexico in the late seventeenth century suggests that Franciscans revived demon-bashing as a way of building their credit; their Jesuit and Carmelite rivals were much more circumspect, accusing the Franciscans of recklessness, if not heresy. See F. Cervantes, 'The Devils of Querétaro,' Past and Present 130 (1992): 51-69
98. S. MacCormack, 'Demons, Imaginations, and the Incas,' Representations 33 (1991): 121-146, discusses how 'demons were losing their explanatory usefulness,' exemplified in Spinoza's claim that 'demons were nonexistent because no clear and unequivocal ideas could be formed about them' (141-2)
99. Jesuit Relations, 27: 145
100. See M. Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Flammarion 1977)
101. L. Hennepin, Nouveau voyage d'un Pais plus grande que l'Europe (Utrecht 1698), 383 Earlier versions of this paper were presented in 1994 to the Guelph-Waterloo-Wilfrid Laurier History Conference and to the French Colonial Historical Society. I would like to thank Michael Ruse for his comments on an early draft, and the anonymous readers for their suggestions