Zachary Yuzwa: Colonial Encounters with the Ancient Martyrs: Saintly and Savage Bodies in the Canadian Wild

This paper addresses the exemplary force of patristic models in a context far removed from the ancient world. References to early Christian literature permeate the writings of Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century New France. Ancient Christian conceptions of the body condition Jesuit depictions of their “martyred” brethren and the indigenous communities they encountered in early modern Canada: indigenous bodies are corrupted, penetrable and changeable, whereas the bodies of Jesuit missionaries are explicitly figured as the product of an ancient ascetic virtue. Capable of suffering, but unmoved by it, men like Jean de Brébeuf are written as the heroes and martyrs of a nascent church. In this paper, I propose to examine the hagiographical discourse that surrounds the life and death of Brébeuf, the earliest “apostle” of the Hurons and one of the first “martyrs” among the Jesuits in New France. In “eyewitness” reports on his death, in the official relations of his superior Paul Ragueneau, in the literary history of François DuCreux, in the visionary experiences of Marie-Catherine de Saint-Augustin, the discourse that attends Brébeuf’s suffering body makes him out to be like the ancient martyrs. The martyrdom of Polycarp, in particular, serves as a productive exemplum for the suffering of Brébeuf at the hands of his Iroquois captors. This act of writing an ancient exemplum of holiness into the new world becomes a vehicle for the textual construction of a new Christian identity but likewise enforces contemporary rhetorics of colonization in the Jesuit missions of New France.