Mohawk Saint Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits Review
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American Catholics could start with this book without much knowledge almost the time period or church history. It's easy to follow. The author is well-qualified to write this history
A historian's expect at St Catherine ("Kateri") Tekakwitha. I wish there were more books similar this about saints: it's a thorough review of all the main materials from people who knew the saint personally, with a lot of relevant historical context on the saint and her hagiographers (in this case, two French Jesuits).American Catholics could start with this volume without much knowledge about the time period or church history. It's like shooting fish in a barrel to follow. The author is well-qualified to write this history. He edited the definitive version of The Jesuit Relations , the about important primary text about the time and place that St Catherine Tekakwitha lived in.
I guess some Catholics might be turned off by the author's detached academic perspective instead of a passionate spiritual experience. That didn't bother me. St Catherine Tekakwitha is infrequent even if you choose to emphasize the author'southward skepticism (for case, his opinions on the saint's posthumous healing powers seem pretty articulate).
In the epilogue, the author describes the process of Catherine Tekakwitha'south eventual canonization. She wasn't a saint all the same when this was published (2004; she was canonized in 2012). I am curious if the writer has written anything else virtually her since her canonization.
Concluding point: this is a short volume. Maybe the best praise I could give it is that I wish information technology had been longer. Recommended for American Catholics or anyone interested in American Indians (peculiarly in New France).
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The bibliographic clarification on the opposite side of the title page of Mohawk Saint includes two field of study headings that include the term biography. Allan Greer wrote an excellent monograph that probes the lives of Catherine Tekakwitha, Claude Chauchetière, and Pierre Cholenec. The term biography is a rather limiting term, in that it implies a study of these individuals within history. Rather, Mohawk Saint is a microhisto
Read this if you lot wish, but I don't recollect this is a very well written review.The bibliographic description on the opposite side of the title folio of Mohawk Saint includes ii subject headings that include the term biography. Allan Greer wrote an excellent monograph that probes the lives of Catherine Tekakwitha, Claude Chauchetière, and Pierre Cholenec. The term biography is a rather limiting term, in that it implies a study of these individuals within history. Rather, Mohawk Saint is a microhistory, because, equally Jill Lepore argues, this genre will "will e'er draw the writer's, and the reader'southward, attention away from the subject field and toward the culture." (Jill Lepore, "Historians Who Honey Besides Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography" in The Journal of American History 88 no. one (Jun., 2001), 142.) In the introduction, Greer makes it clear that the goal is not just to weave a narrative about Tekakwitha, only besides to arts and crafts a history of what information technology was like to live through the upheavals of the early North American colonies. For Greer, this work becomes a microhistory because an understanding of the cultural surroundings is simply as important, if not more than of import, than an understanding of the primary actors.(Greer, iv, eight, ix.) Greer accomplishes this past examining hagiographies and multi-disciplinary works in order to examine the religious lives of Tekakwitha and Chauchetière inside the context and in order to better sympathise the standoff of European and Native American cultures.
Greer'south first goal in Mohawk Saints was to explore the religious lives of both Tekakwitha and Chauchetière. The work explores more than the contact betwixt Tekakwitha and Chauchetière, just also explores the religious and spiritual structure of the two. Greer argues that, for Chauchetière, "under the surface of this rather ordinary missionary career, the spiritual autobiography reveals a truly remarkable inner life."(Ibid, 61.) The writer explains to the reader how the individuals developed spiritually within the accepted norms of their civilisation, and yet, how they were infrequent. Chauchetière was constructed as a mystic who sought to do battle with himself while doing the Lord'due south work. By using Chauchetière's own writings to provide the analysis, the author is able to describe how he viewed himself. This construction is compelling considering it illustrates how Chauchetière viewed the world, nevertheless also how his views of the earth were created by the Order in which he lived. Greer's telling of Tekakwitha's story is similar considering it explores her religious construction within the context of gild. The writer is required to deconstruct the documents written most Tekakwitha: "the procedure of amalgam a historical biography on the basis of hagiography has required us to annul the sources' tendency to treat Tekakwitha as an alien presence in the land of her birth."(Ibid, 57.) Because Greer is using Chauchetière'south and Cholenec's writings, he must cope with the cognition that hagiography is biased towards the views of the Jesuits, who had an agenda in trying to canonize Catherine Tekakwitha. Greer attempts to undertake literary analysis of these works in order to examine these works inside their traditional convention and inside the context of Jesuits in New France. This analysis provides insight into the life of Tekakwitha, but it likewise provides a means to clarify the Jesuit views of Mohawk and Iroquois club, while also shedding low-cal onto how the ethnic people viewed the Europeans.
Greer notes in the introduction that "if historians need ... to brand themselves into anthropologists to study Indians of an earlier historic period, they must practise something similar in examining the Europeans who contacted them."(Ibid, x.) While Greer is crafting the story of Chauchetière and Tekakwitha, he also attempts to compare the Iroquois and European cultures through the major incidents in the lives of Tekakwitha and Chauchetière. Several major themes are the focus of the capacity of Mohawk Saint, including views of expiry and dying, constant modify, mysticism, the trunk corpus with respect to mysticism, and views of community. In each of these chapters, Greer follows the advice laid out in the introduction in order to examine these issues. Past analyzing the two sets of beliefs together, Greer constructs a comparative view that tin further enlighten the reader to customs, practices and beliefs of each culture. Despite the differences fabricated clear past the author, he attempts to bring the cultures together to show that they had similarities as well. Greer argues that the use of spiritualism, mysticism, and ritual acts as a bridge betwixt the cultures. In Kahnawake, "faith served every bit a medium through which internal belonging and external affiliation were negotiated," with the multitude of residents at this site would have seen homo existence equally divisional by the spiritual and incorporeal, which, as Greer believes, creates a link.(Ibid, 99-100; 105.) Because Mohawk Saint uses more than the 'traditional' historical sources and branches into a cross-disciplinary exploration of culture, Greer is able to successfully paint a moving picture of how religious belief in Mohawk and Iroquois culture intersected with European Christianity.
Past looking at individuals within a larger societal context, Greer analyzes how individuals differ from the norm, but also illustrates the beliefs of ii sets of people inside a period of great flux. As Jill Lepore notes, microhistory uses an exemplary individual as a method for exploring a greater historical question or culture.(Lepore, 133.) By exploring the lives of Catherine Tekakwitha and Claude Chauchetière, Allan Greer is able to explore the spiritual views of ii cultures meeting in the American due north-eastward through the analysis of how these individuals were constructed. Because Greer views the past as a foreign culture, Mohawk Saint is able to construct a bright microhistory describing remarkable individuals, and thus the creating specific examples of how the ii colliding cultures viewed religion and mysticism.
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More than than a book nearly a Indian saint this is deep dive into the life of the Indian people of the St. Lawrence region in the belatedly sixteenth century equally well as the Jesuit'southward and Europeans that interacted with them. Very adept.
Greer argues that historians must approach all historical societies as substantially foreign. Greer would fence that simply because 1 might be a French Canadian, does not mean that one automatically understands the mindset of a French Canadian living one, two, or three centuries ago. Every bit such when writing a comparative written report of ii cultures, historians should use the skills of the anthropologists to understand all cultures being discussed considering they are equally strange to the modern reader.
With this in mind, Greer writes a double biography of the lives of Catherine Tekekwitha and Claude Chauchetière. The author follows the life of Catherine, the living and working conditions to which she was accepted as an Iroquois, her movement to the Christian Iroquois community of Kahawake outside of Montreal, her interactions with her boyfriend converts including self-flagellation and the founding of an unofficial native convent, her death, a serious of miraculous healings attributed to her, and her beatification most the end of the twentieth century. Greer not but creates a thorough prototype of Catherine's life just also of Iroquois customs including the economic and social importance of union, adoption to replace lost loved ones, and cocky-inflicted pain every bit role of training for hurting in war. Some of these community, especially self-infliction of pain, found parallels in Jesuit society.
Greer describes Claude's life with a focus on his upbringing and education in Poitiers, his decision to go to Canada to serve as a Jesuit missionary, his on-going battle to overcome the self, his observations of Catherine, and his testimony of the healing power of Lady Catherine after her death. Greer places a great deal of emphasis on Claude's dwelling of Poitiers, especially regarding its proximity to Huguenots and the impact that this probable had on his pedagogy and mystical desire to accomplish "a merging of wills" with God. (75) This search led him to Canada and to the woman that would eventually heal his "own troubled soul": Catherine Tekakwitha (169).
Greer relies heavily on the writings of two Jesuit Priests, Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholonec. Cholonec's hagiography, holy biography, was completed in 1696, and focused on Catherine'south complete forbearance from sexual activity. Catherine's decision to not marry proved to be a betoken of contention between herself and her Iroquois community. Completed in 1695, Claude's hagiography gives a more consummate description of the life of Catherine and the healings attributed to her after her death. Claude'southward excitement for Catherine is obvious in his writing. For example, in his hagiography Claude describes the shrine-similar advent of Catherine's tomb saying "her grave is surrounded by the children who take died since she has been in that location, as if this get-go Iroquois virgin, whom nosotros believe to exist in her celebrity, was pleased to have her celibate trunk surrounded by these niggling innocents like so many beautiful lilies." (159)
Greer writes a fantastic volume that can be enjoyed past the serious historian and lay reader. His investigation of French and Iroquois social club, social uniqueness, and similarities demonstrates his devotion to principles of sound historiography.
Question: Allan Greer observes that many of the Christian practices adopted by Iroquois converts such every bit Catherine were extensions of Iroquois spirituality. What aspects of Christianity were completely new to these converts and tin the adoption, or rejection, of these practices be used to gauge their sincerity in adopting Christianity? Do whatever of these types of practices appear in the bibliographies written by Claude Chauchetiere and Pierre Cholonec?
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The volume gets pulled in other directions, though. There, it's not and so stiff. Sometimes information technology becomes a reception history, looking at how Tekakwitha has been understood through history. Sometimes it becomes a deconstruction of the hagiographic genre. Sometimes information technology becomes speculative biography. It's always clear what the author is trying to do, but
At its all-time, this is a history of two entangled cultures interpreting, misinterpreting and re-interpreting each other. In that location are moments when it is great.The book gets pulled in other directions, though. There, it'due south non so potent. Sometimes it becomes a reception history, looking at how Tekakwitha has been understood through history. Sometimes it becomes a deconstruction of the hagiographic genre. Sometimes information technology becomes speculative biography. It's always clear what the author is trying to do, just it is not always successful and the diverse parts detract from the whole.
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