Apostles of Empire The Jesuits and New France / Bronwen McShea.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McShea, Bronwen, author.

Series:

France overseas.

France overseas: studies in empire and decolonization

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indians of North America--Missions--New France--History.

Indians of North America.

France--Colonies--America--Administration--History.

France.

Canada--History--To 1763 (New France).

Canada.

Jesuits--Missions--New France--History.

Jesuits.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (372 pages).

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2019

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Summary:

2020 Catholic Press Association Book Award in the History category  Apostles of Empire is a revisionist history of the French Jesuit mission to indigenous North Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a comprehensive view of a transatlantic enterprise in which secular concerns were integral. Between 1611 and 1764, 320 Jesuits were sent from France to North America to serve as missionaries. Most labored in colonial New France, a vast territory comprising eastern Canada and the Great Lakes region that was inhabited by diverse Native American populations. Although committed to spreading Catholic doctrines and rituals and adapting them to diverse indigenous cultures, these missionaries also devoted significant energy to more-worldly concerns, particularly the transatlantic expansion of the absolutist-era Bourbon state and the importation of the culture of elite, urban French society. In Apostles of Empire Bronwen McShea accounts for these secular dimensions of the mission’s history through candid portraits of Jesuits engaged in a range of secular activities. We see them not only preaching and catechizing in terms that borrowed from indigenous idioms but also cultivating trade and military partnerships between the French and various Indian tribes.  Apostles of Empire contributes to ongoing research on the Jesuits, New France, and Atlantic World encounters, as well as on early modern French society, print culture, Catholicism, and imperialism. McShea shows how the Jesuits’ robust conceptions of secular spheres of Christian action informed their efforts from both sides of the Atlantic to build up a French and Catholic empire in North America through significant indigenous cooperation.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781496214478

1496214471

9781496214492

1496214498

OCLC:

1099525025