l’Incarnation, Marie de (1599-1672)

Marie de l’Incarnation (1599-1672)

Businesswoman, mystic, founder of the ursuline convent in quebec

Source

Life in France. Marie de l’Incarnation exemplifies the mark an energetic woman could make as a missionary nun in New France. She was born Marie Guyart, daughter of a baker who sold his loaves in the French textile center of Tours. Marie enjoyed mystical experiences even in her youth and dreamed of entering a nunnery. Her father, however, disapproved and arranged a marriage for her to a silkmaker named Claude Martin when she was seventeen. She bore a son the next year, and before the child was a year old her husband died. Marie refused to marry again, devoting herself to religious exercises whenever she could free herself from other tasks in her sister’s household, where she and her son Claude had taken up residence. She spent the next decade helping with her brother-in-law’s carting business, grooming horses, keeping books, and writing correspondence. Sometimes during his absence Marie supervised all the work. All the while, however, she was seeking to dedicate her life to God’s service as a nun, even though that would mean leaving her son Claude behind.

Sisterhood. Marie never gave up her longing to become a nun although family members worked diligently to dissuade her. Finally her brother-in-law agreed to act as legal guardian for her son, setting aside a fund for his upbringing in recognition that the family’s recent prosperity owed much to Marie’s “talent for business.” In January 1631 she appeared at the door of a nearby convent kept by the Company of Saint Ursula, where she threw herself at the feet of the reverend mother. There she took the religious name Marie de l’Incarnation, and for the next few years she carried on a life of physical deprivation, constant devotion, and intensive spiritual training. She soon became an instructor of Christian doctrine in the convent, even writing explanations of the faith and a commentary on the Old Testament Song of Solomon. She also listened to the preaching of Jesuit fathers, some of whom had gone as missionaries to Canada and returned with stories of people who had no “knowledge of Jesus Christ.” Eventually she had a vision in which God told her to go to Canada and “make a house for Jesus and Mary.”

Missionary. On 4 May 1639 Marie de l’Incarnation embarked for Canada in partnership with the noble-born Madeline de La Peltrie, who had pledged to devote her wealth and life to missionary work “in the service of savage girls.” When they arrived at Quebec in August, Marie kissed the soil on which she would spend the remainder of her life. She threw herself into the work of establishing a convent, painting altars, cooking, lugging logs for building, studying Native American languages, and teaching young Huron and Iroquois girls whenever possible. She served as the convent’s superior for three six-year terms and held other offices. Marie also became a tireless promoter of the new convent through her writings. She carried on an extensive correspondence with her son, relatives, friends, religious officials, and potential donors in France. She composed accounts of her mission work for the Jesuit Relations, a popular collection of missionary narratives that were published annually in France to promote the Jesuits’ work in Canada. In 1661 she began writing catechisms, prayers, and instructional materials in Algonquian and Iroquoian. The largest of these was a “big book of sacred history and holy things,” written in Algonquian and titled Sacred History. Seven years earlier she had composed a spiritual autobiography at the request of her son, Claude Martin, charging him to keep it private. In 1677, five years after her death, he published it as La Vie de la venerable Mere Marie de I’Incarnation. The book’s spiritual reflections and detailed accounts of mission life among the Canadian Indians made it a popular seller, spreading throughout France the fame of this enterprising woman. The autobiography remains an important source of information on how contact between two races changed the lives of Native American and European women in seventeenth-century Canada.

Source

Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).