“But an Echo”?: Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth-Century New France

Claude Martin’s Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l’Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual autobiography that Claude’s voice in the text is “but an echo” of his mother’s own. A close reading, however, suggests that Claude so dominates the account of his mother’s life that the Vie emerges as an instance of hagiography and apology that renders Marie the model of the Counter-Reformation saint, the paradigm of post-Tridentine Catholic devotion, and the obedient daughter of a patriarchal ecclesiastical hierarchy in an effort to draw the boundaries of female religious identity in early-modern New France.