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  • Becoming Holy in Early Canada by Timothy G. Pearson
  • Mary Dunn
Becoming Holy in Early Canada. Timothy G. Pearson. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 295, $100.00 cloth, $32.95 paper

Timothy Pearson’s Becoming Holy in Early Canada is an excellent book, one that makes an important contribution to early Canadian colonial history and to our understanding of the lived experience of holiness in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France. In Becoming Holy, Pearson aims to repatriate “holiness from its abstractness as an entity removed from daily life and experience . . . [and] reinsert it into the historical contexts in which it was originally recognized and valued” (5). In seven tightly woven chapters, dedicated to the historical contextualization of early modern Catholic notions of sanctity and the significance of martyrdom, charity, asceticism, miracles, and hagiography in the process of becoming holy in early Canada, Pearson trains his disciplined eye on the “lived encounters and lived relationships between holy persons” and their witnesses (6). Fundamental to Pearson’s approach to the study of holiness is the concept of performance, which Pearson takes to refer “to the lived contexts in which holiness was originally expressed and experienced in the public sphere” (10).

Becoming Holy is a fluid read, laced with captivating anecdotes. Building on the work of Allan Greer, Jodi Bilinkoff, and Emma Anderson, among others (and decidedly influenced by the lived religion approach of David Hall and Robert Orsi), Pearson situates the holy men and women of early modern New France within the thick contexts of their communities. In his attempt to recover (as much as the sources permit) historical performances of holiness in early Canada, Pearson draws attention to the “multiple, diverging, and ultimately deeply entangled causes and meanings” that underlay the deaths of the so-called Jesuit martyrs, the classificatory challenges of Indigenous claims to sanctity, the importance of place, the persistence of gendered ideals (and their transformation over the course of the French regime in Canada), and the porous boundary between private and public, particularly in the cases of women religious whose holy performances took place largely behind the cloister wall but were nonetheless celebrated, sought after, and widely acknowledged in the colonial community at large (57).

Like the colonial enterprise itself, Pearson’s book is an exercise in boundary crossing, taking its reader on an illuminating journey from post-Tridentine France, across the colonial landscape, and into Indigenous lifeworlds, traversing complicated papal politics, gendered traditions of Christian sanctity, and the bare facts of the vicissitudes [End Page 291] of life on the colonial frontier. Becoming Holy, as Pearson puts it, bridges “the gap between history and anthropology and between social, religious, and cultural history” (13). It tells the story of an early Canada in which absolute distinctions between sacred and secular were neither tenable nor even imagined. In the early Canada of Pearson’s study, politics and piety, commerce and evangelism, settlement and devotion were so braided together that an historical account of performances of holiness amounts, in effect, to an historical account of the early colony itself. That Pearson manages to anchor his analysis of holiness in early Canada so firmly in its various historical contexts is, indeed, one of the book’s virtues. Becoming Holy hews closely to its stated agenda of examining “the process of becoming holy in the French colonial period in Canada,” while at the same time offering its readers a valuable primer in early Canadian history (5).

Becoming Holy also bridges the gap between religion as a matter of individual subjectivity and religion as a matter of collective action and broad (largely abstract and anonymous) social forces. In Pearson’s deft hands, holiness in early Canada takes shape not as the consequence of an individual’s personal charisma (à la Max Weber) nor as the constructed product of “collective mental representations” (à la Pierre Delooz) but, rather, in the intimate negotiations between an individual and his or her society. Holiness in early Canada for Pearson is, in other words, a matter of “relationships created in and around [its] local performances” (13). Pearson’s study therefore makes an elegant contribution to the field of religious studies, which...

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