Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665-1700 (review)

In 1653 Marguerite Bourgeoys left Troyes, France to sail for Montreal, a dangerous missionary settlement astride Iroquois trade routes. She decided to go because a tall woman clad in white appeared in a vision and urged 'Go, I will not abandon you.' After setting up a school for settlers' children in a stable, Bourgeoys recruited other devout laywomen to go out and teach across New France. By 1760 a dozen schools had appeared, and female literacy rates were about the same as male ones, atypical for the eighteenth century. Commentators past and present attributed this to the Congregation of Notre-Dame, which Bourgeoys founded. During her lifetime the founder was a model of heroic sanctity, rejoicing at the new resolve required after fire engulfed the community house, and making an Atlantic crossing sleeping on a coiled rope on deck. Such feats, combined with the requisite number of certified miracles, resulted in her canonization in 1982. A biographer's challenge is to satisfy the scholarly and the sceptical while remaining true to her subject, who clearly heard the beat of a supernatural drummer. In this second volume of her biography of Bourgeoys, Patricia Simpson, research co-ordinator of Montreal's Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum, bridges the two worlds commendably.

Simpson shows mastery of accounts written over the centuries. By comparing them, she involves the reader in making sense of disputes and rivalries, discouragements, and possible naturalistic explanations for miracles. The book covers the Congregation's role in housing early immigrant brides, in teaching sewing and other needed skills, in developing farms. The author resolutely humanizes Bourgeoys while still conveying her truly uncommon trust in providence. Simpson points out that the Congregation of Notre-Dame now thrives best in Latin America and Cameroon, where conditions bear some resemblance to those of seventeenth-century Canada.

It will be the task of others to integrate this new biography into the wider historiography of the period. A next step will be fuller analysis of the importance of female mystics, of secular orders, of popular education. Simpson's findings can find a place in frameworks provided by historians such as Roger Magnuson, Elizabeth Rapley, Dominique Deslandres, and Marie-Florine Bruneau, and by studies of filles séculières in France.

Apart from producing a tempered biography of the saint, the author's familiarity with early Montreal permits fresh glimpses of daily lives, particularly those of women that often remain in the shadows. There was the mother of a hyperactive daughter who imprisoned her periodically in a barrel, leading to tragedy when the little girl strangled herself trying to get out. There was the famous wealthy recluse Jeanne Le Ber, who had a hermit's cell built astride the Congregation's church and whose skeletal remains still tell the tale: worn knees from all the hours at prayer, marks on her teeth from snapping so many threads while sewing gorgeous chasubles and altarcloths. We join Montrealers for the potluck suppers provided for people arriving with news from France, and accompany early Superior Marie Barbier on her trip to Quebec to receive Canada's first known breast cancer surgery from Michel Sarrazin in 1700 (surprisingly, a success). Lastly, photographs of seventeenth-century artifacts and an essay on changing iconography also do their part to bring the life and times of one of Canada's founding mothers into clearer view.