Jesuit Missionaries and the Accommodationist Demons of New France

Cowan, Mairi

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75738-4_9

Mairi Cowan⁷

Part of the book series: Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic ((PHSWM))

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Abstract

Mairi Cowan’s chapter on Jesuits in New France illuminates several interesting features of European demonology within a colonial context. After tracing the missionaries’ presumption that demonic forces were essentially the same on both sides of the Atlantic, Cowan analyzes the Jesuits’ belief that demons accommodated themselves to different cultures as a reflection of the Jesuits’ own accommodationist approach on their missions. Next, she discusses why some individual Jesuit missionaries in New France responded to Indigenous people’s claims about seemingly demonic activities with accusations of fraud, while others more readily believed accounts of malevolent spiritual forces in Algonquian and Iroquoian communities. In this chapter’s final section, Cowan focuses on the Jesuits’ collective inability to overcome a reputation as controllers of harmful magic. Indigenous people incorporated the priests into a pre-existing metaphysical system, and thereby transformed the Jesuits into something akin to the demons that the missionaries sought to defeat.

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Notes

1.
“terre jumelle,” Monumenta Novae Franciae, vol. 1, ed. Lucien Campeau (Québec-Rome: Bellarmin-Institutum Historicum Societas Iesu, 1967–), 460–62; Éric Thierry, “Le discours démonologique dans les récits de voyages au Canada et en Acadie au début du XVIIe siècle,” in Voyager avec le Diable: Voyages réels, voyages imaginaires et discours démonologues (XVe–XVIIe siècles), ed. Grégoire Holtz and Thibaut Maus de Rolley, 209–20 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), 219. The most important primary sources for this study are the Jesuit Relations, a series of reports written by Jesuit missionaries and published in Paris between 1632 and 1673. For the volumes published up to 1661, I use the Monumenta Novae Franciae, edited by Lucien Campeau and published between 1967 and 2003 (hereafter MNF). For relations post-dating 1661, I use the Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites and published between 1896 and 1901. All translations into English from the MNF are my own. “Indian” is used when paraphrasing or directly translating the word “sauvage” from texts in French. It is a less jarringly offensive rendering than the more obvious cognate “savage,” and, since it is a historically inaccurate label, it conveys something of the misunderstandings common among European observers in seventeenth-century North America . When providing a more modern interpretation or perspective, the word “Indigenous” is preferred. “Native” is used when the original author was emphasizing a North American origin. Similarly, “Black Robes ” is sometimes used as the name for Jesuits when adopting an Indigenous perspective of the seventeenth century. For the publication history of the Relations, see Micah True, Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). For advice on how best to use the Relations as a historical source, see also Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 1–3; Klaus-Dieter Ertler, “Les Relations des jésuites et la construction de l’observateur Européen face au monde indigène,” in Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities, ed. Marc André Bernier, Clorinda Donato, and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, 276–90 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 276–7; Carolyn Podruchny and Kathryn Magee Labelle, “Jean de Brébeuf and the Wendat Voices of Seventeenth-Century New France,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 34 (2011): 97–126 on 99–100.
2.
John L. Steckley, from the introduction to De Religione: Telling the Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Story in Huron to the Iroquois (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 37–45; Bruce Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 90–1.
3.
MNF III, 600. See also MNF IV, 595, and Tracy Neal Leavelle, The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 77.
4.
“des choses qui ont une vertu comme surnaturelle,” MNF VII, 417.
5.
Peter Goddard argues that the Jesuits did not conflate the manitou with the devil, except when associating the good manitou with God. “The Devil in New France : Jesuit Demonology, 1611–50,” Canadian Historical Review 78.1 (March, 1997): 40–62 on 52. Bruce Trigger says that Jesuits did identify the deities worshipped by the Huron with devils . The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), 503. Tracy Neal Leavelle thinks that it was common among the French to equate manitous with devils . Leavelle, Catholic Calumet, 76.
6.
“Ils ont dit qu’ils sont ‘ondaki.’ c’est-à-dire des démons,” MNF III, 99; “ils recognoissent un manitou, que nous pouvons appeler le diable,” MNF II, 571–2. See also MNF II, 546, 583; MNF III, 328–9, 356; MNF V, 210–12; MNF VII, 400.
7.
MNF IV, 405–6, 423–4; MNF VII, 173.
8.
True, Masters and Students, 138; Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, & Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 105.
9.
Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 165.
10.
MNF II, 434, 564.
11.
MNF III, 355. Peter A. Dorsey argues that the Jesuits in New France also saw “God’s imprint on the languages and, by extension, the cultures of the people they encountered” in “Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority Among the Jesuits of New France,” The William and Mary Quarterly 55.3 (1998): 399–420 on 401.
12.
Girolamo Imbruglia, “A Peculiar Idea of Empire: Missions and Missionaries of the Society of Jesus in Early Modern History,” in Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas, 21–49 on 29–30.
13.
MNF II, 596; Sara E. Melzer, “The Role of Culture and Art in France’s Colonial Strategy of the Seventeenth Century,” in Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas, 169–86 on 170–2.
14.
MNF II, 289, 306.
15.
MNF III, 51–2; Gilles Havard et Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris: Flammarion, 2014), 173–4. By 1665, François-Joseph Le Mercier argued that such progress was already well under way and that the country appeared almost no longer like Canada. Henceforth, he suggested they should erase the name “barbarian” from all the histories or relations and change “Canada” to “New France ,” or even “Old France,” for it seemed to him that the latter had been transported to these countries, so much had things already advanced. Library and Archives Canada, Lettre du jésuite François Le Mercier à Colbert, MG7-IA6, microfilm reel number C-12868, pp. 211–12.
16.
MNF III, 121; MNF IV, 100, 219.
17.
MNF III, 330–1, 675; MNF IV, 287; MNF V, 449–50.
18.
MNF III, 525; MNF IV, 78; MNF V, 61.
19.
MNF VIII, 341.
20.
Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London : Routledge, 2004), 3; Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France, 285; True, Masters and Students, 9–10.
21.
Marie-Christine Pioffet, “La Nouvelle-France dans l’imaginaire jésuite: terra doloris ou Jérusalem céleste?” in Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas, 326–43 on 326 and 335; Alain Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn: Jésuites et amérindiens nomades en Nouvelle-France, 1632–1642 (Québec: Nuit Blanche, 1990), 15. For an insightful and forceful Indigenous account of why people should not convert, as presented by the Algonquin captain Agwachimagan while wintering with the Huron in 1643–1644, see MNF VI, 214–16, discussed in James P. Ronda, “‘We Are Well As We Are’: An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian Missions,” The William and Mary Quarterly 34.1 (1977): 66–82 on 76.
22.
Luca Codignola, “Few, Uncooperative, and Ill Informed? The Roman Catholic Clergy in French and British North America , 1610–1658,” in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700, ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny, 173–85 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 179–81; Peter Goddard, “Canada in Early Modern Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity?” in Decentring the Renaissance, 186–99 on 186–7.
23.
Thomas Worcester, “A Defensive Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-Century New France ,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 1–15; Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 130–1; Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions françaises au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 291, 297, 428, 439.
24.
Simon Ditchfield, “Of Missions and Models: The Jesuit Enterprise (1540–1773) Reassessed in Recent Literature,” Catholic Historical Review 93 (2007): 325–43.
25.
James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 71–2; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5. For a discussion of Jesuit accommodation as enculturation in China, see Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 39–63.
26.
Cited in R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 210.
27.
Cited in Imbruglia, “Peculiar Idea of Empire,” 23–33.
28.
“s’il est besoign, se faire barbare avec eux pour les gaigner à Jésus-Christ ,” MNF V, 545.
29.
Imbruglia, “Peculiar Idea of Empire,” 23–4.
30.
Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 131–3; René B. Javellana, “The Jesuits and the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al., 418–38 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 422, 427; Iris Gareis, “Merging Magical Traditions: Sorcery and Witchcraft in Spanish and Portuguese America,” in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. Brian Levack , 412–28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 14–15; Ralph Bauer, “Baroque New Worlds: Ethnography and Demonology in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation” in Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, ed. Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, 46–78 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 46; Qiong Zhang, “About God, Demons, and Miracles: The Jesuit Discourse on the Supernatural in Late Ming China,” Early Science and Medicine 4.1 (1999): 1–36 on 5–6, 10–15; Shenwen Li, Stratégies missionnaires des Jésuites français en Nouvelle-France et en Chine au XVIIe siècle (Québec: Les presses l’Université de Laval, 2001), 162.
31.
Catherine Albanese has discussed “the conscious and unconscious ways that Indian cultures with their spiritual powers pried open spaces in the seemingly impermeable walls of European civilization,” in her “Exchanging Selves, Exchanging Souls: Contact, Combination, and American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed, 200–26 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Quotation on p. 205.
32.
The fullest discussion of how Jesuits interpreted the dreams of Indigenous people is Leslie Tuttle, “French Jesuits and Indian Dreams in Seventeenth-Century New France ,” in Dreams, Dreamers, and Visions: The Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Anne Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 166–84.
33.
MNF III, 364–5.
34.
MNF IV, 223, 434. The Jesuits often expressed a sense of disgust at the eating at feasts, perhaps as part of the trend outlined by Peter Burke as an early modern reform of popular culture. See his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London : Ashgate, 2009), 289–334.
35.
See, for example, Jean de Brébeuf in MNF III, 352; Le Jeune in MNF III, 594; François Dupéron in MNF IV, 222–3; Jérôme Lalemant in MNF IV, 421; Simon Le Moyne in JR 47: 177; and MNF V, 515. Goddard, “Devil in New France ,” 58; Dominque Deslandres, “Dreams Clash: The War over Authorized Interpretation in Seventeenth-Century French Missions,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster, 143–53 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Delâge, Bitter Feast, 71, 74, 77; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 76–7, 81–2; Greer, Jesuit Relations, 54.
36.
“Un songe, en France, n’est qu’un songe, mais c’est icy un poinct de théologie ou un article de foy,” MNF V, 404, 450–1.
37.
MNF III, 753–4; MNF VII, 143. The parodying type of imitation by this demon is far from what Gilles Havard has found in his examination of mimicry among Indigenous people for the purpose of piercing through the opaqueness of the Europeans’ otherness. See his “Le rire des jésuites: Une archéologie du mimétisme dans la rencontre franco-amérindienne (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 62.3 (2007): 539–73.
38.
“un jeune homme vestu d’une robe blanche comme neige et beau comme un François,” MNF IV, 155; Deslandres, “Dreams Clash,” 152; Tuttle, “French Jesuits and Indian Dreams,” 182–3.
39.
Tuttle, “French Jesuits and Indian Dreams,” 168–9.
40.
MNF III, 363; MNF VII, 172.
41.
MNF III, 358; Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des évêques de Québec, publiés par H. Tètu et C. O. Gagnon, volume premier (Québec: Imprimerie Générale, 1887), 21.
42.
MNF IV, 690; MNF V, 526–8.
43.
MNF II, 289–90.
44.
MNF II, 415.
45.
MNF III, 601.
46.
“ces beaux oracles,” “ce beau mystère,” “ce bel édifice,” “le jongleur qui les contrefaisoit.” MNF II, 566–70.
47.
MNF II, 456. See also MNF II, 435; MNF III, 602, 603.
48.
MNF III, 603–5. Two years later, he maintained that even if most people resorted to trickery, at least some were really in contact with the devil . MNF IV, 326.
49.
MNF III, 104–5. See also MNF III, 110; Seeman, The Huron -Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 53–4.
50.
MNF III, 358.
51.
MNF III, 392–404; Kathryn Magee Labelle, “‘Faire la chaudière’: The Wendat Feast of Souls, 1636” in French and Indians in the Heart of North America , 1630–1815, ed. Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, 1–20 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013); Seeman, Huron -Wendat Feast, 78.
52.
MNF V, 526–8. My thanks to Erik R. Seeman for his advice on interpreting this episode.
53.
The “8” is a feature of French transcriptions of Indigenous names. It started out as an omicron surmounted by an upsilon, so that it looked somewhat like the number 8 but open at the top. Later it closed so that it often looks indistinguishable from an “8.” It represents a sound like the English “w.”
54.
MNF IV, 425, 435, 438–40; MNF V, 167; MNF VII, 155. For a newly converted Christian’s struggle to give up the asc8andics, see MNF IV, 440.
55.
MNF V, 525–6. See also MNF VI, 397; MNF VII, 155.
56.
MNF IV, 409, 412–13, 653–4; MNF V, 538. For his account of a magician who could conjure thunderstorms with the devil , see MNF IV, 654–5. For his disapproval of the Huron sacrificing to the devil for a good harvest, see MNF IV, 652–3.
57.
“un vrai sabat,” MNF III, 742.
58.
MNF III, 714–15.
59.
MNF III, 753.
60.
MNF VII, 414.
61.
“ce mestier d’enfer,” MNF VII, 419–20.
62.
“l’industrie, la force et la vigilance sont le plus puissant aaskouandy qu’un homme puisse avoir,” MNF VII, 417–19.
63.
Goddard, “Devil in New France ,” 40–62.
64.
Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 130–1.
65.
Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 437–5.
66.
Goddard also finds a change over time, from a concern about demons to one about sinful nature, but puts it later—by 1650. Goddard, “Devil in New France,” 43.
67.
Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America , 1600–64 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993), 71.
68.
On Le Jeune’s general mistrust of his Indigenous hosts’ claims more broadly, see Jacques Monet, “The Jesuits in New France ,” The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, 186–98 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 193.
69.
MNF II, 673–4. For a similar incident, see also MNF II, 716–17. He was much less reluctant to accept accounts when they came from Europeans, even at secondhand. He called it strange that the devil appeared sensibly to Indigenous South Americans, according to reports by Europeans, but did not communicate in any visible or sensible way to the Indians where he was. MNF II, 583–5.
70.
MNF II, 570–1.
71.
Delâge, Bitter Feast, 164–5; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 79–80.
72.
MNF II, 659–60. For a colorful description of Le Jeune trying to sleep through one of Carigouan’s ceremonies, see MNF II, 687–8. Carigouan was not the only sorcerer with whom Le Jeune had a vexed relationship. See also MNF III, 595–7; Axtell, The Invasion Within, 98–9.
73.
MNF III, 58–9.
74.
“il a esté tout grillé, rosty et misérablement bruslé,” MNF III, 60–1, 230–1, 233–4.
75.
Léon Pouliot, “Le Jeune, Paul ,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1 (Toronto and Québec: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1966 rev. 1979).
76.
Joseph Donnelly, Jean de Brébeuf (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1975), 11, 57; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 501; Monet, “The Jesuits in New France ,” 188; René Latourelle, “Brébeuf, Jean de (Échon),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1 (Toronto and Québec: University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1966 rev. 2015).
77.
Cited in Nancy Bonvillain, “Jesuit Perceptions of Iroquoian Culture: Ethnocentrism and Enlightenment,” in Jesuit Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators and Missionaries in the Americas, 1549–1767, ed. Joseph A. Gagliano and Charles E. Ronan, 81–97 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1997), 84.
78.
MNF III, 361–2.
79.
MNF III, 105–6; Podruchny and Labelle, “Jean de Brébeuf and the Wendat Voices,” 109.
80.
MNF III, 366.
81.
MNF IV, 416; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 572–3; Donnelly, Jean de Brébeuf, 149–50.
82.
Bonvillain, “Jesuit Perceptions,” 84–5.
83.
MNF III, 754–5.
84.
“Il est aisé qu’on accuse d’irréligion ce qui n’est que sottise et qu’on prenne pour opération diabolique ce qui n’a rien au-dessus de l’humain,” MNF VII, 395–6.
85.
JR 47: 181–3; JR 51: 111, 123–5, 217; JR 62: 181.
86.
“Cela est bon pour vous autres,” MNF II, 465–6.
87.
MNF III, 103.
88.
“nous avons nos façons de faire et vous les vostres, aussi bien que les autres nations,” MNF III, 737.
89.
Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 566, 848; Beaulieu, Convertir les fils de Caïn, 89–92.
90.
MNF III, 735. Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 246–8; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 499–500, 534–5; Carole Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 106–8.
91.
“vrays démons incarnez,” MNF III, 769.
92.
“Ils parlent sans cesse de leur Oki, c’est-à-dire de ce grand Esprit qu’ils adorent,” MNF IV, 146.
93.
“‘vous estes des Okhi,’ c’est-à-dire vous estes des démons ou des créatures extraordinaires et hors commun des hommes,” MNF III, 317–18.
94.
“la maison des François estoit une maison de démons, ou de gens méfaisans, qui estoient venus en leur pays afin de les faire mourir,” MNF III, 677.
95.
MNF III, 317–38, 781; MNF IV, 656–7; Delâge, Bitter Feast, 175–7; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 473–6.
96.
MNF III, 653; Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 535.
97.
MNF III, 115, 200.
98.
MNF III, 625–6, 729.
99.
MNF III, 781.
100.
Gordon Sayre, Les sauvages américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 204; Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 108–9; James Axtell, “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands,” The William and Mary Quarterly 44.2 (1987): 300–9. For similar charges brought by the Neutrals, see MNF V, 198–9.
101.
MNF IV, 22–3, 31–4; MNF IV, 140.
102.
MNF IV, 658.
103.
MNF III, 781; Blackburn, Harvest of Souls, 112.
104.
MNF VI, 264–7; Axtell, Invasion Within, 115–16; François-Marc Gagnon, La Conversion par l’Image: Un aspect de la mission des jésuites auprès des Indiens du Canada au XVIIe siècle (Montreal: Les Éditions Bellarmin, 1975), 42–6, see also 66–7. For other examples, see Marie de l’Incarnation, Correspondance, ed. Dom Guy Oury (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971), 840, 857; Jean Delumeau, Le péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident (XIIIe – XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 369–550; Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, 439.
105.
MNF IV, 566–7; Axtell, Invasion Within, 114; True, Masters and Students, 93.
106.
MNF IV, 135–6; Laurier Turgeon, “The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object,” Ethnohistory 44.1 (1997): 9–18.
107.
“cette petite furie d’enfer”; “Veux-tu donc te damner?”—“Ouy da! Je suis tout résolu, dit-il, de souffrir les feux et les flammes d’enfer. Je me suis disposé dès mon bas aage à estre cruellement bruslé. J’y ferray paroistre mon courage,” MNF IV, 705.
108.
Even when converting to Christianity , people in Indigenous communities often formed “micro-Christendoms,” a term proposed by Peter Brown for the late antique period and then developed by Kenneth Mills for the early modern Andes. Mills insists on “the local people’s particular, small-scale cultic priorities, their variant Christian enthusiasms, their sometimes idiosyncratic forms,” while “also stressing their persistent and largely self-defined membership in, and relationship to, larger collections of people, beliefs, rules, and practices.” Mills, “Religious Imagination in the Viceroyalty of Peru,” in The Virgin, Saints, and Angels: South American Paintings 1600–1825 from the Thoma Collection (Milan: Skira, 2006), 28; cf. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), especially the introduction and chapter 16.
109.
MNF V, 489–90.
110.
MNF V, 492–3.
111.
“fais trève pour un jour de la foy. Nostre païs se perd; les malades se meurent. Pourquoy vous retirez-vous de nos dances? Pourquoy refusez-vous de rendre cette charité au public? Ce sont les chrestiens qui nous tuent, puisqu’ils ne nous veulent pas secourir,” MNF V, 490–1. On the formation of Christian factions that cut across traditional lineages and tribes to form risks across social groupings, see Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 717, 721.
112.
Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 848.

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author would like to thank the organizers and participants in the William and Mary Quarterly-Early Modern Studies Workshop “Religions in the Early Americas” at the Huntington Library for their rigorous and helpful feedback on an early draft of this chapter.

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Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Mairi Cowan

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Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, USA
Michelle D. Brock
University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada
Richard Raiswell
Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada
David R. Winter

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Cowan, M. (2018). Jesuit Missionaries and the Accommodationist Demons of New France. In: Brock, M., Raiswell, R., Winter, D. (eds) Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75738-4_9

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