In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son, Claude, against the wishes of her family and her own misgivings. Marie concluded, "God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him therefore in His hands, I bid adieu to him joyfully." Claude organized a band of schoolboys to storm the convent, begging for his mother's return. Eight years later, Marie made her way to Quebec, where over the course of the next thirty-three years she opened the first school for Native American girls, translated catechisms into indigenous languages, and served some eighteen years as superior of the first Ursuline convent in the New World. She would also maintain, over this same period, an extensive and intimate correspondence with the son she had abandoned to serve God.The Cruelest of All Mothers is, fundamentally, an explanation of Marie de l'Incarnation's decision to abandon Claude for religious life. Complicating Marie's own explication of the abandonment as a sacrifice carried out in imitation of Christ and in submission to God's will, the book situates the event against the background of early modern French family life, the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Deeply grounded in a set of rich primary sources, The Cruelest of All Mothers offers a rich and complex analysis of the abandonment.
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The Crueest o A Mothers
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catholic practice in north america
se r i e s c o -e di t or s: Angea Aaimo O’Donne, Associate Director o the Francis and Ann Curran Center or American Cathoic Studies, Fordham University John C. Seitz, Assistant Proessor, Theoogy Department, Fordham University
This series aims to contribute to the growing fied o Cathoic studies through the pubication o books devoted to the historica and cutura study o Cathoic practice in North America, rom the coonia period to the present. As the term “practice” suggests, the series springs rom a pressing need in the study o American Cathoicism or empirica investigations and creative exporations and anayses o the contours o Cathoic experience. In seeking to provide more comprehensive maps o Cathoic practice, this series is committed to pubishing works rom diverse American ocaes, incuding urban, suburban, and rura settings; ethnic, post-ethnic, and transnationa contexts; private and pubic sites; and seats o power as we as the margins.
se r i e s a d v i s ory b oa r d: Emma Anderson, Ottawa University Pau Contino, Pepperdine University Katheen Sprows Cummings, University o Notre Dame James T. Fisher, Fordham University Pau Mariani, Boston Coege Thomas A. Tweed, University o Texas at Austin
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The Crueest o A Mothers m a r ie d e l’in c a r n at i o n , m o t her h o o d , a nd t he c hr is t i a n t r a d i t i o n
Mary Dunn
f or dh a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2016
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Library o Congress Cataoging-in-Pubication Data
Dunn, Mary, 1976– The crueest o a mothers : Marie de ’Incarnation, motherhood, and the Christian tradition / Mary Dunn.—First edition. pages cm.—(Cathoic practice in North America) Incudes bibiographica reerences and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-6721-7 (coth : ak. paper) 1. Mothers and sons—Reigious aspects—Cathoic Church. 2. Abandoned chidren—France—History. 3. Marie de ’Incarnation, mère, 1599–1672. 4. Martin, Caude, 1619–1696. 5. Cathoic Church—France—History—17th century. 6. France—Church history—17th century. I. Tite. BX2353.D86 2015 271'.97402—dc23 2015004708
Printed in the United States o America
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1 Expication: Representations o the Abandonment in theRelations, the Letters, and theVie 2 Expanation: Contextuaizing the Abandonment within Seventeenth-Century French Famiy Lie 3 Expanation: The Marginaization o Motherhood in the Christian Tradition 4 Expanation: Materna Hagiographies and Spirituaities o Abandonment in Seventeenth-Century France 5 Motherhood Refigured: Kristeva, Materna Sacrifice, and the Imitation o Christ Aterword/Aterward