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The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs . By Emma Anderson . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2013. x + 463 pp. $39.95 cloth.
Book Reviews and Notes
It is fitting that this review of Emma Anderson's The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs is being written on November 1st, All Saints Day. For the story she tells with equal measures of historical insight, literary imagination, and moral conviction is ultimately concerned with sorting out saints--those recognized, those overlooked, those barely remembered. It is a story of communal memory and contested memory, of pasts continually reinvented to meet current needs. And it is a story that cuts across boundaries of time, theology, nation, and race.
Within the span of a few years in 1640s New France, eight Jesuits were killed by native assailants. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, and six other lesser known missionaries met violent ends while ministering to Mohawk and Wendat peoples. Anderson effectively contextualizes their fates within Jesuit martyrdom ideology, Wendat religious divisions over Catholicism, and Iroquois notions of soul return and sacrifice. From the beginning, there were multiple perspectives on the meaning of their deaths, a pattern she is keen to trace all the way into the twenty-first century. Most of her attention is riveted upon those in the church (mostly Catholics but eventually some protestants as well) who fashioned and refashioned the missionaries' legacy, up to and beyond their canonization as North America's first Catholic saints in 1930. But she also remains attuned to other points of view, especially native voices from within and outside the church who have...