Abstract
Marie de l’Incarnation, From Mother to Son: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation to Claude Martin, translated and with Introduction and Notes Mary Dunn, American Academy of Religion – Texts & Translation, Oxford University Press: New York, 2014; 256 pp.: 9780199386574, £47.99/$74.00 (hbk)
It is not easy, on first acquaintance, to warm to Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), the celebrated (and recently canonized) French mystic who, as the widowed Marie Martin, abandoned her young son in 1631 to enter the Ursulines and, when the distraught child made desperate attempts to break in to see his mother, attributed his actions to the work of the devil. Yet whatever our reserves she was a truly remarkable woman, whose correspondence is a primary resource of extraordinary value. In 1639 she left for the struggling colony of New France, and in Quebec founded the first Ursuline convent in the New World. Her letters to her son Claude over thirty-one years form the most richly complex strand of her abundant correspondence. Forty-one of the eighty-one extant letters have now been translated and presented in English by Mary Dunn.
Marie’s writings are unique. Her intense, emotive spirituality is balanced by the practical experiences of a highly capable woman who learnt the Algonquin, Huron and Iroquois languages, wrote in all of them, and interacted constantly with the Amerindians; and she gives dramatic accounts of the often violent, and always threatened, life among the early settlers that complement the Jesuit Relations from a distinctly female perspective (while throughout these letters we follow the evolving relationship between the distant mother and the son she abandoned). Claude Martin, who became a distinguished Maurist Benedictine, edited, and apparently revised, the letters in 1681, and for most this is all that survives. The reader needs a reliable guide when first approaching them.
This edition is just such a guide, with an excellent introduction – informative, scholarly and well judged – and thorough annotations. The translation reads well, and rises successfully to the challenge of putting its seventeenth-century French original into accessible modern English. It is, for example, a good decision to render the ubiquitous ‘sauvages’ as ‘Indians’, far more appropriate than ‘savages’; yet nevertheless, as the translator is aware, inevitably losing something of the semantic complexity of the original. The translator does her best with the passages of mystical exaltation in this strongly Christocentric piety, although nothing can prevent the expressions of ecstatic love – familiar and unproblematic in the context of early modern writings of the French School of Spirituality – from seeming strange, even embarrassingly lush, in a context of occasionally colloquial modern English (as when hostile Mohawks ‘pulled a fast one’, p. 137). There are, inevitably, a few slips in the translation, misunderstandings or mistranslations of seventeenth-century French usage: thus the phrase ‘Monsieur de Genève’ in the 1681 original (p. 211), the normal contemporary term for the bishop, is correctly identified in a note as François de Sales, but oddly translated as ‘The Monsieur of Geneva’ (p. 153).
But these are small quibbles. More seriously, given the rich documentation of the annotations, one greatly regrets that the publishers have not included a bibliography of work on Marie de l’Incarnation, not least by Mary Dunn herself. It is, though, my only serious reservation about this notably successful and well-handled edition.