Michael Leemann, “Like Squirrels: Religious Dissent and the Body of the ‘Savage’ in Marie de l’Incarnation’s Writings”, in Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent. Naked, Veiled, Vilified, Worshipped (Routledge Studies in Early Modern Religious Dissents and Radicalism), edited by Elisabeth Fischer and Xenia von Tippelskirch, London/New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. 174–193.

For the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French Atlantic, historical inquiries in the context of “Francization” — the official colonial policy that intended the transformation of native Americans into Europeans — have previously emphasized a shift in thinking from religious to racial differentiation. Instead of chronologically juxtaposing religious and racial alterity, this contribution explores their intersection in the writings of Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672). Marie, mother superior of the Canadian Ursulines who attempted to convert “savage” girls and women to Catholicism, complained that the neophytes were most susceptible to melancholy. At times, according to Marie, melancholic “savages” in delusional states would even escape from the convent “like squirrels.” That the “savages” were especially prone to the malady stemmed from their “savage birth” which, ultimately, made them inept for becoming entirely Christian. As this chapter intends to show, Marie’s assertion of an inborn disposition testifies to an embodiment of difference that was both religious and racial. While religious dissent was rooted in “savage” bodies, female European orthodoxy was disembodied. Standing in a long hagiographic tradition, Marie’s published writings propagated the transcendence of the female body, thus intervening in struggles over female religious fervor in Counter-reformation France.