Re-Thinking Where the Sources Lead: Reflecting on the Research and Writing Process

Alanna Loucks

Over the last few months, I started writing a draft of the final chapter of my dissertation. This chapter reconstructs the household and larger web of relationships created by Mère d’Youville and the Grey Nuns of Montréal. This chapter fits into my larger project, which traces the familial and economic networks created by three generations of four French families, each involved in distinct enterprises that were emblematic of colonial Montréal society, which together influenced the ever-changing character of the city: French colonial governance, the fur trade, the military, and monastic life. At any one time, the households of these four families reflected the diversity that characterized Montréal, as a crossroad between continental and Atlantic worlds, and the surrounding region economically, and in occupation, ethnicity, and gender. These households were worlds of their own – a microcosm of the broader societal landscape of the city – but they were also deeply embedded in the fabric of this city itself and in larger, overlapping economic, social, and familial webs and channels of exchange that criss-crossed North America and the Atlantic. For the fur trader, colonial officer, and governor, their households are dynamic and diverse, but quite obviously similar to each other in structure and individual roles and participation within these spaces. But for the final household, that of the Grey Nuns, the contours of this spatial container seemed harder to delineate and the structures, hierarchies, labour divisions, and larger network of this monastic family, albeit similar in some ways to the other three, seemed more difficult to dissect and assess. What follows is a description of the ongoing process, in all its messiness, of working through this research and reconstruction to ponder or probe how to balance where the sources can lead and the maintenance of a larger argument and methodology.

In 2021, I submitted a post to Borealia about Marguerite d’Youville.[1] The post took a decidedly biographical approach and it focused only on Youville. Over the past few years, I have read, collected, inputted, and mapped the fascinating, intricate, and extensive webs of inter-relations, associations, partnerships, and interactions of a fur trading family, a family of decorated soldiers, and influential colonial administrators. The wealth of primary and secondary source material on the subjects of the fur trade, the colonial military, and administrative structures in Montréal, and in New France and North America more generally, encouraged and supported my contextualization and understanding of these different individuals and their larger webs of interaction. However, my research into the Grey Nuns of Montréal, and the community’s founder, Marguerite d’Youville, seemed to lead in a different direction – one that was much more biographical or institutional, and unfortunately, further away from the larger argument I planned to make in my project. I spent months trying to outline how this interesting, and ultimately central, conventual household became embedded in colonial Montréal society and within the networks that connected the city to the rest of the continent and the Atlantic world, much like the other households in my project. Finally, with the support of my supervisors, I poked my head out from under the vast amounts of primary and secondary materials that attested to Mère d’Youville’s life, her relationships, and her actions as the founder of the Grey Nuns. In a manner that sounds a bit philosophical, I finally got off the current, which was pulling my argument in a way that reflected the direction that the sources wanted to take me.

Recently, Jacob F. Lee interestingly described the surprises he encountered while conducting research for his current project about “the long aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase.”[2] As Lee describes, research into The Territorial Papers of the United States began with a series of questions and expectations, which in turn, were upended once Lee’s reading of these documents actually began. I think that this experience is a familiar one. One might comb through hundreds of documents to find a single reference to a relevant individual or event, or the necessary or desired sources to support one’s hypotheses may simply not exist. Additionally, historical emphasis on textual sources can further hinder exploration, as material or oral sources are harder to examine or uncover. As historians, we are taught to “read against the grain” or “between the lines” to try to uncover less obvious or overt traces of individual’s voices or actions, or to ask different questions to come to less obvious conclusions, but this is not always easy to do.[3] We are also importantly warned by scholars, including Nancy van Deusen, Zeb Tortorici, and Sophie White, about the “seduction of recovery,” and our desire to “liberate voices, narratives, and lost lives,” which can blur the ever-shifting, and frequently deeply unequal structures that create the archive itself and determine what is preserved.[4] In researching my final chapter, I tried to let the sources guide my way, but as it turned out, it was not where I wanted to go.

Undeniably, Mère d’Youville was a fascinating woman who was widowed by a gambling fur trader while pregnant and with young children to feed. Youville became more involved in charitable organizations working to aid and support the poor, and eventually, she founded the Grey Nuns, alongside three other likeminded women, which came to occupy the Hôpital-Général de Montréal. These are all important pieces of this fascinating woman’s life, and they are crucial and unavoidable pieces of the larger history of this community of women and the conventual household they built in colonial Montréal. An amazing collection of Mère d’Youville’s letters, alongside administrative and financial records, following the Grey Nuns takeover of the Hôpital-Général, has been preserved in the Grey Nuns archive in old Montréal, which further highlights the characteristics and work of this woman. And since 1959, several biographies have been written about her life, as Mère d’Youville was canonized in 1990 to become the first Canadian-born individual to be declared a saint. A network of Youvillian Congregations across North, and parts of South America today attests to her continued influence. But this biographical and institutional information is not the reason I included this conventual community in my dissertation project.

So, I had to try to push the sources in a different direction to get at different, generally less obvious questions.

For the other chapters in my project, historiographical conversations are extensive, methodologically diverse, and it is easier to identify trends in source use, approach, and kinds of conclusions. The historiography of religion in New France also has clear trends. For example, the centrality of religion, particularly the actions of male ecclesiasticals, like the Jesuits, in colonial projects, spiritually, administratively, and economically, is widely examined.[5] The crucial role of women in the “Christianization” of the North American continent, especially in the fostering and maintenance of religious sentiment in colonial settlements, like Québec, has also received extensive scholarly attention.[6] For example, biographical and institutional histories describe the foundation of well-known female-run religious institutions in New France and the sentiments and activities of the great women who were responsible for their operation.[7] But it seemed that approaches outside of the biographical or institutional streams within historiographical conversations about female monastic communities in New France were limited. Additionally, historiographical discussions about religion, religious women, and their activities tend to be separated from the other aspects of colonial society that are discussed in this project.[8]  As Kathryn Burns suggests, these women were “in this world, but not of it.”[9] Because the Grey Nuns household and its members were drawn together in different ways, it was more difficult to approach the conventual household using my method of individual network reconstruction and analysis.

 

I looked outside of the temporal, geographical, and imperial scope of New France or the French empire to consider more expansive historiographical conversations.[10] On the one hand, the work of scholars who situate particular religious communities within a specific colonial context, to emphasize how these female-run households adapted French and other European traditions and imperial mandates and became embedded in their new continental surroundings, proved most influential in the adjustment of my own methodology, particularly in my conception of conventual spaces, their inhabitants, and activities. In particular, Kathryn Burns, Emily Clark, and Colleen Gray illustrate how in Cuzco, New Orleans, and Montréal, respectively, religious women established conventual households that integrated French and Spanish religious traditions, and institutional structures and practices into their respective colonial worlds to create affective and spiritual ties, a “distinct female piety,” business enterprises, and conventual spaces that reflected their local realities devotionally, commercially, spatially, and demographically.[11] For example, the nuns of Santa Clara in Cuzco, Peru built what Burns refers to as a “spiritual economy,” which maintained their devout character behind the grille of their convent, but also created a dense network of kinship ties, channels of spiritual exchange, and a variety of commercial investments and relations that turned these nuns into principal guarantors for elite Spanish and Indigenous members of Cuzco society. In what became a bustling inter-continental and trans-Atlantic hub at New Orleans, despite their cloistered status, the Ursulines also strategically adapted to and engaged in their surrounding world, building an enterprise that adhered to their vows, while flexibly incorporating colonial practices, including the slave trade, into their economic undertakings, which contributed to the diversity of their community. Finally, in Montréal, Colleen Gray shows how the Congrégation de Notre-Dame embraced and fought against male ecclesiastical opposition to maintain a more secular status, while preserving a structured and hierarchical community and an absolute devotion and adherence to God and their vows, to balance their religiosity with the needs of those around them. As their founder, Marguerite Bourgeoys, insisted, the nuns should be involved in the life of the society around them but also detached from it.[12] Despite their differences, all of these matrilineal families and conventual households became central actors on the colonial stage. As this scholarly work emphasizes, religious women and their communities, like the Grey Nuns, were embedded within colonial society and played a crucial role in the multi-faceted functioning of these spaces.

Using the methods of scholars who focus on individual network creation and analysis, and building on the approaches used by scholars of different geographic and imperial contexts, my chapter uses the Grey Nuns and their activities and connections to emphasize how this conventual household and community of women built a network, rooted in religious devotion and embedded in the specific and local context and character of the city of Montréal, which drew the diverse inhabitants of the city and the colonial North American world into one space. The Grey Nun sisters represent the core of this discussion, but as an uncloistered, filles séculière, community, whose mission was to serve the poor of Montréal, these women, their activities, and their interactions cannot be separated from their specific surroundings in Montréal. They were embedded in this multi-layered spiritual, sensory, and complex world, and their surroundings worked to strengthen their community, as they capitalized on opportunities to fill a void in Montréal. As Emily Clark shows with the Ursulines in New Orleans, the Grey Nuns were a product of their environment and their decisions, interactions, and activities reflect this. This montréalais character is what ties this community of religious women to the other households discussed in this project, and the sectors of Montréal society that they represent, as they too were the product of their interconnected environment, and the Grey Nuns’ conventual household and network, in many ways, mirrors other families and webs found in the city. In this way, this chapter draws together scholarly conversations and methodologies, some of which are outside of French colonial or in fact religious historiography, to examine a largely unexplored female religious community as a node within overlapping and diverse networks of kinship, interaction, religious devotion, and economic exchange that criss-crossed Montréal, and North American and Atlantic worlds.

As my work on this chapter continues, this will likely continue to be an ongoing struggle between balancing the biographical and institutional direction of the sources and the larger method guiding my project. As the concluding piece of what has been a long process, conducting this research and writing this chapter has been a productive and useful exercise and has been a reminder to not get too wrapped up in the sources themselves. Ultimately, I hope that this analysis of the Grey Nuns household, alongside that of other individuals engaged in different, but overlapping sectors of this colonial Montréal world, provides an alternative view of the ways that the Grey Nuns community can be considered, as a family, monastic household and community, and as a business enterprise. And so, the work continues.

Alanna Loucks is a PhD student at Queen’s University. Her current project examines the familial,  ecclesiastical, and economic connections developed by four French families over three generations, between 1650-1763, in order to understand the various ways that their lives, interests, and relationships reflected and contributed to Montréal’s position as a crossroads within the larger webs of North American and Atlantic Worlds. You can find her on Twitter at @alannaloucks.

 

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[1] Alanna Loucks, “A Different Road to Sainthood: Building a Religious Community in Eighteenth-Century Montréal,” Borealia: Early Canadian History, July 5, 2021, https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2021/07/05/a-different-road-to-sainthood-building-a-religious-community-in-eighteenth-century-montreal/.

[2] Jacob F. Lee, “Implementing the Louisiana Purchase,” Early American Studies, November 11, 2023, https://web.sas.upenn.edu/earlyamericanstudies/2023/11/11/implementing-the-louisiana-purchase-jacob-f-lee/. See also Lee’s article, Jacob F. Lee, ““Do You Go to New Orleans?”: The Louisiana Purchase, Federalism, and the Contingencies of Empire in the Early U.S. Republic,” Early American Studies 21, no. 3 (2023): 460-90.

[3] See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-15.

[4] Nancy van Deusen, “Indigenous Freedom Suits, Epistemological Mobilities, and the Deep Archive,” Slavery & Abolition 44, no. 3 (2023): 519-37, esp. 531-32; Zeb Tortorici, “Archival Seduction: Indexical Absences and Historiographical Ghosts,” Archive Journal (2015), http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/archival-seduction/; Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labour, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 4. See also Sue Peabody, “Microhistory, Biography, Fiction: The Politics of Narrating the Lives of People Under Slavery,” Transatlantica 2 (2012): 1-19; Sophie White and Trevor Burnard, “Slave Narratives in British and French America, 1700–1848,” in Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700–1848, eds. Sophie White and Trevor Burnard (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 1-13.

[5] See Bronwen McShea, Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), p.376; Timothy Pearson, Becoming Holy in Early Canada (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2014), p.375.

[6] See; Mairi Cowan, “Education, Francisation, and Shifting Colonial Priorities at the Ursuline Convent in Seventeenth Century Québec,” The Canadian Historical Review 99, no. 1 (2018): 1-29; Mairi Cowan, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2022), p.272; Jan Noel, Along a River: The First French-Canadian Women (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p.325; Leslie Choquette, ““Ces Amazones du Grand Dieu”: Women and Mission in Seventeenth Century Canada,” French Historical Studies 17, no. 3 (1992): 627-55.

[7] For two examples of works that take a slightly more traditional biographical and institutional approach see; Thomas M. Carr Jr., A Touch of Fire: Marie-André Duplessis, the Hôtel-Dieu of Québec, and the Writing of New France (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2020), p.309; Kimberly Anne Main, “Rendering Service to the Community: The Spiritual Life of the Ursuline Nuns of Québec City, 1639-1780” (PhD diss., Toronto, ON: University of Toronto, 2021), p.252.

[8] Elizabeth Rapley suggests, in fact, that hagiographies themselves are not a part of a coherent whole. Rather, “no one [speaks] for monasticism or Catholicism as a whole.” Additionally, hagiographies tend to preach only to the converted, and this leads to an artificial separation between discussions of religion, particularly religious women living in cloistered communities under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the outside world. See; Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2001), 4-5. Some scholars have bridged this separation and have examined the central role of religion, particularly baptism and godparentage, in the fur trade. Catholicism became a central part of peoples’ identity and sense of belonging, and shared belief was a method of connecting socially, economically, and within kinship networks. See; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), p.234; Émilie Pigeon, “Au Nom du Bon Dieu et du Buffalo: Métis Lived Catholicism on the Northern Plains” (PhD diss., Toronto, ON: York University, 2017), p.371; Robert Michael Morrissey, “Kaskaskia Social Network: Kinship and Assimilation in the French-Illinois Borderlands, 1695-1735,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2013): 103-46.

[9] Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1.

[10] For a useful discussion of the fruitfulness of looking outside imperial, geographical, or temporal historiographical containers to expand our methodologies, see; Allan Greer, “National, Transnational, and Hypernational Historiographies: New France Meets Early American History, The Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2010): 695-724.

[11] Burns, Colonial Habits, p.324; Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p.304; Colleen Gray, The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693-1796 (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2008), p.479. See also; Rachel Spaulding, “Mounting the Poyto: An Image of Afro-Catholic Submission in the Mystical Visions of Colonial Peru’s Úrsula de Jesús,” Early American Studies 17, no. 4 (2019): 519-44; Jan Noel, “Caste and Clientage in an Eighteenth Century Québec Convent,” The Canadian Historical Review 82, no. 3 (2001): 1-14.

[12] Patricia Simpson, Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre-Dame, 1665-1700 (Montréal & Kingston: McGill & Queen’s University Press, 2005), 74.

 

Featured image: Image of the Original Hôpital Wall in Old Montréal (Image by Author)