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Print Price: $90.50

Format:
Hardback
256 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780199386574

Publication date:
July 2014

Imprint: OUP US

From Mother to Son

The Selected Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation to Claude Martin

Translated and with Introduction and Notes by Mary Dunn

Series : AAR Texts and Translations Series

From Mother to Son is an annotated translation of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters written by Marie de l'Incarnation, founder of the Ursulines in Canada, to her son, Claude Martin, between 1640 and 1671.

These collected letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting these letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, a relationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family.

In providing a contemporary translation of these letters, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a North American narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a history of New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular.

The letters included in this volume give the reader a sense of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn offers a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in the modern Christian West.

Readership : Suitable for students and scholars of theology, religious studies, history, and women's studies. Scholars interested in the early history of New France and European North America.

Introduction
Letters
Notes

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Mary Dunn received her Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2008. She is now an assistant professor of early modern Christianity at St. Louis University. Her research has been primarily focused in seventeenth-century New France and, more recently, on Marie de l'Incarnation, whose decision to abandon her son in favor of religious life is the focus of her book-in-progress.

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Special Features

Includes letters that have never before been translated into English.
The first English-language translation of Marie de l'Incarnation's letters in decades.
Is the only collection of Marie's correspondence that focuses exclusively on letters written by Marie to her son.
Includes extensive annotations that connect Marie's correspondence with the most recent and important scholarship in the areas of colonial history, Christian spirituality, women's writing.