Wednesday, December 18, 7 p.m.
A few lines in the margin of a manuscript can tell us a lot about the past. In this talk, the historian Mairi Cowan will show how a single marginal gloss can open new perspectives on how people in seventeenth-century Quebec thought about the wider world. Marie Hiroüin de la Conception, a nun at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, was described as a “Scottish gentlewoman” in one of the community’s records. Further searching through the Hôtel-Dieu archives and documents from Scotland, France, and Italy provides clues about a family that had fled from Scotland to France during the Reformation.
Augustines at the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec thought it was essential to emphasize Marie Hiroüin’s Scottishness and nobility, which raises questions that extend far beyond the small French settlement into what it meant to be “Scottish” so far from Scotland, how social status in exile could be relevant for a nursing order of nuns, and why people in New France described Mary Stewart – also known as Mary, Queen of Scots – as the Queen of England. Thinking through these questions helps us understand the Hôtel-Dieu in New France and the Scottish diaspora, the complexities of Tudor dynastic succession, and the far-reaching web of early modern spiritual geopolitics.
Presenter Biography
Mairi Cowan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga. She has written about the tensions of international theology, national politics, and local tradition in twelfth-century Glasgow; experiences of childhood in the court of James IV, King of Scots; the connections between social discipline and the Catholic Reformation in Scotland; colonial efforts to “Frenchify” Indigenous people in seventeenth-century New France; and Jesuit missionaries’ beliefs about demons in Indigenous societies of North America.
Her most recent monograph, The Possession of Barbe Hallay: Diabolical Arts and Daily Life in Early Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), is a microhistory of bewitchment in New France. She is also co-editor of the recent collection Gender in Scotland 1200-1800: Place, Faith and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
This event will be a hybrid.
This event is part of a talk series celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.