ABSTRACT
Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau and Joan Scott’s The Fantasy of Feminist History, this chapter uses the case study of seventeenth-century French Ursuline missionaries to demonstrate how religious women imagined, conceptualised, constructed, disseminated and received the equality of the sexes. It aims to demonstrate how examinations of imagination, so-called mystics and fantasy in Ursuline life-writings provide especially useful tools to analyse how these early modern women resolved the “quandary of sexual difference” that ensued in mid-to-late seventeenth-century France, a period of religious and political centralisation that resulted in a significant shift in the French Ursuline mentalité. Specifically, the correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation (mother superior of the Ursulines of Quebec), Jesuit Relations and spiritual and secular literature of the period will be used to demonstrate how New France Ursulines-as-Jesuitesses were imagined, read, acted, and written into being. As colonial agents, martyrs, amazones, femmes fortes, guerrières spirituelles, and Canadoises, they existed “outside their sex” and embodied an apostolic spirit shared with their Jesuit associates.
