Abstract

Abstract:

An analysis of the relationship between martyrdom and warfare in French colonial Louisiana illustrates how Catholic priests made sense of their precarious position in a brutal colonial frontier at the geographic periphery of New France. Based on events surrounding the deaths of six priests, martyrdom never appears to be a singular act of willfully receiving the wrath of a "savage other" and becoming a holy saint in the published annals of religious orders and in the minds of pious readers. Rather, moments of martyrdom situated priests within larger colonial systems of violence that redirected the attention of missionaries away from the conversion of indigenous people and toward their physical destruction, in effect joining performances of martyrdom with everyday practices of life in a colonial society oriented by rituals of warfare, revenge, and honor.

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