The New World of the Catholic Reformation: New France and Old Religion
The traditional telling of the Reformation often centers on the European experience: Luther’s Protest, Calvin’s Geneva, Henry VIII’s divorces, or the Council of Trent. However, the Age of the Reformation also coincided with the Age of Discovery, and the fraught religious perspectives of the Old World often accompanied travel and settlement in the New.
For France and French Catholicism, this was particularly true of their community in what is now Quebec, otherwise known as New France. Here, the culture of the Catholic Reformation and the Council of Trent found a new home among the council grounds of the idigenous tribes of the Great Lakes. A culture of sainthood, relics, and church hierarchy was imported into the New World and fused with indigenous culture in the form of St. Ketari and others to create a transatlantic culture of renewed Tridentine Catholicism.
This project explores the emergence of this indigenous world of the Counter Reformation in New France, its spread, operation, and results in this frontier for the Old Faith in the New World.
L’Atlas curieux, ou la Monde…, quatrième partie, 1703
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