A handsome copy, in very good condition, of this extremely rare poem honouring six Ursuline nuns sent to Martinique to establish the first mission, a girls’ school there in 1681. It is an extraordinary record of the feats of some of the first female European missionaries to the New World. We have found only two copies in North America.
A highly dramatic retelling written in rhyming couplets, the poem recounts the assembling of the Ursuline contingent and their long voyage to Martinique. It was a treacherous journey and its perils are stressed here, from fear of Barbary pirates – ‘tirans d’Alger’ (p.29) - to a colossal storm, raised by Satan and his ‘infernal cohort’ (p.23) in which the nuns emboldened and protected by their faith, battled ‘cent montaignes liquides’ (p.25) and ‘assauts de l’Enfer’ (p.27).
The Ursuline mission in Martinique was the second of four made by the order in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, after the first, to Quebec in 1639, and followed by similar projects in French-occupied Louisiana (1727) and Pondicherry (1738). Described in broad strokes here as being to spread true faith, end idolatry, build a thousand temples to the true God and convert the most obstinate of the faithless (p.34), in its aim the Martinique mission was tied closely to the colonial policy of the French government under Louis XV. ‘Colonial policy had shifted from the conversion of native peoples to the retention of colonists, and the Ursulines’ new charge was to educate the daughters of colonists to become good French (Catholic) mothers and thus to contribute to the moral propriety of the colony and its labor force … [thus] When the Ursulines arrived in St Pierre, Martinique in June 1682, they immediately began educating the daughters of French and Creole colonists and of African slaves’ (Keller-Lapp).
The Ursuline mission functioning as an arm of the broader French foreign policy mission is evident here. On landing in Saint Pierre, flowers bloom where the nuns tread; ‘the poem presents Kalinago land as undeveloped, ripe for French civilization and agriculture. The Ursuline poem thus functions not only as religious propaganda, but as publicity for colonial conquest and settlement at large, and it places women at the centre of its dual aims’ (Williard, p.80). The mission would go on to own a sugar plantation, worked by enslaved Africans.
The poem explicitly refers to the Ursulines’ prior mission in Canada, the first of the order’s international missions, in Quebec in 1639, and the very first to the New World to be made by female European missionaries. Written from the perspective of an enraged Lucifer incensed at the nuns’ ‘insolent audacity’, the present work tells of the ‘blows’ that the mission made against his so-called cruel empire ‘dans Canada’ (p.22). Led by Marie de L’Incarnation of Tours, the cohort of nuns that travelled to that first mission in 1639 came to be known as ‘Canadoises’, ‘missionaries who were physically strong, healthy, young, tenacious, self-sacrificing and brave…Jesuit leaders in Quebec described Ursuline missionaries as “Amazons” and martyrs’ (Keller-Lapp). The ideal of the Ursuline ‘canadoise’ endured. This poem is at pains to stress the resilience of the women travelling to Martinique, enduring hardships that six strong men could not - ‘six hommes des plus fortes ne pûrent resister/Aux peines, aux travaux, qu’il falut suporter’ (p.30).
The Martinique and other Ursuline missions were products of the so-called ‘Ursuline phenomenon’ that had taken place in early seventeenth-century France. The considerable increase in female religious communities there saw an ‘explosive growth’ in the Ursuline community in particular, with, at its peak, around 10,000 members in almost 300 houses, 222 of which were established between 1616 and 1645. The Paris convent - named on the title here and established in 1612 - was the most prestigious. Pioneering in their emphasis on female education, “as a religious order, the Ursulines brought together the reform spirit, and the conviction that girls should be educated, in a social form that was acceptable to the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, precisely the segments of French society most sensitive to the winds of religious reform and social change in the early decades of the seventeenth century” (Jones & Rapley, p.516).
This poem is dedicated to Louise Françoise de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Nantes (1673-1743), to whose ‘innocente envie de voir a Jesus Christ l’Amerique asservie’, the poet appeals directly in the final portion of the text. Illegitimate daughter of Louis XIV, Louise Françoise was just nine years old at the time of this dedication; she received the courtesy title ‘Mademoiselle de Nantes’ on her legitimisation as the King’s daughter when she was 6 months old. The dedicatory poem here addresses the young princess, appealing to her future sagacity and virtues. The final two verses of the dedication appeal directly to the King.
Refs: M.B. Jones & E. Rapley, ‘Behavioural Contagion and the Rise of Convent Education in France’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.4 pp.489-521. H. Keller-Lapp, ‘Floating Cloisters and Heroic Women: French Ursuline Missionaries, 1639-1744’ World History Connected [open access]. A.M. Williard, Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
Brunet II, 262; Sabin, 63600.
OCLC: Library Company of Philadelphia, John Carter Brown Library only. Only one previous sale record for a different copy of this work, Maggs Catalogue 479, Bibliotheca Americana Part V (1926), p.341, £21..
