The Possession of Barbe Hallay

The Possession of Barbe Hallay
Author: Mairi Cowan
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2022-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228014999

When strange signs appeared in the sky over Québec during the autumn of 1660, people began to worry about evil forces in their midst. They feared that witches and magicians had arrived in the colony, and a teenaged servant named Barbe Hallay started to act as if she were possessed. The community tried to make sense of what was happening, and why. Priests and nuns performed rituals to drive the demons away, while the bishop and the governor argued about how to investigate their suspicions of witchcraft. A local miller named Daniel Vuil, accused of using his knowledge of the dark arts to torment Hallay, was imprisoned and then executed. Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position. The Possession of Barbe Hallay is both a fascinating account of a case of demonic possession and an accessible introduction to social and religious history in early modern North America.

French Connections

French Connections
Author: Andrew N. Wegmann
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807174572

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,” this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate “spheres” of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Witchcraft [4 volumes]
Author: Richard M. Golden Director, Jewish Studies Program
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1310
Release: 2006-01-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1851095128

The definitive compilation on witchcraft and witch hunting in the early modern era exploring significant people, places, beliefs, and events. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition is the definitive reference on the age of witch hunting (approximately 1430–1750), its origins, expansion, and ultimate decline. Incorporating a wealth of recent scholarship in four richly illustrated, alphabetically organized volumes, it offers historians and general readers alike the opportunity to explore the realities behind the legends of witchcraft and witchcraft trials. Over 170 contributors from 28 nations provide vivid, documented descriptions and analyses of witchcraft trials and locations, folklore and beliefs, magical practices and deities, influential texts, and the full range of players in this extraordinary drama—witchcraft theorists and theologians; historians and authors; judges, clergy, and rulers; the accused; and their persecutors. Concentrating on Europe and the Americas in the early modern era, the work also covers relevant topics from the ancient Near East (including the Hebrew and Christian Bibles), classical antiquity, and the European Middle Ages.

Witch Trials

Witch Trials
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2024-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476694419

This chronological reference compendium traces accusations, punishments, and the investigation of occultism from sorcery inquiries in 323 BCE Athens to the modern day. The text provides detailed information on actual hearings, torture, and death sentences for cases both famous and unknown. Primary sources--media, correspondence, adjudication--reveal the appalling injustices of government, church, and mobs toward the accused. Extensive appendices include a glossary, chronology of examples, and a list of legal proceedings, their locations, and outcomes.

Before Canada

Before Canada
Author: Allan Greer
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2024-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228023521

Long before Confederation created a nation-state in northern North America, Indigenous people were establishing vast networks and trade routes. Volcanic eruptions pushed the ancestors of the Dene to undertake a trek from the present-day Northwest Territories to Arizona. Inuit migrated across the Arctic from Siberia, reaching Southern Labrador, where they met Basque fishers from northern Spain. As early as the fifteenth century, fishing ships from western Europe were coming to Newfoundland for cod, creating the greatest transatlantic maritime link in the early modern world. Later, fur traders would take capitalism across the continent, using cheap rum to lubricate their transactions. The contributors to Before Canada reveal the latest findings of archaeological and historical research on this fascinating period. Along the way, they reframe the story of the Canadian past, extending its limits across time and space and challenging us to reconsider our assumptions about this supposedly young country. Innovative and multidisciplinary, Before Canada inspires interest in the deep history of northern North America.

Fashioning Acadians

Fashioning Acadians
Author: Hilary Doda
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228019494

What people wore in the distant past is often challenging to determine, owing to the disintegration of natural textiles and materials over time. Yet when new findings from archaeological excavations are compared with documentation about early Acadia, a fascinating picture of the society’s early fashions is revealed. Fashioning Acadians is a history of clothesmaking and dress in Acadia from 1650 to 1750. Through the analysis of four Acadian settlements in what is now Nova Scotia, Hilary Doda uncovers the regional fashions and trends that had begun to emerge prior to the violence of the deportations of 1755. Men’s and women’s wardrobes are described from head to toe, from headdresses and hairstyles down to stockings and shoes, along with accessories such as buttons, buckles, and jewellery. While Acadians retained many aspects of the fashion systems of France, New France, and New England, a distinctive Acadian identity can be seen to take shape as their dress evolved and was influenced by other regional styles. Exploring the possibilities of a new methodology for identifying lost or decayed garments, Doda argues that surviving notions, sewing tools, and accessories – the small finds of archaeological sites – are important sources of information not only about domestic life, but about manufacturing processes, dress and textile cultures, and the influence of intersecting fashion systems in colonial spaces. Fashioning Acadians expands our understanding of Acadian lives and their connections to both the Atlantic world of goods and the landscapes of Nova Scotia.

Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada

Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada
Author: Colin M. Coates
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 022802238X

In Louis XIV’s New France, colonial authorities attempted to reproduce French regal authority in novel ways, often by performing typical metropolitan political rituals. When these practices were transposed into the St Lawrence Valley settlements, where a small French population lived alongside a substantial Indigenous presence, they took on new meanings. The colony of Canada replicated many features of the developing French absolutist state. Yet while the king likely knew more about his colony than he did about most parts of metropolitan France, this transatlantic setting imposed new constraints on absolutist authority, from the challenges of distance to an Indigenous population that largely lived outside European norms. Political Culture in Louis XIV’s Canada examines royal power as it was represented in ritual (ceremonial entrances, Te Deums, processions), in rhetoric (political disputes over cabals and factions), and in objects (portraits, royal busts, currency, buildings, maps, and censuses). Colin Coates describes the successes and failures the French authorities experienced in exporting their political practices. He reveals how those authorities’ understandings of Indigenous political culture shaped ideas of the proper relation between rulers and the ruled. This book traces the establishment of a colonial political culture that continued to shape the lives of the French in Canada long after the Sun King’s death in 1715.

Enthusiasms and Loyalties

Enthusiasms and Loyalties
Author: Keith Shepherd Grant
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0228015219

The Enlightenment Atlantic was awash in deep feelings. People expressed the ardour of patriots, the homesickness of migrants, the fear of slave revolts, the ecstasy of revivals, the anger of mobs, the grief of wartime, the disorientation of refugees, and the joys of victory. Yet passions and affections were not merely private responses to the events of the period – emotions were also central to the era’s most consequential public events, and even defined them. In Enthusiasms and Loyalties Keith Grant shows that British North Americans participated in a transatlantic swirl of debates over emotions as they attempted to cultivate and make sense of their own feelings in turbulent times. Examining the emotional communities that overlapped in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, between 1770 and 1850, Grant explores the diversity of public feelings, from disaffected loyalists to passionate patriots and ecstatic revivalists. He shows how certain emotions – especially enthusiasm and loyalty – could be embraced or weaponized by political and religious factions, and how their use and meaning changed over time. Feelings could be the glue that made loyalties stick, or a solvent that weakened community bonds. Taking a history of emotions approach, Enthusiasms and Loyalties aims to recover and understand the wide range of political and religious emotions that were possible – feelable – in the Enlightenment Atlantic.

Mysteries of Canada

Mysteries of Canada
Author: Hammerson Peters
Publisher: Hammerson Peters via PublishDrive
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2019-02-13
Genre: History
ISBN:

An assortment of real Canadian mysteries published on MysteriesOfCanada.com throughout the year 2018. Includes tales of clairvoyance, ghosts, poltergeists, lost treasure, superstitions, haunted hotels, and monsters.