Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665-1700 (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Jan Noel (bio) Patricia Simpson. Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 McGill-Queen’s University Press. 292. $34.95 In 1653 Marguerite Bourgeoys left Troyes, France to sail for Montreal, a dangerous missionary settlement astride Iroquois trade routes. She decided to go because a tall woman clad in white appeared in a vision and urged 'Go, I will not abandon you.' After setting up a school for settlers' children in a stable, Bourgeoys recruited other devout laywomen to go out and teach across New France. By 1760 a dozen schools had appeared, and female literacy rates were about the same as male ones, atypical for the eighteenth century. Commentators past and present attributed this to the Congregation of Notre-Dame, which Bourgeoys founded. During her lifetime the founder was a model of heroic sanctity, rejoicing at the new resolve required after fire engulfed the community house, and making an Atlantic crossing sleeping on a coiled rope on deck. Such feats, combined with the requisite number of certified miracles, resulted in her canonization in 1982. A biographer's challenge is to satisfy the scholarly and the sceptical while remaining true to her subject, who clearly heard the beat of a supernatural drummer. In this second volume of her biography of Bourgeoys, Patricia Simpson, research co-ordinator of Montreal's Marguerite Bourgeoys Museum, bridges the two worlds commendably. Simpson shows mastery of accounts written over the centuries. By comparing them, she involves the reader in making sense of disputes and rivalries, discouragements, and possible naturalistic explanations for miracles. The book covers the Congregation's role in housing early immigrant brides, in teaching sewing and other needed skills, in developing [End Page 413] farms. The author resolutely humanizes Bourgeoys while still conveying her truly uncommon trust in providence. Simpson points out that the Congregation of Notre-Dame now thrives best in Latin America and Cameroon, where conditions bear some resemblance to those of seventeenth-century Canada. It will be the task of others to integrate this new biography into the wider historiography of the period. A next step will be fuller analysis of the importance of female mystics, of secular orders, of popular education. Simpson's findings can find a place in frameworks provided by historians such as Roger Magnuson, Elizabeth Rapley, Dominique Deslandres, and Marie-Florine Bruneau, and by studies of filles séculières in France. Apart from producing a tempered biography of the saint, the author's familiarity with early Montreal permits fresh glimpses of daily lives, particularly those of women that often remain in the shadows. There was the mother of a hyperactive daughter who imprisoned her periodically in a barrel, leading to tragedy when the little girl strangled herself trying to get out. There was the famous wealthy recluse Jeanne Le Ber, who had a hermit's cell built astride the Congregation's church and whose skeletal remains still tell the tale: worn knees from all the hours at prayer, marks on her teeth from snapping so many threads while sewing gorgeous chasubles and altarcloths. We join Montrealers for the potluck suppers provided for people arriving with news from France, and accompany early Superior Marie Barbier on her trip to Quebec to receive Canada's first known breast cancer surgery from Michel Sarrazin in 1700 (surprisingly, a success). Lastly, photographs of seventeenth-century artifacts and an essay on changing iconography also do their part to bring the life and times of one of Canada's founding mothers into clearer view. Jan Noel Jan Noel, Department of History, University of Toronto at Mississauga Copyright © 2007 University of Toronto Press Incorporated
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".