The Toronto Jesuit History Research Group Presents: “Hiding in Plain Sight: Open Secrets About the Jesuit Relations from New France.”
Posted by Andy Chang on 9/16/25 • Categorized as
November 14, 2025
1:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Presenter: Micah True
In this presentation of his new book, The Jesuit Relations: A Biography (MQUP, 2025), Micah True re-examines four steps that scholars typically mention when describing how the famous Jesuit Relations were created: the composition of raw material by missionaries in the field, its transport to Quebec, the assembly of the manuscript Relation there, and the publication in Paris of this annual report from the New France mission. Drawing on largely overlooked aspects of the texts, he tells a more complicated story about how the Relations came to exist than the one that tends to be repeated in scholarship. Attending to the publication history of these seventeenth-century reports and their legacy in our own time, he also reflects on why features of the texts that are plainly visible have not tended to be part of the story scholars now tell about the Relations.
Micah True is professor of French and Folklore at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. He is the author of Masters and Students: Jesuit Mission Ethnography in Seventeenth-Century New France, published by McGill-Queen's University press in 2015, and the translator of the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix's 1744 epistolary account of his voyage through North America, published in Brill's Jesuit Studies series in 2019. His new book, published this year by McGill-Queen's University Press, is The Jesuit Relations: A Biography.“”
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting online.
Location
Regis College 100 Wellesley St W,
