Jesuit Linguistic Manuscripts and Indigenous Masters of Languages

FRCT Jesuit Centre Lunch-hour Lecture

  • old archive book with cursive handwriting

  • Wednesday, September 27, 2023
    220 St. Paul's College

    Speaker: Fannie Dionne, Ph.D. 

    Fannie Dionne is a Project Historian and Writer for the Jesuits of Canada. Her thesis, completed at McGill University in Montreal, analyzed the creation, use and circulation of Wendat-French dictionaries written by Jesuit missionaries in New France. During her postdoctoral fellowship at UQAM, she analyzed  the dissemination of Jesuit manuscripts after 1800 and the creation of the Archive of the Jesuits in Canada after 1844. Fannie has also worked as a consultant historian for different organizations such as Univers culturel de Saint-Sulpice and the McCord Museum. She now  continues to study the history of post-Restauration Jesuits in Canada.

ABOUT THE LECTURE: 

To successfully interact with—and convert—the different Indigenous nations they met on their ancestral territories in “New France in the 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuits missionaries put in place several strategies for learning Indigenous languages, including the writing of linguistic documents such as bilingual dictionaries.

These sources were the fruit of a continuous collaboration with Indigenous “masters of languages,” evident in numerous entries and even the very structure of the dictionaries themselves. This talk will explore how these manuscripts are thus the product and the result of these complex relationships.