| Summary: | My paper entitled “An Italian Jesuit in Canada: Faith and the Imagination in the Breve Relatione of 1653” was presented on October 20 in the Northrop Frye Hall. It was part of a session on the Counter-Reformation and Catholic Missions and included papers by Francesco Divenuto from the University of Napoli and Jens Baumgarten of the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. A copy of my paper is attached with this report. My paper on Francesco Bressani’s Breve Relatione was well received and stimulated some questions on the general reception of Bressani’s book and message in Italy. How was Bressani regarded by his contemporaries? What evidence do we have about the reception of Bressani’s book in Italy? Bressani’s construction of himself as a hero of the missions and, in fact, a living martyr also raised questions about his own intentions and those of the Jesuit order. Is this self-construction typical of Baroque artists and writers? These are questions that I will need to investigate in future work on this historical figure and this peculiar book. There were no negative comments on this paper. The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies is planning to publish some of the papers from the conference and I plan to submit this paper for consideration. They will be sending me deadline information. Bressani published his Breve Relatione in Italian in 1653. He had spent the years 1642 to 1650 in New France as a Jesuit missionary. As a Jesuit he was aware of the expansion of the European powers in the New World: the French and English in North America and the Spanish and Portuguese in South America. The Jesuit mission was to spread Christianity in the New World. As an Italian Bressani had particular views on European contact with the First Nations. He saw that it was necessary to spread Italian culture and so encouraged Italians to go to the lands of the New World. There are many indications of these attitudes in his Breve Relatione, the only part of the massive Jesuit Relations that is in Italian. Academic ...
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