Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France is self-consciously a work of revision, by which the Jesuit missionaries are rescued from the conflicting pieties of past historians. Bronwen McShea invites her readers to reconsider the Jesuit missions at the foundations of Canadian history.
James Carson bids us to “reimagine” that St. John Brébeuf, the Jesuit martyr, was “never martyred” but “died for reasons indigenous to the time and place he inhabited, for reasons that rest squarely on the deep beliefs of the people who had welcomed him.” Historian Christopher Blum is not convinced.