November 2013: New Book on the North American Jesuit Martyrs

Harvard University Press has published The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs by Emma Anderson (University of Ottawa), on the 1930 canonization of eight Jesuit missionaries who died in the 1640s, becoming North America’s first Catholic saints. Anderson, according to the publisher, explores “how Jesuit missionaries perceived their terrifying final hours, the work also seeks to comprehend the motivations of the those who confronted them from the other side of the axe, musket, or caldron of boiling water, and to illuminate the experiences of those native Catholics who, though they died alongside their missionary mentors, have yet to receive comparable recognition as martyrs by the Catholic Church.”