Christopher Rivers, a professor of French at Mount Holyoke College in the United States, has launched a new website containing his translations of selected letters on slavery written by Jesuit missionaries. French Jesuit Letters on Slavery: ‘No Less an Object of Our Zeal’ is open-access resource available at https://jesuitlettersonslavery.wordpress.com.
The collection presents Rivers’ translations of late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth letters by Jesuit missionaries written while the men worked in the French slave colonies of the Caribbean. Rivers provides a general introduction to the project as well as more details on his sources at https://jesuitlettersonslavery.wordpress.com/introduction-and-sources/. He also provides a foreword to introduce his approach to the letters and the challenges posed by the translation process.
As of September 2019, the database by Rivers contains the following letters