From Mother to Son is an annotated translation of forty-one of the eighty-one extant full-length letters written by Marie de l'Incarnation, founder of the Ursulines in Canada, to her son, Claude Martin, between 1640 and 1671.These collected letters reveal much about the early history of New France and the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century. Uniting these letters into a coherent whole is the distinctive relationship between an absent mother and her abandoned son, arelationship reconfigured from flesh and blood to the written word exchanged between professed religious united in Jesus Christ as members of the same spiritual family. In providing a contemporary translation of these letters, Mary Dunn renders accessible to an English-speaking readership a rich source for the history of colonial North America, providing a counterpoint to a North American narrative weighted in favor of Plymouth Rock and the Puritans and a historyof New France dominated by the perspectives of men both religious and secular. The letters included in this volume give the reader a sense of the nature and evolution of Marie's relationship with her son. By highlighting the great range of their conversation, Dunn offers a window onto one of the more intriguing and complicated stories of maternal and filial affection in themodern Christian West. | From Mother to Son by Mary Dunn, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters