BOOK TALK | Mairi Cowan- The Possession of Barbe Hallay

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:

Join Mairi Cowan for a talk: Relief, Deliverance, or Exorcism? Casting Out a Demon in Seventeenth-Century New France

This is a Zoom event.

To join, please use the following Zoom link:
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/82840360702

More details: Events for February 2023 | Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies (crrs.ca)

Mairi Cowan is associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga.

about the book

Stories of the demonic infestation circulated through the small settlement on the St Lawrence River for several years. In The Possession of Barbe Hallay Mairi Cowan revisits these stories to understand the everyday experiences and deep anxieties of people in New France. Her findings offer insight into beliefs about demonology and witchcraft, the limits of acceptable adolescent behaviour, the dissonance between a Catholic colony in theory and the church’s wavering influence in practice, the contested authority accorded to women as healers, and the insecurities of the colonial project. As the people living through the events knew at the time, and as this study reveals, New France was in a precarious position.