Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds with Mary Dunn

Kristian Petersen:

Welcome to Religious Studies News. I’m your host, Kristian Petersen, and today I’m here with Mary Dunn, who’s professor of theological studies at St. Louis University and director of the Center for Research on Global Catholicism. She’s the winner of the 2023 AAR Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies. She’s here to speak to us about her book, Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds published with Princeton University Press. Congratulations Mary. Thanks for joining.

Mary Dunn:

Thank you, Kristian. Yeah, it was a real honor to receive this award. I can’t imagine an award I would just be more delighted to receive, so thank you to the AAR for that.

Kristian Petersen:

I’m sure. Yeah, so exciting and it’s a very cool book and I’m glad you won because I probably wouldn’t have come across it in my own subfield. And part of what you do, you’re kind of taking this historical approach, but you’re also tying the past to the present in many ways, especially in the way you talk about how the book started. So can you talk about how thinking about early modern Catholicism through this framework emerged for you?

Mary Dunn:

Absolutely. So in some ways what I call the book, and this is a dirty word in historical studies, but I call it history in the present tense or this deliberately presentist approach to the history of early modern Catholicism or early modern New France. And I know a lot of traditional historians would push back against this presentist approach, but one of the things that was really important to me in this book, and I’ll talk a bit about the genesis of the book in a minute, but was to what I felt was lift the veil and what a lot of us historians of religion are doing already, which is to say we’re thinking about our subject matters through the lens of our own experiences and our own questions about the lives we’re living and the world we see around us. So I really do believe that we are all doing this.

It’s just rather taboo to admit to it and theorize it in our scholarship. And so for me, this book definitely emerged from the circumstances of my own life. This is a book on how people in early modern Catholic, new France — which is Canada under the French regime, would be another way of putting it — how they told stories of sickness and disability, how they made these life experiences signify in their own historical contexts. I call it being pushed from the present toward the past as opposed to being pulled by the past from the present, because I had my own experiences in my own life regarding both disability and sickness. And part of the premise of the book is that we are all going to be facing these questions of sickness, surely and arguably disability at some point in our lives. And it’s urgent that we figure out how to make these experiences meaningful to us beyond, and this is a real critique of the book, beyond the rather kind of constricting narrative framework we’re given by our own culture, which tends to frame both sickness and disability in terms of a biomedical problem with the body that needs to be solved.

And just based on my own life experiences, and of course I invite people to read about it in the book where I go into detail about just what these were, but these are really constricting narrative structures or narrative frameworks to be kind of born into in the modern period. My argument in the book is that the early modern narratives that I uncovered, and I can talk more about this in a moment, but that I uncovered in Catholic, French Canada were no less restrictive or constraining to the people who lived kind of within their organizing structures, but that they’re really different from ours. And what I wanted to do in this book was bring these two narrative sets into collision. Bring this French Catholic early modern way of thinking and telling the stories of sickness and disability into collision with our biomedical narrative, for the sake, really, of not just understanding the past but also historicizing the present.

I think it’s so easy, and we can think about this in any number of walks of life today, but it’s so easy to think that the way we do things or the way we think about things or the way we make meaning of our various life experiences in the present are fixed. Like they’re rigid. There’s no other way to do it. And I think one of the key points about history and why everybody should care about history from my grandma to your child is that it really helps us understand that the way we do things is historically contingent. We can always do things differently. And so my ambition in this book was to answer the questions I was facing, but also how do we tell more capacious narratives of sickness and disability by reflecting on the past and with the goal not just of understanding the past, but also with the goal of historicizing the present, and really importantly to me, of broadening the range of possible means by which we might make sickness and disability meaningful in the future. We’re not stuck in our way of doing things, and how does the past help us think more capaciously about how we might make meaning of these experiences moving forward? So I hope that was helpful. Feel free to ask any clarifying questions.

Kristian Petersen:

And you do that through a kind of new conceptual model, which you call embodied difference. And then the other kind of key thread throughout the book is the kind of medium of narrative. So I was hoping you could tell us about how you conceptualize notions of disability and sickness in your project, and then why is narrative an important tool for understanding them?

Mary Dunn:

Yeah, that’s such a great question. So embodied difference was a term that I wanted to use, that I had been thinking of, with reading a lot of disability theory and also a lot of, there’s much less of this, but a lot of theorization about illness — embodied difference was a term I had come across in some of my broad reading on disability theory. What I meant to suggest by using that term, it was the only term I could use, because what I meant to suggest was that the line between sickness and disability is fuzzy and it’s really moving all the time. It’s mobile. I mean, at a certain point, sickness becomes disability or disabilities might be configured as sickness. I think sometimes we want to keep those two things separate. But what I found as I was getting into the subject matter for this book is that those two terms are not separable and embodied difference was my way of thinking about the two along a continuum.

And in terms of narrative, yeah, that was really important to me. One of the things that, at the foundation of this book, the historical material are four different narratives really of sickness and or disability. So just briefly, I engage The Jesuit Relations, which is a series of annual reports produced and edited, heavily edited, from the mission field of New France from the 17th, primarily in the 17th century. Chapter two engages a history produced by the Augustinian nuns who ran the hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec. The third chapter is on a piece of hagiography written about one of those nuns who worked at the Hôtel-Dieu by a Jesuit. And then the fourth set of documents I worked with were a series of 21 reports of miraculous healing attributed to a recollect brother named Frère Didace.

And what was clear from the very beginning was that these were, we sometimes distinguish of course in anthropology and in religious studies between the raw and the cooked. And I think we sometimes think that these primary sources we’re dealing with, those are the raw materials and we’re going to cook them in our historical or anthropological analysis, but of course they’re not, these sources are already cooked. The Jesuits were looking at instances of sickness on the mission field. The nuns were thinking about sickness already in the context of their hospital work, and they were already making these experiences of sickness and disability signify in their own historical context. So I realized that I was already dealing with four sources that were narrativizing, narrating sickness and disability in these various ways. And then of course, when we do the work of history, we too are trying to assemble these primary sources and the data we’re working with into a coherent narrative. We’re trying to make it meaningful. And I was really thinking a lot with Hayden White and his way of foregrounding narrative in the work of history and thinking about notions of the true story.

What’s the true story here about sickness and disability? Well, I wouldn’t say there’s no true story. I would say there are many true stories. There’s a story you can tell about sickness and disability that is as true as any other, and I realized what I was dealing with were four narrative sources that told these stories in a particular way, and that I too was going to reassemble these four different primary sources into my own narrative of coherence to make sickness and disability again with an eye to the present, meaningful to me and to my readers in our own contemporary context.

Kristian Petersen:

Now, you explore these case studies and they’re all within this kind of broader context of early modern Catholicism in French Canada. You begin with this serial publication, The Jesuit Relations. How is sickness and disability portrayed in this publication, and how do they understand embodied difference in terms of maybe a spiritual mission?

Mary Dunn:

Yeah, well, that is actually, The Jesuit Relations — I’ve been working with that my whole career, even in graduate school. And I was struck maybe six or seven years ago by an encounter with The Jesuit Relations when I realized, holy cow, they are talking about sickness all the time. So there are some searchable, not ideal translations, but searchable translations of The Jesuit Relations online. And I remember one day searching one of the volumes, so this is just one annual volume, and it’s a several hundred page text, but the word sick or sickness or some iteration of that appeared something like 122 times. And that’s actually really what launched this project in some ways. I mean, I’ve already been thinking about these questions for personal reasons, but it was this striking appearance of sick bodies in an annual journal that was supposedly dedicated to reporting on the progress of this spiritual mission, so I thought.

And so the question that inaugurates the first chapter where I deal with The Jesuit Relations is why are the Jesuits talking so much about sick bodies? What’s going on here? And so my essential argument in that chapter is that sickness was really critical to the unfolding of the Jesuit mission in New France. The most basic level sickness offered opportunities for these deathbed conversions and baptisms among indigenous North Americans. But interestingly as well, there are some protracted stories of not just deathbed conversions, but sickness experiences which the Jesuits configure as opportunities for the cultivation of these Christian virtues of patience, constancy, and holy resignation. And then also they configure sickness as invitations for dramatic displays of divine power. So whether it’s dramatic displays of spiritual conversion or a miraculous healing, these are the kinds of ways that the Jesuits are telling these stories.

But I also was aware, and this is a really important part of that first chapter, I was also aware, of course, as we all are and should be, that these are Jesuit stories. These are not capturing the experiences, necessarily, although perhaps in some cases they do more faithfully than others, but they’re not capturing the experiences of the indigenous Americans on whom they’re reporting. And so I took, I think it was a fairly significant historiographical risk, and interspersed, deliberately interrupted the analysis I was giving of the way the Jesuits are telling these stories and the relations, with a kind of imaginative and inventive, although source-based, hypothetical reconstruction of one of the indigenous man’s Emory Tchames in one of the Jesuit relations of his own experience, what it must might have been like for him to actually experience sickness. And the Jesuits tell his story a particular way, but I wanted to interrupt the Jesuit story with a fictionalized account of an alternative way in which he might’ve told his own story. And of course, I might be entirely wrong about that, and I probably am, but the real methodological point there was, we need to understand that the Jesuits are telling their own kind of hegemonic, dominating story of what sickness was like for these indigenous “patients” on the field, and that their own experiences arguably were radically different.

And so simply by interrupting the Jesuit narrative with these imaginative, reconstructed little narrative bits that I was trying to do, was my way of gesturing to the ethical importance of reminding my readers and reminding myself that we need to be careful not to take the Jesuits at face value.

Kristian Petersen:

You also look at the chronicle of a group of nuns at a new hospital in Quebec. How did the hospital, in these kind of narrative reconstructions, serve as a location for healing, for spiritual care? To me, what seems for both the Catholic nuns and for their patients?

Mary Dunn:

Yeah. Okay. So I’d like to answer that question by flipping what I’d said about The Jesuit Relations on its head. So what struck me about The Jesuit Relations was that the Jesuits were talking about physical sickness so much in their journals that were supposedly to be chronicling the progress of a spiritual mission. What I found so striking in the histoire, this history of the hospital in Quebec, was that the nuns who were really working on a day-to-day basis with sick patients talked very little or wrote very little in this histoire about those sick patients. So they wrote very little about physical illness, even though their vocation was ostensibly physical healing. Of course, what has long been established and what people know quite well is that the early modern hospital, the medieval hospital, et cetera, were not exclusively oriented toward the care of bodies. They were also oriented to the care of souls.

So I would say that by the early modern period, I think it’s fair to say that both physical and spiritual healing probably were equally important in the hospital. But the story I try to tell about the Hôtel-Dieu and the histoire that tells its history for a certain period of time is that the nuns were engaged in healing patients bodies and souls. However, one of the very striking things about this histoire, apart from the very few stories about patients in the histoire, is that there were a tremendous number of stories about the nuns themselves. So I was expecting to read a number of accounts about this patient and that patient. I found very few of those. What I did find much more than that was that this histoire abounded with stories of stick and ailing nuns. And so that was a real puzzle. That was probably the hardest chapter for me to write. I really struggled with trying to figure out exactly what was going on in this histoire, but it finally became clear to me that hospital work for these nuns was not just about healing the patients who came into the hospital door from the outside, but it was about healing themselves. And interestingly, a lot of these stories that are told in the histoire are stories of nuns who acquire illness or acquire disability even into the point of death because they’ve cared for the souls and the bodies of the patients that came through the doors and these illnesses acquired or disabilities acquired by the nuns in the process of serving the sick were illnesses that ended up serving as the means by which these nuns secured their own spiritual salvation. So it’s this really interesting, complex kind of entanglement between patient from the outside and the nuns on the inside, the nursing nuns on the inside, and then also between these ailing bodies and these souls in need of salvation, both the bodies and souls of the patients and the bodies and souls of the nuns. So it was this really complex kind of caregiving economy that was just as much about physical care as it was about spiritual care. Yeah, I mean, the way the histoire tells this story, the protagonists here are the nuns and their salvation, their spiritual salvation, which ends up damaging their bodies. I just found it fascinating.

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah. And for the second half of the book, if we can think of it that way, you moved from these kind of collective institutional locations and look at specific individuals. Can you tell us a little bit about how embodied difference was taken up in the narrative about these two figures that you focus on?

Mary Dunn:

Sure. Yeah. So the third chapter is on Catherine de St. Augustine and her hagiography. So all of these sources are entangled, which I found really interesting when I was writing the book and constructing it, and it wasn’t necessarily apparent to me when I began the research. Catherine de St. Augustine was a Hospitaller nun, an Augustinian nun who worked at the Hôtel-Dieu. Her hagiography was written by a Jesuit. So now you have this connection between chapter three and chapters one and two, but Catherine de St. Augustine, her hagiography is a bit of a puzzle because it’s super medieval in its characterization. She is this writhing, oozing, suffering demoniac and has this extraordinary body that is front and center in this hagiography in a way that was actually not at all representative of early modern hagiographies at this point. They tended to, after the Council of Trent, hagiography tended to move away from the really elaborate baroque somatic saint to these kind of more apostolic, active, virtuous saints doing good works.

But Catherine de St. Augustine is an early modern hagiography written in this medieval mold. And what I found was that, what the puzzle I wanted to solve in this chapter was: what is her extraordinary body doing in this text? And so in this chapter, I really think with disability theory, particularly with Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis, and think about the ways in which Catherine de St. Augustine’s body is literally like the prosthetic device that drives the narrative forward, that enables it to move like a prosthesis does, toward its end, which is to configure Catherine de St. Augustine as another Christ, as of course all hagiography tries to do. And so disability in that chapter, in her particular hagiographic life, is the center here. And I just mostly ask after, in what way is Paul Ragueneau, the Jesuit author of this hagiography, trying to make this disabled body, this extraordinary disabled body meaningful in this hagiographic text?

And then, what can we learn about hagiography as a genre in terms of thinking about the way we might say narrative prosthesis functions in this particular hagiography? And then in the final chapter, the final chapter was a lot of fun to write. I’ve been working with miracle stories my whole career, and this story again is based on these 21 miracle accounts of healing attributed to this recollect brother. And I really enjoyed this chapter because these are 21 short stories, mostly culled from depositions taken from miraculés. And it was hard to think through this one. This whole book I’ve written is a pushback against the biomedical model that says the only narrative we can tell about either sickness or disability is that it is a problem to be solved. So disability often will resolve in overcoming the disability; triumph or sickness resolves; and the cure: triumph.

And the whole book is a pushback against this. And I wanted to say with the whole book, hold on, aren’t there other ways we can think about sickness and disability, not as just something we got to get rid of, but as something that perhaps offers these opportunities for living and thriving in the midst of sickness and disability? And so this last chapter, I had to confront the plot line of these miracle stories, which on its face, sure looks like it’s about the effacement and the erasure of disability or sickness, because of course these are stories that end in healing. But I thought through this with the aid of Bob Orsi’s History and Presence and his concept of abundant historiography. You’ve got all these people, all these connections, all these things, all these devotional practices, and these are ways, Orsi says, this abundant, abundant things are ways of making God present in the world.

And I was thinking with Orsi and thinking about these miracle accounts and finally realized, that’s it. The point is not that disability disappears in these stories or that sickness disappears, but that God appears. I mean, that’s the whole point of a miracle story is that now we have this kind of concrete embodied manifestation of divine presence in the here and now. So I really reframed these stories as being less about, we got rid of disability, we got rid of sickness and more to be about through the adjustment and healing from sickness and disability, we made God appear. That’s what these are really about. So yeah, that’s basically chapters three and four. But chapter four was a lot of fun because I think it’s the only chapter that really allows us to have a peek into the lay Catholic experience in early modern New France.

Kristian Petersen:

So obviously there’s a ton to dive into as a reader, and I hope people will pick up the book. I’m wondering if maybe just as a final question, I can ask you to reflect on how you think people outside of your subfield might benefit from the book, either in your methods or the framework, or how might you think the folks in the AAR will take this book?

Mary Dunn:

Yeah, I love that question. I mean, I would hope that, I think that’s really important to a lot of us out there how our work speaks to people beyond our particular subfield. So I think the method is really important in this book. The notion that, it is not just justifiable, but perhaps crucial to think with the present when we are doing our work on religious experience and practice in the past, I would hope that that gives food for thought, whether people like it or not or want to think with it is one thing, but it’s certainly something to think about. Perhaps people will like to think against it as well, this kind of presentist approach to history. But I think I really do believe that this is what we all as historians of religion are doing, whether we know it or not, it’s important to acknowledge it, and it’s important to think about the relevance, even thinking more broadly than simply the AAR, let’s think about the humanities in general. If we can’t make the argument for the relevance of our historical work or our work in literary studies or anthropology or whatever field it might be, art history, then I think we’re going to have a really difficult time making arguments for the relevance of the humanities.

And I think all of us engaged in the AAR know that what we do is important and makes a substantial significant cultural contribution. We are often very tongue tied, though, when we think about how we can defend it and how we can make that argument to the public. And to me, really thinking explicitly and writing explicitly about how a particular work of history might impact how we live our lives in the present and what our options for the future are, is one way of making this argument about relevance to the public. The other thing I would say is that I do make, and I talked a bit about this in my discussion of the first chapter in The Jesuit Relations, but I really do think that the argument makes a strong argument for the imagination as a tool of the historian. And this is something Hayden White talks about as well, but what does that look like in historical studies? I give some kind of performance of that in the first chapter. So that too, I think is something that others in the AAR and beyond the AAR might want to think with. What does it look like to use imagination in historical studies.

And what’s the line? I mean, there’s an opening, I use a poem as the epigraph of the book and the poem, it’s called Fiction Versus Nonfiction by Lois Beardsley. And the poem is meant to gesture to the very thin line that I think separates historical works from works of fiction. And again, we just get to the point about narrative. All history is really narrative. Fiction is narrative, too. Imagination is the tool of the historian. So where do we draw the line between history and fiction?

Kristian Petersen:

Yeah, I think that’s great. I think that would be interesting for lots of people to take up here. Well, Mary, thanks again for making the time to talk about your wonderful book, and congratulations again on the award.

Mary Dunn:

Thank you, Kristian, and thanks for the opportunity.