Frank A. Abbott. The Body or the Soul? Religion and Culture in a Quebec Parish, 1736-1901.

Laverdure, Paul

Frank A. Abbott. The Body or the Soul? Religion and Culture in a Quebec Parish, 1736-1901. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016. xxvii, 356 pages. $100 cloth

Brilliant. This is the word that springs to mind when reading this book. Frank Abbott, a retired professor of history formerly at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, has written a subtle, textured parish history that is light-years from the standard parish history filled with badly-identified photographs and few facts. Using the parish of St-Joseph-de-Beauce as his starting point, Abbott examines the parish registers, the annual reports to the archbishop of Quebec, censuses, and the rich, often over-looked ethnographic resources gathered by generations of folkore field researchers at Laval University. Along with these rich primary sources, he weaves his deep knowledge of Quebec religious historiography, secondary sources, and theoretical analyses from a wide range of philosophers and social scientists to offer fascinating insights into Quebec rural society. Popular culture and individual as well as community agency are important counterweights to the idea of clerical hegemony.

There are eight chapters in 250 pages, with another hundred pages of appendix, notes, bibliography and index. Chapter 1, "Habitants and religion in nineteenth-century Quebec," is an overview of the rise of the institutional Church to prominence in nineteenth-century Quebec. In important ways, Abbott invalidates Louis Rousseau's thesis of a sudden religious revival in the mid-nineteenth century at least in this part of rural Quebec. He also throws doubt on Rene Hardy's arguments for a gradual religious revival and increase in clerical control (18). Abbott does not see evidence for either position. An increase in Easter communions did not mean that piety increased, but that clerical rigorism had softened, due to the influence of Saint Alphonsus Liguori's moral theology (149). Popular support for church buildings was certainly present, as the second chapter, "Development and transformation: St-Joseph-de-Beauce, 1736-1901," shows, but did it mean clerical control? Abbott argues that the French-Canadian farmer was not backward, but an agent who reacted to changes in the market economy, took advantage of opportunities and, rather than seeing religion as a hindrance, used it to advance well-being, both on earth and in heaven. The Church itself saw no opposition between the market economy and religion; neither did the individual farmer. The clergy actively promoted roads and rails; the habitants supported buildings that attracted more wealth. Chapter 3, "Render unto God: Buildings and Belief," examines the enormous sums spent on church buildings--churches, rectories, convents--and the little spent on educational institutions. Basically, those with the means to do so sent their children elsewhere for education or built local private academies. Those without means saw no need for children to get more than a basic education. Despite clerical urgings, neither group favoured spending on school buildings. Chapter 4, "Ministering to a Rural Parish: The Cures of St-Joseph, 1761-1901," demonstrates how little power the clergy had, how one was removed by local complaints, and how all of them accomplished what they could primarily through moral suasion, in partnership with local parishioners, who participated in the definition of what was required of the clergy. Chapter 5, '"Holy Water and Candles': Catholicism in St-Joseph," doubts the "social control" theory of religion by emphasizing the mutually shared beliefs of both clergy and people in a reality beyond the material. This chapter is "deeply interesting" (174) and fun: there is, for example, a description of curse words in popular parlance. For this, Abbott uses the work of Jean-Pierre Pichette (formerly a professor of folklore at the University of Sudbury) to good effect. Chapter 6, "Beliefs, Superstitions, and Popular Spirituality," describes local folk beliefs, many of which dovetailed with Catholic orthodoxy, although some, such as Ouija boards, seemed to have been imported from Protestant circles. Chapter 7, "Holy Water versus Fire Water: Habitant Sociability and the Cures," and chapter 8, "Sociability and Sexuality: 'On danse pour le plaisir de danser,' look at two ways in which the clergy tried to control parish behavior, in drinking and in dancing, and how they failed. A brief, dense conclusion, "The Body and the Soul," again emphasizes how parishioners balanced body and soul.

Abbott goes beyond asking whether the average French-Canadian habitant was as submissive to clerical control as popular opinion describes him (xx), since this myth has been abandoned by recent historiography. He asks "how institutional Catholicism interacted on the mundane level with the ordinary faithful." Looking at the interrelationship between religion and popular customs, it is clear that Catholicism is important in daily life. Abbott, more than anyone else, digs as deeply as possible to find out what people actually believed in the past and has, I believe, reconstructed the moral compass of the Quebec habitants.

Aside from the two dozen or so typographical errors (the article "the" often disappeared from the text or was misplaced when it was needed) and the fact that Jean du Berger was also spelled Du Berger in the bibliography (and thus appeared in two different places ... and why not? He was definitely an important folklore scholar who needs to be read by historians), the book ws well edited. I would doubt Abbott's statement (135) that "In Quebec there was no strong anticlerical tradition." Did Marcel Trudel's two-volume study of Voltaire in Quebec not testify to the antecedents of later Catholic liberal and Protestant anticlericalism?

Nonetheless, no brief book review can do real justice to this extremely well constructed and argued monograph. The book itself should be required reading in courses relating to Quebec, Canadian religious history, and the social history of Canada. Abbott sums up his work in the conclusion: "The social history of rural popular culture and its encounter with modernity in this small and relatively unimportant rural Quebec parish over the course of the nineteenth century tells us a number of things about larger human issues such as the agency of ordinary people in the face of powerful institutions." (248) They survived and thrived. And that was the point of it all, to keep body and soul together.

Paul Laverdure

University of Sudbury