The prospect of the new film, The Testament of Ann Lee (about to be released), is exciting for a historian, such as myself, with a passion for studying eighteenth-century religion.

My interest in the history of religion often gravitates to the topic of Christianity and Indigenous people. I’m particularly compelled to study the ways that Christian groups interacted with Indigenous people in the contexts of settler colonialism.

In a previous post, “ Ecclesiastical Kinship at Pointe-de-l’Église ,” I discussed the ‘presbyterial household’ of the Abbé Jean-Mandé Sigogne. Among the children who lived (for a time) as part of this ecclesiastical kin-unit were three Surette brothers from Argyle Township, near Yarmouth. These boys were sons of Athanase Surette and Louise d’Entremont, Acadian parishioners at Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau.[1] Louise and Athanase produced a prodigious family, having twelve children

The following is a series of letters between Cécile Melanson (née Murat) of Pointe-de-l’Église, Nova Scotia, and her son, Stephen (or Étienne) Melanson of Boston, Massachusetts. As I’ve written for the Acadiensis blog , Cécile Murat was not Acadian by birth. Born in 1780, she was a child of French parents living in Boston and was later adopted by an Acadian couple in rural Clare. In 1800, Cécile married an Acadian, Jean-Baptiste Melanson (brother of Samuel Melanson in my prev

I’ve studied the papers of the eighteenth-century Acadian merchant captain, Pierre Doucet, for over five years, and every time I revisit and review the archival collection, I turn up new evidence that I overlooked previously. The documents left by Captain Doucet and his son, Colonel Anselm (or Samuel) Doucet, constitute the Fonds Famille Dousett (or Doucet) at the Centre Acadien, Université Sainte-Anne . While a microfilm of this fonds is held at the Nova Scotia Archives in

Currently, as of summer 2025, the former Église Sainte-Marie in Nova Scotia's municipality of Clare faces the threat of possible demolition. Amid declining church attendance among Canadians generally, hundreds of communities across the country have faced such a predicament in recent decades. Underutilized and decaying church buildings have been demolished and replaced by other structures. I suggest here that the case of Sainte-Marie is distinct, setting it apart from many chu

In the late 1940s, Thomas Merton, the well-known Trappist monk, composed a history of his religious order. In this work, titled The Waters of Siloe , Merton devoted a chapter to Nova Scotia, telling the Trappists’ distinct nineteenth-century episode in the province, beginning with a refugee monk stranded in Halifax in the summer of 1815. This monk – born Jacques Merle in France in 1768 – was known by his devotional name, Father Vincent de Paul (after the seventeenth-century F

Documents authored by eighteenth-century Acadians are rare. The French settlers known as the Acadians had been deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, and Roman Catholic education in the province was soon thereafter reduced to non-existence. The generation of eighteenth-century Acadians born and raised in exile seldom had access to formal education.[1] There were exceptions, however, and some Acadians born in the tumult of the 1750s rose to prominence through lucrat

During the research I conducted for my PhD thesis, I spent several visits at the Nova Scotia Archives looking through the parish records of Roger Viets, the Anglican missionary at Digby from the 1780s into the early 1800s.[1] Viets was a Loyalist clergyman who migrated to Nova Scotia from Connecticut during the American Revolution. In 1786 he was appointed to the Loyalist congregation at Digby by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the missionary arm of the Church