Andrew Newman
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643458
- eISBN:
- 9781469643472
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643458.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
This chapter uses onomastics, the study of names, to compare the intersecting stories of two women who lived in the Iroquois-Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake. The Iroquoian concept of requickening ...
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This chapter uses onomastics, the study of names, to compare the intersecting stories of two women who lived in the Iroquois-Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake. The Iroquoian concept of requickening may lend insight into how Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, may have modelled her life after her baptismal namesake, St. Catherine of Siena. The Jesuits’ choice of Marguerite, after St. Margaret of Antioch, as a new baptismal name for John Williams’s captive daughter Eunice may have been intended as an allusion to her rescue from heresy. Her eventual marriage to a Mohawk man fulfilled her Mohawk name, Kanenstenhawi, just as Kateri Tekakwitha’s vow of chastity fulfilled her Christian one.Less
This chapter uses onomastics, the study of names, to compare the intersecting stories of two women who lived in the Iroquois-Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake. The Iroquoian concept of requickening may lend insight into how Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, may have modelled her life after her baptismal namesake, St. Catherine of Siena. The Jesuits’ choice of Marguerite, after St. Margaret of Antioch, as a new baptismal name for John Williams’s captive daughter Eunice may have been intended as an allusion to her rescue from heresy. Her eventual marriage to a Mohawk man fulfilled her Mohawk name, Kanenstenhawi, just as Kateri Tekakwitha’s vow of chastity fulfilled her Christian one.
