Marie Guyart

Marie Guyart was born on 28 October 1599 in Tours, in the Kingdom of France, the daughter of Florent Guyart, a master baker, and Jeanne Michelet. She grew up in a large, devout Catholic family and later described a formative childhood experience in which, at about the age of seven, she believed Christ appeared to her and invited her to belong to him. Although she felt drawn to the cloister, her family arranged a marriage for her in 1617 to Claude Martin, who was engaged in the silk trade in Tours. Their only child, a son also named Claude, was born in 1619. Claude Martin the elder died that same year, leaving Marie a widow before the age of twenty, with an infant son and the task of winding up a strained commercial household.

During the following decade she lived partly with her family and partly in the household of her sister and brother-in-law, Paul Buisson, whose river-transport business on the Loire she helped to manage with recognized practical ability. She made a private vow of chastity, pursued a demanding interior life, and reported further mystical experiences, including a sense of spiritual marriage to the Word incarnate. After placing her son, then about twelve years old, in the care of others for his education, she entered the Ursuline monastery of Tours in January 1631 and received the religious name Marie of the Incarnation. The departure wounded her son deeply; he later entered the Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, took the name Dom Claude Martin, and became the principal editor and biographer of her spiritual writings. Mother and son were eventually reconciled through an extensive correspondence that still survives.

Inspired by Jesuit accounts of the missions in New France and by what she took to be a divine vocation, she sought and obtained permission to leave her convent in Tours for the colony. In May 1639 she sailed from Dieppe in company with two fellow Ursulines, Marie de Saint-Joseph and Cécile de Sainte-Croix, and the lay patron Madeleine de la Peltrie. They arrived at Quebec in August 1639 and founded the first Ursuline house in North America, together with a boarding and day school for girls, the earliest such school in New France. The community received both daughters of French colonists and Indigenous girls from several nations. Marie of the Incarnation served repeatedly as superior, directed the reconstruction of the monastery after it burned in 1650, and combined administrative labor with teaching and with the study of Indigenous languages.

She learned Algonquin, Wendat, and Iroquoian languages well enough to compose dictionaries, a catechism, and a sacred history for use in the school and mission. Her letters, addressed especially to her son in France, and her spiritual Relation of 1654 constitute primary sources for the religious, educational, and daily life of seventeenth-century Quebec. She remained in the colony for the rest of her life and died at Quebec on 30 April 1672. The Catholic Church beatified her on 22 June 1980 under Pope John Paul II and canonized her on 3 April 2014 under Pope Francis. Her feast is kept on 30 April, particularly in Canada, where she is remembered as a foundress of female religious life and of girls' education in New France.