Reviews of Books

The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. By COLIN M. COATES. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv, 231. $70.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.)

The literature on New France sometimes reminds me of the "dappled" creation celebrated by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his exuberant poem "Pied Beauty." Perhaps because it is the bilingual fruit of a weakly integrated scholarly community, scholarship on France's North American colonies defies tidy classification into, say, frontier or Atlantic perspectives. One may find in this corpus not just "landscapes plotted and pieced," "all trades, their gear & tackle & trim," but also plenty of "things counter, original, spare and strange," not to mention "things fickle, freckled (who knows how?)."1 It should come as little surprise, at any rate, to find that the two books under review here are markedly different in tone, focus, and approach, despite their authors' common intent to produce cultural histories of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French Canada (early nineteenth, as well, in Colin Coates's work) and despite their heavy plumbing of judicial archives, including several common court cases. Much of this divergence springs from their concepts of culture itself.	1
Some of the differences, however, are simply those of genre. Addressing a wide audience in essay form, Peter Moogk revisits disparate topics that have preoccupied him during the last few decades. Though La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada--A Cultural History seems to announce a survey, Moogk makes no claims to systematic coverage of what he views as "a loose chain of isolated . . . outpost[s] of French culture" (p.12). Earlier work on popular insults and immigration and on social status and artisans is here reconfigured and expanded.2 To these, he has added spirited pieces on the mutual perceptions of colonists and native peoples, the state, colonial identity in Canada and Acadia, and popular religion. He injects not just new material and themes pertinent to his previous writings but also highly personal and present-minded (and to my mind often troubling) reflections on their overarching significance.	2
Coates's monograph, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec, in contrast, revises his dissertation and directs a microscopic lens at the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River, roughly at midpoint between Three Rivers and Quebec. This is a case study of two contiguous seigneuries, the Jesuit-owned Batiscan and Sainte-Anne de la Pérade, whose elite lay owners included several generations of noble military officers from the Tarieu de Lanaudière family and later, John Hale, husband of Sir Jeffery Amherst's niece Elizabeth. To a degree, Coates builds on a tradition of local work on rural social structures, inheritance, and farming practices. As his title suggests, however, he has broadened the purview to include changes in the land and in social relations. These suggestive lines of enquiry overlap at times, partly through Coates's overall concern for "cultural meaning" (p. 5) and for how people "tried to make sense of their world and their surroundings" (p. 4).	. . .