Marie of the Incarnation (Ursuline)
Marie of the Incarnation (28 October 1599 – 30 April 1672) was a French Ursuline nun, missionary, mystic, educator, and writer who founded the Ursuline monastery of Quebec and helped establish the first institution devoted to the education of girls in North America. One of the major mystical writers of seventeenth-century French Catholicism, she produced a large body of autobiographical, spiritual, and epistolary writings and also composed catechetical and linguistic works in several Indigenous languages of New France.
Marie of the Incarnation played a central role in the religious, educational, and cultural life of New France. Her correspondence constitutes one of the principal documentary sources for the history of the colony in the seventeenth century. She was canonized by Pope Francis through equipollent canonization in 2014 alongside François de Laval.
In the Martyrology
- April 30 Saint Marie de l’Incarnation, widow, founder of the Ursulines in Canada