Tucked neatly away in a corner of a narrow street in the Old City of Quebec is the Ursuline Convent. Founded in 1639 by Mere Marie de l'Incarnation, the seminary was to be Canada's first school for girls. More importantly, these seventeenth-century stones were to form the very foundations of needlework in Canada. While the British were feverishly settling the New England states, the French were at work exploring and colonizing the area immediately to the north which they called New France. In 1638, the Jesuits, whose evangelical efforts spearheaded Roman Catholic operations in the New World, sent an urgent appeal to France and to Rome for the help of nuns, to be both nurses and teachers to colonists and "savages" alike.
In responding to this appeal, Mere Marie de l'Incarnation, an Ursuline from Tours, was able to answer a mystical calling to educate and civilize the young Indian girls in the New World. In 1639 she and two other Ursulines, as well as their patroness, a young French noblewoman, courageously crossed the sea and established a school in response to a challenge from the Jesuits. Along with their missionary zeal, they also brought the Ursuline tradition of excellence in embroidery, though it was perhaps the strong influence of Mere Marie and her own skills in needlework that somehow enabled this tradition to survive.
Harsh Beginnings
Despite the harsh realities of life in New France - bitter cold winters, blazing hot summers, sickness, and plagues, a constant shortage of money, and even two disastrous fires in 1650 and 1686 - the small seminary grew and flourished. Before too many years had passed, the Ursuline sisters found they had the time and energy to devote to one of their greatest joys - the provision of vestments and ornaments for the churches and chapels of their chosen land. It was no longer necessary to accept donations from home or the "mission castoffs" of parishes and religious institutions in France. Whenever supplies from Europe were not forthcoming, the resourceful nuns raised their own sheep, spun and dyed their own yarns, and even wove their own cloth to use for the decoration of their places of worship. Moreover, they found that newly established parishes all along the shore of the St. Lawrence River would gratefully commission them to embroider vestments and ornaments, the additional source of income being of great benefit to their teaching and evangelistic efforts among the natives. Thus the tradition of the Ursulines as great ecclesiastical embroiderers became firmly rooted in the soil of New France.
In 1671, just one year prior to the death of their beloved foundress, the Sisters of Quebec welcomed a new arrival to their cloister, Mere Marie LeMaire des Anges, an Ursuline from the Great Convent of Paris. She launched them firmly into what has been described by French Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau as la brillante periode, which can be translated roughly as "the Golden Age" in Canadian embroidery. Not only was Mere des Anges a superb needlewoman, she was also a highly trained artist, skilled in all aspects of the rich Baroque style of the era. This sumptuous period in the history of Ursuline embroidery was to last from the time of her arrival, through her death in 1717, and onward by virtue of those she had trained, until the British conquered Quebec in 1959.
Ecclesiastical embroidery, unlike the secular embroidery of the time in New France, did not suffer from the
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