Scottish in the Margins of New France: Marie Hiroüin de la Conception, a Nun at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Seventeenth-Century Québec

Marie Hiroüin, a nun at the Hôtel-Dieu in Québec, was identified as a Scottish noblewoman in the margin of one of her community’s records. An examination of how she came to be in New France, then an analysis of why the nuns at the hospital chose to emphasise her Scottishness and her nobility, offer new insights into migration, national identity, and religion in the seventeenth century. Hiroüin’s family, the Irvines of Hilton, remained Catholic through Scotland’s Protestant Reformation. Some family members stayed in Scotland, while others went to France, Italy, and North America. In New France, nuns commemorated the commitment of Hiroüin’s family to Catholicism and alliance to Mary, Queen of Scots. This commemoration shows the long reach over both space and time of early modern British politics and religion. At a hospital in a small settlement on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, far from the centres of power in either Britain or France, nuns were using the Scottishness and nobility of Marie Hiroüin to demonstrate to themselves and their successors the virtues of their religious vocation in colonial North America.