Martyrdom, Rhetoric, and the Affective Remainder

Abstract This article takes as its subject a document known as the precieux manuscrit , assembled by Paul Ragueneau, superior of the Jesuit mission in New France, in 1652 as an aid to the canonization of the eight Jesuit missionaries who would come to be known as the North American martyrs. I situate the precieux manuscrit , a text dense with elaborately wrought descriptions of torture, endurance, and expiration, within the context of early modern Jesuit rhetorical theory. I argue that the precieux manuscrit is a persuasive text designed affectively to interpolate its readers into the plurisensorium of Jesuit martyrdom by means of rhetorical strategies of embellishment, amplification, and hypotyposis, harnessing the emotions it provokes to prove the conceptual argument at stake—that the Jesuit missionaries had been killed in odium fidei .