To browse Academia. In September , a strange, savage-looking girl was discovered in the country near Chalons-sur-Marne, France. The extraordinary appearance of this wild creature amid the bucolic plains of Champagne sent shock waves through the region and eventually captured the attention of writers and scientists throughout Europe.
Although she was gradually "tamed" and re-formed as a Catholic nun, the girl's ambiguous existence on the boundaries of civilization fascinated the European intelligentsia. This article provides the most detailed account of what happened, who she was, and what ideas swirled around her among the European observers.
From New France, Marie would also carry on an extensive correspondence with her son, Claude, whom she had abandoned at the tender age of eleven to enter religious life. The letters exchanged between mother and son over the course of some thirty years to reveal much about the early history of New France, the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century, and - not least of all - an early modern anthropology of the savage Other.
For Europeans both at home and abroad, the existence of New World natives gave rise to a series of questions: Were these curious people irrational beasts or human beings included within the sphere of biblical revelation?
Did they represent an earlier stage in human development? A degenerate race? Were they, like the Europeans themselves, sons of Noah? The French street literature from the 16th century diffused tragic histories in canards, texts that were sold to a wide audience, printed in cheap material and with few pages, in which the supernatural phenomena and the crimes occupied most of it. Among the canards narrating crimes, women were naturally showed as victims, but are the narrative of crimes committed by women that receive special attention in this paper: in these canards the feminine is metamorphosed into pain, jealousy and revenge, and it will culminate in the destruction of their close ones.
