RT Article
T1 Les "Hymnes ou cantiques sacrez" d'Elie Neau : un nouveau manuscrit du "grand mystique des galères"
JF Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français
VO 124
SP 416
OP 423
A1 Butler, Jon
LA French
YR 1978
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1787646017
AB Elie Neau est connu sous deux aspects. Il est l'auteur de lettres et cantiques : Histoire abrégée des souffrances du Sieur Elie Neau (Rotterdam, 1701) et le fondateur de la première école américaine pour esclaves noirs (New York, 1704). Le document présenté réunit ces deux aspects. C'est un manuscrit de 1718 conservé à Londres. Il montre que le professeur poète cherchait à obtenir des subventions par une conversion de façade à l'anglicanisme, mais qu'il conservait ses convictions calvinistes. Celles-ci étaient à la source d'une œuvre qui donne au protestantisme français un rôle pionnier dans la recherche de remèdes au système esclavagiste, alors en formation. Until now historians have known the French Protestant refugee and colonial American immigrant, Elias Neau, in two quite different contexts: as the author of an influential collection of letters and "Cantiques", Histoire abregee des souffrances du Sieur Elie Neau (Rotterdam, 1701), whose contents encourage the historian Emile Leonard to call Neau the « grand mystique des galeres », and as the founder of the first American school for black slaves, which was organized in New York City in 1704. The document printed here links these two enterprises for the first time. It constitutes the introductory material to a longer sixty-page manuscript Neau gave to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1718 and which now is in the Society's London archives. It demonstrates that Neau continued his literary activity long after he joined the Church of England in New York City so he could receive help for his school from the S. P. G. in London. It also reveals that the religious convictions that forced Neau to flee France in 1679, and to suffer imprisonment in the dreaded galleys in the 1690s, underwrote his valiant work with American slaves as well, thus giving French Protestantism a noble place in the history of attempts to ameliorate evils in the developing American slave system.