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Maria Monk (1816?- 1849) was a Canadian woman who claimed to have been a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent. She, or ghost writers who used her as their puppet, wrote a sensationalistic book about these allegations.
Maria Monk's book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed was published in January 1836. In it, Monk claimed that nuns of the Sisters of Charity of a Montreal convent of Hotel Dieu were forced to have sex with the priests in the seminary next door. The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If the sexual union produced a baby, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Uncooperative nuns disappeared.
There is some evidence that Maria Monk suffered a brain injury as a child. One result of this brain injury was that Monk became easily manipulated, and was not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. It has been suggested that Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers.
Maria Monk's book came shortly after an earlier incident in Boston, Massachusetts prompted by an anti-Catholic book. In 1835 Rebecca Reed wrote a book called Six Months in a Convent, which contained an unsympathetic, but mostly accurate, description of her experiences in an Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts. This convent was burnt down by a mob shortly before the Reed book appeared, after an incident in which one of the nuns attempted to escape and was persuaded to return, and a rumor circulated that she was being held against her will. Reed died shortly after the publication of her book, of tuberculosisTuberculosis is also called TB consumption (TB seemed to consume people from within with its symptoms of bloody cough, fever, pallor, and long relentless wasting), wasting disease White Plague (TB sufferers appeared markedly pale), phthisis (Greek for con that was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities she practised in the convent.
Reed's book became a best-seller, and Monk or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fictionHorror fiction is, broadly, fiction intended to scare, unsettle or horrify the reader. Although a good deal of it is about the supernatural, any fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, suspenseful or frightening theme may be termed "horror"; conversely, by their offering. The tale of Maria Monk was, in fact, clearly modelled on the gothic novelThe gothic novel is an English literary genre, which can be said to have been born with The Castle of Otranto ( 1764) by Horace Walpole. It is the predecessor to modern horror fiction and it above all has led to the common definition of gothic as being cos that were popular in the early nineteenth century, a literary genreWritings by multiple authors that are very similar in theme and style, especially where these similarities are intended and deliberately pursued by the authors, are often grouped together as genres . Well-known genres of fiction include romance, western, that had already been used for anti-Catholic sentiments in works such as Matthew LewisThere are several famous people with this name, including: Matthew Lewis, the novelist Matthew Lewis, the actor.'s The MonkThe Monk is a Gothic novel by Matthew Lewis that first appeared in 1796. It was written before he turned 20, in the space of 10 weeks. The story concerns Ambrosio, a monk in Spain and a famous preacher, who is undone by the love of Matilda, his pupil.. It contains the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, and gloomily picturesque estate; she learns the dark secrets the place contains, and after harrowing adventures makes her escape.
Monk claimed that she had lived in the convent for seven years, got pregnant and fled because she did not want her baby destroyed. She had told her story to a protestant minister in New York, who had encouraged her to tell her tale to a wider audience. According to Protestant newspaper American Protestant Vindicator, by July 1836 it has sold 26.000 copies. Later other publishers also published books that supported its claims or were close imitators - not to mention tracts that refuted the tale.