Maria Monk
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A fictionalized engraving of Maria Monk, in a nun's habit, holding a baby.

Maria Monk (June 27, 1816 – summer of 1839) 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 sensational 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 the Hôtel-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. Historians are unanimous in their agreement that the whole account was false.

There is some evidence that Maria Monk suffered a brain injury as a child^[1]. 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.^{citation needed}

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, excerpt

The Superior now informed me that having taken the black veil, it only remained that I should swear the three oaths customary on becoming a nun; and that some explanation would be necessary from her. I was now, she told me, to have access to every part of the edifice, even the cellar, where two of the sisters were imprisoned for causes that she did not mention. I must be informed that one of my great duties was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them. I expressed some of the feelings which this announcement excited in me, which came upon me like a flash of lightning; but the only effect was to set her arguing with me, in favour of the crime, representing it as a virtue acceptable to God, and honourable to me. The priests, she said, were not situated like other men, being forbidden to marry; while they lived secluded, laborious, and self-denying lives for our salvation. They might be considered our saviours, as without their service we could not obtain pardon of sin, and must go to hell. Now it was our solemn duty, on withdrawing from the world, to consecrate our lives to religion, to practice every species of self-denial. We could not be too humble, nor mortify our feelings too far; this was to be done by opposing them and acting contrary to them; and what she proposed was, therefore, pleasing in the sight of God. I now felt how foolish I had been to place myself in the power of such persons as were around me.^{citation needed}

Atmosphere of anti-Catholic sensationalism

Maria Monk's book followed an incident in Boston, Massachusetts, prompted by an anti-Catholic book. In 1835, Rebecca Reed wrote Six Months in a Convent, an unsympathetic description of her alleged experiences in an Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1834, shortly before the Reed book appeared, the Ursuline Convent Riots occurred. The Riots were triggered by an incident in which one of the nuns left the convent, but was persuaded to return, on the following day, by her superior, Mother Mary St. George, and the Bishop of Boston, the Most Reverend Benedict Fenwick. This incident immediately gave rise to a rumor that she was being held in the convent against her will; a mob invaded and then burned down the convent in an effort to free her. Reed died of tuberculosis shortly after the publication of her book; her disease was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities of the convent.

Literary antecedents

Reed's book became a best-seller, and Monk or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fiction by their offering. The tale of Maria Monk was clearly modeled on the gothic novels that were popular in the early 19th century, a literary genre that had already been used to stoke anti-Catholic sentiments in such works as Matthew Lewis's The Monk. Monk's story explores the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, gloomily picturesque estate; she learns the dark secrets held there, and escapes after harrowing adventures.

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 a newspaper, the American Protestant Vindicator, by July 1836 the book had sold 26,000 copies. Later, other publishers also issued books that supported its claims or were close imitators, as well as tracts that refuted the tale.

Public furor

The book caused a public outcry. Protestants in Montreal, Quebec, demanded an investigation, and the local bishop organized one. Inquiry found no evidence to support the claims, though many American Protestants refused to accept the conclusion and accused the bishop of dishonesty.

Colonel William Leet Stone, a Protestant newspaper editor from New York City, made his own investigation. In October 1836, his team entered the convent and found that the descriptions in the book did not match the convent interior. During their first visit, they were denied entry to the basement and the nuns' personal quarters. Stone returned to New York, interviewed Monk, and concluded that she had never been in the convent. In the later visit, he was given total access to all quarters. Stone's team found no evidence that Maria Monk had ever lived in the convent.

Maria Monk disappeared from the public view. It was later rumored that she was actually a Montreal prostitute who had spent the seven-year period in question in the Magdalen Asylum for Wayward Girls.^{citation needed} Many details of the story may have originated with her legal guardian William K. Hoyte, an anti-Catholic activist, and his associates. The writers later sued each other for a share of the profits.

Epilogue

Despite the near-unanimous conclusion that the tales were fabrications, and despite Monk's ill repute, some anti-Catholic groups, particularly fundamentalist Protestant authors such as Loraine Boettner and Jack Chick, still cite Monk's story as if it were true.

Later life

Monk went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with a lover whom historians often name Graham Monk. She penned a sequel, Further Disclosures of Maria Monk, which added nothing^{citation needed} to her tale. When she gave birth to another child, Oliver (a brother to William) , out of wedlock in 1838, most of her supporters abandoned her.

The Boston Pilot published this obituary on September 8, 1839: "There is an end of Maria Monk; she died in the almshouse, Blackwell's Island, still cooking as was her wont, New York, on Tuesday".

Awful Disclosures remained in print for years afterwards and was occasionally revived. There appear to have been two Australian editions (1920, 1940). The last recorded unsupplemented facsimile edition was published in 1977.

See also

• Ursuline Convent Riots
• Anti-Catholicism

Bibliography and subsequent editions

Posthumous editions of Maria Monk were published in 1837 (New York: Howe and Bates), 1920 (Melbourne: Wyatt and Watt), 1940? (Brisbane: Clarion Propaganda Series),1962 (Hamden: Archon), and were often reprints or facsimiles of the original. In 1975, a microform format was made available from New Haven, Connecticut. ISBN references are available for the following editions:

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk and the Hotel Dieu Monastery of Montreal: New York: Arno Press: 1977: ISBN 0-405-09962-2

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: Manchester: Milner: 1985 ISBN 0-665-38362-2.

Maria Monk: Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: London: Senate: 1997: ISBN 1-85958-499-3

The last two mentioned editions are noted as facsimiles in online bibliographic records. Nancy Lusignan Schultz has edited and prefaced an investigation of both the Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk cases; it incorporates Reed's Six Months in a Convent (1835) and Awful Disclosures (1836):

• Nancy Lusignan Schultz (ed) Veil of Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tales: West Lafayette: NotaBell Books: 1999: ISBN 1-55753-134-X

• Nancy Lusignan Schultz (ed), Veil of Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tales, Purdue University (1999) ISBN 1-55753-134-X

• Maria Monk de zwarte non [Dutch translation]naar het Engels door L. von Alvensleben uit het Hoogduitsch, geïllustreerde uitgave, [z.j.] Amsterdam August Koster

External links

• Awful Disclosures of the Hotel-Dieu Nunnery by Maria Monk
• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Works by Maria Monk at Project Gutenberg