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Author: Louisa Goddard Whitney
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2024-07-31
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 3385545145
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReprint of the original, first published in 1877.
Author: Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-08-21
Total Pages: 349
ISBN-13: 019088102X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKJust five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking exposé of convent life, had already sold more than 20,000 copies. The book detailed gothic-style horror stories of licentious priests and abusive mothers superior, tortured nuns and novices, and infanticide. By the time the book was revealed to be a fiction and the author, Maria Monk, an imposter, it had already become one of the nineteenth century's best-selling books. In antebellum America only one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, outsold it. The success of Monk's book was no fluke, but rather a part of a larger phenomenon of anti-Catholic propaganda, riots, and nativist politics. The secrecy of convents stood as an oblique justification for suspicion of Catholics and the campaigns against them, which were intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and, in particular, the role of women in the Republic. At a time when the term "female virtue" pervaded popular rhetoric, the image of the veiled nun represented a threat to the established American ideal of womanhood. Unable to marry, she was instead a captive of a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a white slave, and a foolish virgin. In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers--male and female--forged this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns, and women more broadly, in America.
Author: Emily Sarah Holt
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2024-01-01
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9360466360
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"In Convent Walls" by Emily Sarah Holt is a historic novel that offers a vibrant and compelling portrayal of life in the walls of a convent in the course of the turbulent times of the English Reformation. Holt's paintings captures the challenges faced by using the nuns as they navigate the political and non-secular upheavals of the 16th century. The tale revolves around the principal individual, Cicely, a young female who finds herself drawn into the cloistered international of a convent. As England undergoes the transformation from Catholicism to Protestantism, the convent turns into a microcosm of the larger societal modifications. Cicely, torn between her non-public ideals and the expectancies of the convent, will become a witness to the struggles and conflicts that outline this era in history. Holt skillfully weaves collectively subject matters of religion, responsibility, and societal expectations, imparting readers with a nuanced exploration of the demanding situations confronted via people caught within the midst of non-secular and political modifications. The novel offers a glimpse into the lives of girls within the convent partitions, shedding light on their non-public journeys and the impact of broader historical occasions on their destinies.
Author: Marj Charlier
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2021-03-02
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1094092770
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMarj Charlier’s The Rebel Nun is based on the true story of Clotild, the daughter of a sixth-century king and his concubine, who leads a rebellion of nuns against the rising misogyny and patriarchy of the medieval church. At that time, women are afforded few choices in life: prostitution, motherhood, or the cloister. Only the latter offers them any kind of independence. By the end of the sixth century, even this is eroding as the church begins to eject women from the clergy and declares them too unclean to touch sacramental objects or even their priest-husbands. Craving the legitimacy thwarted by her bastard status, Clotild seeks to become the next abbess of the female Monastery of the Holy Cross, the most famous of the women’s cloisters of the early Middle Ages. When the bishop of Poitiers blocks her appointment and seeks to control the nunnery himself, Clotild masterminds an escape, leading a group of nuns on a dangerous pilgrimage to beg her royal relatives to intercede on their behalf. But the bishop refuses to back down, and a bloody battle ensues. Will Clotild and her sisters succeed with their quest, or will they face excommunication, possibly even death? In the only historical novel written about the incident, The Rebel Nun is a richly imagined story about a truly remarkable heroine.
Author: Hubert Wolf
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2015-01-13
Total Pages: 557
ISBN-13: 0385351925
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent. In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant’Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent’s beautiful young mistress, Maria Luisa. Having convinced those under her charge that she was having regular visions and heavenly visitations, Maria Luisa began to lead and coerce her novices into lesbian initiation rites and heresies. She entered into a highly eroticized relationship with a young theologian known as Padre Peters—urging him to dispense upon her, in the privacy and sanctity of the confessional box, what the two of them referred to as the “special blessing.” What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical significance, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing on written testimony and original documents, Professor Wolf—Germany’s leading scholar of the Catholic Church, and among the very first scholars to be granted access to the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the office of the Inquisition—tells the incredible story of how one woman was able to perpetrate deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Church itself.
Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2019-09-10
Total Pages: 425
ISBN-13: 1681373882
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.
Author: Robin LaFevers
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 565
ISBN-13: 054762834X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the fifteenth-century kingdom of Brittany, seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god of Death has blessed her with dangerous gifts--and a violent destiny.
Author: Rebecca Theresa Reed
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9781557531346
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRebecca Reed and Maria Monk may not be well-known authors today, but these women were publishing sensations in nineteenth-century America. Their lurid tales of life in two North American convents, one in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the other in Montreal, Canada, sold more than one-half million copies. Reed escaped from the Ursuline convent in Charlestown in 1832. Her dramatic renditions of Roman Catholic ritual practice helped spark a night of violence that resulted in the convent being burned to the ground by an angry mob. Reed's published narrative, Six Months in a Convent, appeared just as the trials of the rioters were ending in 1835, and became an instant literary success. Monk's supporters capitalized on the lucrative market in anti-Catholic literature, by bringing out the pseudo-pornographic Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in 1836. Monk, who claimed her infant daughter had been fathered by a Catholic priest, was in fact a Montreal prostitute rather than a nun. She enjoyed the life of a literary star in New York before her hoax was uncovered. These two narratives are now available for the first time in a single paperback edition. Nancy Lusignan Schultz's introduction provides a fascinating glimpse into the history, development, and marketing of these phenomenal best-sellers. The convent tales by Reed and Monk are classics that must be read by those interested in American studies, popular culture, social and religious history, literature, and women's studies.
Author: Nancy Lusignan Schultz
Publisher: UPNE
Published: 2002-04-11
Total Pages: 346
ISBN-13: 9781555535148
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe shocking story of the night an angry mob burned down a quiet Massachusetts convent -- and the larger story of anti-Papist and anti-feminist sentiment.
Author: Alice McDermott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-09-19
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 0374712174
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife—that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.
