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Maria Monk (June 27, 1816 – summer of 1849) was a Canadian woman who was a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent witnessed and participated in violence directed at other nuns. witnessed infanticide. She, or ghost writers who used her as their front, wrote a book about these allegations. The 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 Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph of the Montreal convent of the Hôtel-Dieu, whom she called "the Black Nuns", 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. Monk’s errors began early in her story. In her account, she stated that there were three convents in Montreal: "1st. The Congregational Nunnery. 2d. The Black Nunnery, or Convent of Sister Bourgeoise. 3d The Grey Nunnery."〔Maria Monk, ''Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: or, The Hidden Secrets of A Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed'', Manchester, (): Milner, (), page 12. ()〕 She was, however, confused even on the nature of the orders. The Congregational Nuns were the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal, founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys, not the Sisters of Charity, as Monk stated at the beginning of her text;〔(Monk, p. 10 )〕 the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph, whose habits were black but who were not typically called "Black Nuns", operated the Hotel-Dieu, where Monk claimed that she entered and suffered, and it was not founded by "Sister Bourgeoise ()"; and it was the Sisters of Charity who were commonly known as the Grey Nuns. There is some evidence that Maria Monk had suffered a brain injury as a child.〔"Her book, both hotly attacked and defended, continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood, after she had rammed a pencil into her head." Richard Hofstadter, ''The Paranoid Style in American Politics''()〕〔Archdeacon, Thomas J. ''Becoming American''. 1984, page 76〕 One possible result of this injury was that Monk was easily manipulated, and was not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. It has been suggested that Maria Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers.〔 The book has been described as a hoax by scholars.〔Stein, Gordon. (1993). ''Encyclopedia of Hoaxes''. Gale Group. pp. 224-226. ISBN 0-8103-8414-0〕〔("Maria Monk: A Nun’s ‘Secrets’ Revealed" ). Retrieved 2015-05-01.〕 ==Atmosphere of anti-Catholic sensationalism== Monk’s book was published in an American atmosphere of anti-Catholic hostility (partly fueled by early 19th-century Irish and German Catholic immigration to the U.S.) and followed the 1834 Ursuline Convent Riots near Boston. These 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 by the Bishop of Boston, the Most Reverend Benedict Fenwick. This incident immediately gave rise to a rumor that the woman was being held in the convent against her will; a mob invaded and then burned down the convent in an effort to free her. In 1835 Rebecca Reed published an anti-Catholic, gothic novel, a highly-colored account of her six months as an Episcopalian charity pupil at the Ursuline convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Reed herself died of tuberculosis shortly after the publication of her book; her disease was widely believed to have been caused by the austerities to which she had been subjected at the convent. Reed’s book became a bestseller, and Maria or her handlers hoped to cash in on the evident market for anti-Catholic horror fiction. Monk’s tale was clearly modeled on the gothic novels that were popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a literary genre that had already been used to stoke anti-Catholic sentiments in such works as Denis Diderot's ''La Religieuse''. Monk’s story epitomizes the genre-defining elements of a young, innocent woman being trapped in a remote, old, gloomily picturesque estate, where she learns dark secrets and escapes after harrowing adventures. Monk claimed that she had lived in the convent for seven years, became pregnant, and fled because she did not want her baby destroyed. She told her story to a Protestant minister, Rev. John Jay Slocum,〔A Short History of the Slocums, Slocumbs and Slocombs of America, C.E. Slocum, Syracuse N.Y. 1882 and ()〕 in New York, who encouraged her to repeat it to a wider audience. According to the ''American Protestant Vindicator'', by July 1836 the book had sold 26,000 copies. Other publishers later issued books that supported Monk’s claims or were close imitators, or else they published tracts that refuted the tale. Historian Richard Hofstadter called it, in his 1964 essay ''The Paranoid Style in American Politics'', "()robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before ''Uncle Tom's Cabin''." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Maria Monk」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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