Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, billed as an escaped nun's shocking expose 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 impostor, 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 campaign against them, which was 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.

About the Author
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Missouri. Her research focuses on American cultural, religious, and gender history in the nineteenth century.

Reviews
Yacovazzi's monograph is written with panache and humor, and is richly illustrated. For such a short book (a featherweight at just over 200 pages), it also boasts considerable breadth. * Emma Anderson, University of Ottawa, Journal of Religion *
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi skillfully situates antebellum America's anti-convent texts in their broader literary, social, and political contexts. In successive chapters of Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America, Yacovazzi compares the anti-convent publications to such contemporaneous genres as slave narratives, "city mysteries" (sensational novels exposing urban vice), and anti-Mormon tracts (attacking polygamy). She also deftly relates anti-convent discourse to such social and political developments as the rise of radical abolitionism, the common school movement, the feminization of teaching, the sectarian Bible Wars of the 1840s, and the nativist Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s.
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi's excursion into the antebellum world of "escaped-nun" tales yields captivating insights into the ways these accounts promoted the domestic ideology of American Protestants by othering women who threatened it.... Escaped Nuns is a well-written, extensively researched, and welcome addition to historical, literary, and religious studies.
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi does a wonderful job of centering nuns in the political and social history of the 19th-century US in Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America. The author demonstrates convincingly that the reaction to these Catholic women by non-Catholic Americans in the antebellum era-and beyond-played formative roles in shaping gender norms, public schooling, politics, ideas about sexuality, and abolitionism in heretofore-underappreciated ways...The author's analysis reinvigorates scholarship on anti-Catholicism, and it is also a pleasure to read. This work is highly recommended for popular and scholarly audiences. * William S. Cossen, Reading Religion *
Yacovazzi's important monograph has the great benefit of taking anti-convent rhetoric seriously, showing its connections to other much better-known movements of the era, and thereby moving nuns and convents from the periphery into the center of antebellum culture. * Joseph G. Mannard, American Cathoilc Studies *
lively and well-researched * James Emmett Ryan, Church History *
This is a useful resource for classes on US religion and gender studies. Summing up: Recommended * CHOICE *
In Escaped Nuns, Cassandra Yacovazzi employs deep research and gripping stories to examine the surprisingly pervasive anxieties in antebellum America about Catholic nuns and convents. This book will be required reading in the history of religious prejudice in America. * Thomas S. Kidd, Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University *
More than a fascinating work of cultural history, Escaped Nuns convincingly connects the sexual and spiritual politics that create untenable visions of 'womanhood.' Yacovazzi provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century American nativism, anti-prostitution, abolitionism, and anti-polygamy campaigns collided into a perverse abhorrence for nunsor, really, any woman who operated outside the confines of the Protestant family. This is a must-read to understand the dangerous arguments about women being made today by political and religious leaders on all sides. * Rebecca Sullivan, Professor of English, University of Calgary *
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi's Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign against Convents in Antebellum America brilliantly traces the origins of anxieties about religious women to early convent captivity narratives that railed against deviations from a closely inscribed republican script of marriage and motherhood. This intriguing book convincingly demonstrates that nineteenth-century escaped nuns' tales forged a repressive template which, even today, fetters popular conceptions of Catholic religious women. * Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Professor of English, Salem State University *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190881009
Author Cassandra L. Yacovazzi
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 454g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 234mm * 18mm