Fire & Roses : The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834

Schultz, Nancy Lusignan

ISBN 10: 0684856859 / ISBN 13: 9780684856858

Edité par Free Press, New York, 2000

A propos de cet article

Small 4to 9" - 11" tall; 317 pages.

N° de réf. du vendeur 230934

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Fire & Roses : The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834
• Éditeur: Free Press, New York
• Date de parution: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0684856859
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780684856858
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: First Edition; First Printing.
• État de l'article: Near Fine
• État de la jaquette: Fine

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

From its founding in 1826, the convent on Mt Benedict had been roumoured to conceal physical and sexual abuse of nuns and female boarding students within its walls. In 1832 Rebecca Theresa Reed allegedly escaped and wrote a tale of women held against their will and subjected to cruel treatment by convent authorities. A series of anti-Catholic lectures by the Reverend Lyman Beecher stoked existing fears of a papal plot and these lectures eventually lead to a riot during which a drunken mob burnt the convent to the ground. The arsonists' ringleader became a local folk hero. Based on years of research this book offers a tale of violence and redemption, from an era when anit-papist diatribes were the stuff of standing-room only lectures; independent women were feared and reviled; and a new nation was struggling with its own identity.

Présentation de l'éditeur

In the midst of a deadly heat wave during the summer of 1834, a woman clawed her way over the wall of an Ursuline convent on Mount Benedict in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and escaped to the home of a neighbor, pleading for protection. When the bishop, Benedict Fenwick, persuaded her to return, vicious gossip began swirling through the Yankee community and in the press that she was being held at the convent against her will, and had even been murdered. The rumored fate of the ""Mysterious Lady,"" as she became popularly known, ultimately led to the burning of the convent by an angry, drunken mob of Protestant men. The arsonists' ringleader, a brawny bricklayer named John Buzzell, became a folk hero. The nuns scattered, and their proud and feisty mother superior, Mary Anne Moffatt, who battled the working-class rioters and Church authorities, faded mysteriously into history. Nancy Lusignan Schultz brings alive this forgotten event, focusing her probing lens on a time when independent, educated women were feared as much as immigrants and Catholics, and anti-Papist diatribes were the stuff of bestsellers and standing-room-only lectures. She provides a glimpse into nineteenth-century Boston and into an elite boarding school for young women, mostly the daughters of wealthy Protestants, vividly dissecting the period's roiling tensions over class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education.