1. Trial Documents of the Convent Riot (1870), 20 (hereafter referred to as Trial Documents ).

2. For the connection between this 1833 revival and the 1834 convent burning, see Louisa G. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 18.

3. James T. Austin, " Argument" before the Supreme Judicial Court in Middlesex , 9. For a cogent, if unsuccessful, argument that the government must indemnify the Ursulines in order to guard against mob destruction of private property, see George Ticknor Curtis, The Rights of Conscience .

4. The incident is recounted in Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America , 150. See also Peter Condon, "Constitutional Freedom of Religion and the Revivals of Religious Intolerance," U.S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 4, part 2 (1906).

5. Capt. Frederick Marryat, Diary , 78.

6. On the convent burning, see Documents Relating to the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown ; "Destruction of the Charlestown Convent," U.S. Catholic Historical Society Records and Studies 12 (1918) and 13 (1919); John England, "Documents Relating to the Imposture of Rebecca T. Read [ sic ], and the Burning of the Ursuline Convent, at Charlestown, Mass," The Works of the Right Reverend John England , vol. 4; "Mob Law," American Quarterly Review 17 (1835); and Ewens, The Role of the Nun . Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 , also contains extensive accounts of the episode. On the ritual aspect to Catholic-Protestant violence, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France , chap. 6. A good account of why Jacksonian America suffered from so much mob violence is Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era .

7. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 106.

8. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the

Ursuline Convent, August 11, 1834 , 12. See also David Grimsted, "Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting," American Historical Review 77 (1972): 361-97.

9. James T. Austin, " Argument, " 7.

10. Trial Documents , 82.

11. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 58.

12. Ibid., 123.

13. Ibid.

14. Supplement to "Six Months in a Convent, " 128. Another student, Lucy Thaxter, remembers in her "Account" that "for some days previous to the riot we had heard rumors of an excited state of feeling among the people in consequence of a story which was going about of a nun having been buried alive at the convent" (n.p.). Thaxter escaped early during the riot.

15. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 37.

16. Trial Documents , 36; Trial of the Convent Rioters , 12.

17. Trial Documents , 27.

18. Ibid., 36.

19. Ibid., 23.

20. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 18.

21. Charles W. Frothingham, The Convent's Doom , 12.

22. From a handbill included in Trial Documents .

23. James T. Austin, " Argument, " 9.

24. Trial Documents , 43.

25. Trial of the Convent Rioters [newspaper clippings], 2.

26. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the Ursuline Convent, August 11, 1834 , 11.

27. Trial Documents , 80.

28. Trial of the Convent Rioters , 21.

29. Trial Documents , 33.

30. Trial of the Convent Rioters , 14.

31. For Reed's account of her escape, see Six Months in a Convent , 172-74. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. Sales figures are from Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 90. My account of Reed's work disputes his claim that it was important, "not because of its contents . . . but because of the controversy which it aroused" (91).

32. Whitney, The Burning of the Convent , 53; see also Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 71.

33. Mary Anne Ursula Moffatt [Mother Mary Edmond St. George], An Answer to Six Months in a Convent Exposing Its Falsehoods and Manifold Absurdities by the Lady Superior . Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. For another example of the interrelated themes of convent captivity, orphanhood, and morbid sensibility, see Sister Agnes; or, The Captive Nun .

34. The quoted terms are those of Reed's editor in the introduction, 31. If such popular texts as the dime novel or popular history like Reed's Six Months in a Convent can be read, in Fredric Jameson's terms, as the "dream work of the social" (an approach recently extended to antebellum popular literature by Michael Denning)—as symbolic disclosures and at least provisional resolutions of intractable social inequities and confusions—such a reading can (perhaps unwittingly) reinscribe such texts with the very coherence characteristic of middle- and upper-middle-class discourse, an imposition justified by the alleged subversiveness of popular working-class literature. It becomes plausible to ascribe coherence as long as it is adversarial. Reed's work urges us to engage more seriously with the social function of incoherence. See Denning, Mechanic Accents , especially the introduction and chaps. 3 and 5.

35. See Billington, The Protestant Crusade , 73-74. After the bishop bought the land, the Charlestown selectmen asked the legislature to authorize them to make rules regulating burials; acting on that authority, they passed regulations governing the transport and burial of bodies, which had to be done with permits; Fenwick, realizing the only effect was to discriminate against Catholics, ordered the burial of the two children and was then prosecuted. On the issue of trespass, Eve Sedgwick observes of the Gothic novel: "Thus violence seems to pertain much less to a sojourn in the depths of monastery, convent, Inquisition, castle, or hiding place than to an approach—from within or without—to the interfacing surface" ( The Coherence of Gothic Conventions , 24).

36. Report of the Committee Relating to the Destruction of the Ursuline Convent, 5 .

37. "Sacrifice," Christian Examiner 65 (1858): 318.

38. Supplement to "Six Months in a Convent, " 69.

39. Brownson, "Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism," Brownson's Quarterly Review 3 (1846): 369-99; reprinted in Works , vol. 6.

40. Theodore Dwight, Open Convents , 116.

41. James D. Hart, The Popular Book , claims that both Maria Monk's and George Lippard's novels were aimed at a working-class male audience. Leslie A. Fiedler supports this interpretation in his introduction to The Monks of Monk Hall , where he claims that demipornographic fiction was "not merely produced by men only but intended for an exclusively male audience" (xiii). The collaborative male and female authorship of several such demipornographic works, their frequent use of the persona of the sentimental heroine, and the difficulty of establishing precise reader demographics all make these claims debatable.

42. Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery , 4. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

43. William L. Stone, Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hotel Dieu , 10. Further references are given parenthetically in the text.

44. Quoted in Ralph Thompson, "The Maria Monk Affair," Colophon , part 17 (1934): n.p.

45. As reprinted in John England, "Documents Relating to the . . . Burning of the Ursuline Convent," in Works , 4:418.