Maria Monk
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Maria Monk (June 27 1816 – summer of 1839) was a Canadian woman who claimed to have been a nun who had been sexually exploited in her convent. She, or ghost writers who used her as their puppet, wrote a sensational book about these allegations.
Maria Monk's 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 Sisters of Charity of a Montreal convent of the Hôtel-Dieu 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. Historians are unanimous in their agreement that the whole account was false.
There is some evidence that Maria Monk suffered a brain injury as a child. One result of this brain injury was that Monk became easily manipulated, and was not able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. It has been suggested that Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers.
