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IN AUGUST 1849 NEW YORK CITY POLICE arrested Maria Monk for picking die pockets of her paramour. Newspapers in both Boston and New York reported diat die arrest occurred near her "den," a euphemism for a brothel, in the Five Points district of New York.1 In the minds and eyes of cultured middle-class men and women die Five Points was a despicable area of poor brothels, detestable crime, vermin, and disease best avoided by all respectable women. No virtuous family could survive within this "veritable sink of iniquitous pleasures."2 The degraded reputation of the area also permeated the popular literature of the day. Upon arriving in the Five Points, Peter Precise, the fictional hero in Ned Buntline 's 1848 novel, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York, exclaimed: "Oh God! Can tins be a Christian city?"3 The arrest of a prostitute in the Five Points district, therefore, did not typically arouse much interest or surprise. Maria Monk, however, was a special case.4
Monk had captured die minds and imaginations of Americans in 1836, when, with the aid of Protestant ministers in New York, she published her autobiography, Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery.5 In her book Monk shocked the country by disclosing die terrible ordeals she had suffered among die nuns and priests in the Hôtel- Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, Canada, including incidents of seduction, rape, torture, infanticide, and murder. Almost immediately after the book's publication, however, journalists investigating her background discovered information that placed Monk and her supporters on the defensive. These journalists revealed diat die woman celebrated by Protestant leaders and the public for disclosing die sexual evils and dangers of Catholicism in fact represented the very vice, sexual promiscuity, and licentious behavior that these leaders purported to condemn. The child Monk had delivered after her escape, a child she had attributed to her rape by a priest, was linked instead to a sexual tryst with an unidentified man in a brothel. Monk's mother, whom Monk blamed for not protecting her from the lures of Catholicism, provided a legal deposition claiming that her daughter experienced periodic fits of insanity. After a series of lawsuits the Reverend J. J. Slocum admitted to having fabricated Monk's story in order to arouse anti-Catholic sentiments. This disclosure...