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Fire and Roses : The Burning of the
Charlestown Convent, 1834
by Nancy Lusignan Schultz
About the Book
excerpted from the Fire
and Roses website
"In the midst of a deadly
heat wave during the summer of 1834, a woman clawed her way over the wall
of a Roman Catholic convent near Boston, Massachusetts and escaped to the
home of a neighbor, pleading for protection. When the Bishop, Benedict
Fenwick, persuaded her to return, rumors 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 imagined fate of the
"Mysterious Lady," as she became popularly known, ultimately led
to the destruction of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts
on the night of August 11, 1834 by a mob of Protestant men.
Nancy
Schultz brings alive this forgotten moment in the American story,
shedding light on one of the darkest incidents of religious persecution to
be recorded in the New World. The result of painstaking archival research,
Fire & Roses offers a rare 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. Schultz examines the imagined secrets that led to the riot and
uncovers the real secrets in a cloistered community whose life was
completely hidden from the world."
A
Note to CatholicMom.com participants
from author Nancy Schultz
I hope you enjoy Fire and Roses.
I first began work on the book when I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts,
where the land that the convent once stood upon is now located. I stumbled
upon the dramatic story of the Ursuline convent through some research into
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the well-known abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin. I was curious about Stowe's seemingly ambiguous attitude toward
Catholicism in some of her novels--which seemed to contradict her
progressiveness on questions of race. I quickly found out that her father,
the Reverend Lyman Beecher, had given three anti-Catholic sermons on the
day before the convent was attacked, and that many of the Beechers were
quite vehemently anti-Catholic.
I had grown up in Massachusetts and attended Catholic schools and
colleges, and had never heard of this event. I headed for the local
history room of the Somerville Public Library and began to read up on the
convent riot. After looking into some of the original documents, I was
hooked.
I spent eight years researching and writing the book. I began the project
during a sabbatical when I was expecting my oldest son and finished the
book ten days before the birth of my youngest son. I affectionately refer
to my boys as "The Book Ends."
One thing I would like readers to take away from the book is a greater
awareness of a chapter of our history that reveals where we came from in a
way that history texts do not. Many people are surprised to hear
that there was this kind of religious tension in American history. I also
want to continue the search for information about Mary Anne Moffatt, and
perhaps interest readers in the search. She was a woman who had a powerful
impact on New England culture. She was a very exceptional woman of her
time. Yet she was reviled. I'm personally intrigued by her mystery, and
I'd like to know what the end of her life looked like. To be such a
powerful figure, and then just disappear from the pages of history seems
unjust.
If you would like to offer your theory on what happened to Mary Anne
Moffatt, I invite you to post your ideas to my discussion board on www.fireandroses.com.
I greatly appreciate your interest in my work.
With all my best regards,
Nancy Schultz
Biography
Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Ph.D., is the author of two anthologies, Fear
Itself, Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture and Veil of
Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tails. She is a Professor and
Coordinator of Graduate Studies in English at Salem State College in
Salem, Massachusetts. For a more complete overview of Dr. Schultz'
work, please visit her website at www.FireandRoses.com.
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