Even before the 1840s Irish potato blight and famine prompted large-scale Irish Catholic migration to the United States, a booming Protestant tract industry had been publishing articles and books highly critical of the Roman Catholic church. Anti-Catholic writing was a large, profitable, and socially disruptive antebellum print genre, and Escaped Nuns opens by showing the direct connection between anti-Catholic public discourse and mob violence. Catholic priests and nuns were often targeted by such publications. Conversely, numerous anti-convent books were inspired by violent events, such as in 1834, when a drunken mob looted and burned the elite Catholic Ursuline convent/girls academy in Charlestown, Massachusetts, shouting “Down with the Pope! Down with Tyranny!” (29). As the convent academy and its library burned, rioting men moved to the Ursuline cemetery and “yanked corpses out of coffins, animating them like puppets, and pulled teeth out as tokens to remember the night” (31). The most popular of the anti-convent narratives was Maria Monk's The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery (1836), a false but purportedly true account of evil doings at a Catholic convent in Montreal. Those alleged activities included outlandish sexual misbehaviors and routine infanticide by “fiends in human shape called Nuns and Priests!” (xiii). Sensational books and articles quickly spread news of the Charlestown convent burning and stoked the nativist anti-Catholic mood; more anti-Catholic violence would sporadically occur in the years ahead, most notably with a Philadelphia convent and school burning during an 1844 riot. This lively and well-researched brief study traces the anti-convent, anti-nun American mood throughout the antebellum period and into the twentieth century.

The central text here is Monk's Awful Disclosures, which became a runaway bestseller. Numerous reprinted editions and hundreds of thousands of copies were sold during the nineteenth century, and editions of the book continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century. Critics for antebellum Protestant periodicals led the public furor that helped turn Awful Disclosures into a publishing sensation. But Awful Disclosures turned out to be a literary hoax, and its author was soon discovered not to be Maria Monk but instead a group of men, whose fraudulent book nevertheless helped advance a virulent campaign against Catholic convents and nuns. Escaped Nuns sets out to understand the appeal of Awful Disclosures and similar published convent exposés of the period, while tracing the history of American antipathy toward nuns, Catholic convents, and convent schools. In addition, Yacovazzi develops an argument that Catholic nuns have long represented a moral hazard for American womanhood, asserting that their “lives surely threatened the sexual, domestic, and child-rearing contributions of women” (58). For example, anti-convent fiction extended fear and loathing of nuns and convent schools by suggesting that “Schools taught by [nuns] who were not themselves wives and mothers threatened the family circle” (70).

American reform efforts of the nineteenth century advanced print discourse about education, femininity, and sexuality that sometimes portrayed convents in negative ways. In this way, American writers stoked fears of nuns among Protestants that had been simmering for centuries. The antislavery movement created additional energy directed against convents, according to Yacovazzi, who observes that abolitionists, anti-Mormon writers, and anti-convent crusaders all shared similar concerns about human captivity, especially the purported captivity of women. For instance, “Abolitionists presented slavery as a threat to female purity, the marriage institution, and happing hopes, citing the rape of female slaves and the harrowing experience of family separation through sale” (xv). Similarly, anti-convent writers, who used unsubstantiated claims of female captivity and created alarm among middle-class Protestants who were confronted with the nun's life as the anathema to female virtue, marriage, and domesticity.

Recent decades have produced a wealth of scholarship on anti-Catholicism in antebellum America, and Yacovazzi recognizes that her work is in debt to the scholarship of Jenny Franchot, Marie Anne Pagliarini, David S. Reynolds, and Tracy Fessenden. Escaped Nuns is conceived more narrowly than these earlier studies, however, and focuses exclusively on nuns and convents as targets of the broader American culture of anti-Catholicism. At stake for Yacovazzi are the ways that these women and their convent homes (and the sensational reactions they caused readers) inform us about “American culture, gender ideals, and notions of nationhood” (xxii).

Along the way, Escaped Nuns reanimates forgotten aspects of the nineteenth-century commercial publishing scene, with its high-minded salesmanship and Christian proprieties sometimes masking the tempting financial returns of salacious books. The secretive arrangements made by respectable Methodist publishers like the Harper Brothers to bring out Awful Disclosures under a fake publisher's imprint are a prime example. So as to avoid sullying their reputation with a sensational, nearly pornographic anti-Catholic book brimming with sexual deviancy, infanticide, torture, and religious malfeasance, the Harper brothers discreetly outsourced its pornographically inclined and profitable anti-convent bestseller. Imitations of Maria Monk's convent exposé followed in subsequent years, thus establishing the anti-convent thriller as an important staple of the antebellum print marketplace. Even more interestingly, Yacovazzi traces the close connections between anti-convent tracts, anti-Mormon books, nativist or Know-Nothing tracts, city mystery novels, and anti-slavery narratives: genres with a strong stake in evangelical Christianity that also advanced sexist, reactionary views of women's role in family, marriage, and culture.

Notable among the compelling insights presented in Escaped Nuns is the proposition that while sensationalism was on offer in many of anti-convent books and helped to explain their popularity, the topic of nuns as alternative identities for modern professional women may have been equally compelling for American readers. While fiction writers exploited nuns’ perceived otherness and victimhood, during a period when “separate spheres” gender ideology was ascendant and working to delimit women's life and career options, actual Catholic nuns supplemented their religious work with valuable and lasting contributions to American society as “nurses, teachers, and administrators” so that “In some ways, [nuns] were the first career women” (10).