Abstract
The sexual activities of priests, female penitents, monks and nuns were to become a major preoccupation in a corpus of erotic anti-Catholic material during the long eighteenth century. A multiplicity of books and pamphlets describing their cavortings was published and reprinted, all taking up similar themes. Some of them addressed the debauched activities of priests; some focused on the seduction of young nuns by secular young men. This material provided many of the first basic elements that would be included as principal features of later English pornography.
This Hermaphrodite Order, [the Gilbertines] made up of both Sexes, did very soon bring forth Fruits worthy of itself; these holy Virgins having got almost all of them big Bellies…. These Nuns to conceal from the World their Infamous Practices, made away secretly their Children; and this was the Reason, why at the time of the Reformation, so many Bones of Young Children were found buried in their Cloisters, and thrown into places where they ease Nature.
Gabriel D’Emiliane, A Short History of Monastical Orders1
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Notes
Gabriel D’Emiliane, A Short Histoiy of Monastical Orders (London, Robert Clarvell, 1693), pp. 133–4.
Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 149.
See Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1992), p. 54. For examples of contemporary anti-Catholic diatribes, see Anon, The Present Danger of Popery (London, J. Howe & B. Bragg, 1703); E. Gibson (ed.), A Preservative against Popery, 3 vols. (London, n.p., 1738).
G. Rude, ‘The Gordon Riots: a study of the rioters and their victims’, TRHS, 5th Series, Vol. VI (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 93–114.
Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in the Eighteenth Century, 1714–80 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 38.
Jeremy Black, The British and The Grand Tour (Stroud, Alan Sutton, 1992).
Jeremy Black, The Grand Tour (London, Croom Helm, 1985), p. 243.
Daniel P. Mannix, The Hell-Fire Club (London, The New English Library, 1959), pp. 11–13. According to Mannix, his tutor wrote about the incident.
John Locke, Travels in France 1675–1679; Peter Heylyn, A Full Relation of Two Journeys; the One into the Main-Land ofFrance; the Other into Some of the Adjacentlslands (1656); Thomas Killigrew, letter of 7 December 1635, all quoted in John Lough, France Observed in the Seventeenth Century by British Travellers (Stockfield, Oriel Press, 1985), pp. 185–7, 190.
Graciela S. Daichman, ‘Misconduct in the Medieval Nunnery: Fact not Fiction’, in Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane and Elisabeth W. Sommer (eds.), That Gentle Strength, Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 1990), pp. 97–117.
Mark Bence-Jones, The Catholic Families (London, Constable, 1992), p. 42.
Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978); Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 89–99; Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (New York, Biblo and Tansen, 1964).
Katherine Rogers, ‘Fantasy and Reality in Fictional Convents of the Eighteenth Century’, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3 (1985), pp. 227–315.
See Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, Routledge, 1985), pp. 150–80, particularly p. 167.
Mr. Edward Stephens, A True Account of the Unaccountable Dealings of Some Roman Catholick Missioners of this Nation. For Seducing Proselytes from the Simplicity of the Gospel to the Roman Mystety of Antiquity (London, J. Downing, 1703), p. 13.
Antonio Gavin, Master-Key to Popery (Dublin, J. Walthoe, 1724), p. 31. The DNB declares Master-Key to be ‘a farrago of lies and libels, interspersed with indecent tales’, although Ashbee believed the accounts to be true, stating, ‘It is full of anecdotes and curious information concerning the church of Rome, for the most part from personal knowledge, and is on this account the more remarkable’; Ashbee, Vol. II, pp. 112–20.
Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Jean Louis Lolme, The History of the Flagellants (London, n.p., 1780), pp. 103–4.
Anon, Miss Cadiere’s Case Very Handsomely Handled in The Ladies Miscellany (London, W. Hinton, 1751).
Anon, The Case of Seduction Being an Account of the late Proceedings at Paris, as well Ecclesiastical; as Civil Against the Reverent Abbe Claudius Nicholas des Rues for committing rapes on 133 Virgins (London, E. Curll, 1726).
Arlette Farge, Subversive Words. Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (London, Polity Press, 1994), pp. 68–9.
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© 2003 Julie Peakman
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Peakman, J. (2003). Anti-Catholic Erotica. In: Mighty Lewd Books. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512573_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512573_7
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