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Fire & Roses

The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834

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About The Book

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.
After battering down the front door, the men destroyed icons, smashed pianos, hurled the bishop's library into a bonfire, ransacked the possessions of both sisters and students, and finally burned the imposing building to the ground. Not satisfied with this orgy of vandalism, they returned the following night and tore the lovely gardens up by the roots. The ruins sat on Mount Benedict, a hill overlooking Boston Harbor, for the next fifty years. The arsonists' ringleader, a brawny bricklayer named John Buzzell, became a folk hero. The nuns scattered, and their proud and feisty mother superior, Mary Anne Moffatt, who battled the working-class rioters and Church authorities, faded mysteriously into history.
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. She provides a glimpse into nineteenth-century Boston and into an elite boarding school for young women, mostly the daughters of wealthy Protestants, vividly dissecting the period's roiling tensions over class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education. Although the roots of these conflicts were in the Puritan migration to America, it was ultimately the mob's perverse fantasies about cloistered women -- in an independent community -- that erupted in a combustible night of violence.
By unearthing the buried truth and bringing alive these fascinating characters, Nancy Schultz tells a gripping story of prejudice and pride, courage and cowardice in early nineteenth-century America that not only restores a clouded chapter in the country's history but also has a poignant resonance for our own times.

About The Author

Product Details

  • Publisher: Free Press (October 17, 2000)
  • Length: 336 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743212564

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Raves and Reviews

Andrew Greeley author of The Catholic Imagination The burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834 is one of the high points of anti-Catholic bigotry in the United States. The story of this terrible deed involves not only the tragedy of the destruction of the convent and its school but also the tragedy of the brave, independent woman who founded it. Mary Anne Moffatt was driven out of Boston by the bishop and out of the Ursuline Order by hostile colleagues. Then she disappeared from the face of the earth. Boston bigotry hated not only Catholics but also strong women.

Joan D. Hedrick Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography In this impeccably researched and lively account, Nancy Lusignan Schultz explores how class resentment, ignorance, and fear led to the destruction of an institution, the first of its kind in New England. Led by a fearless and headstrong Ursuline nun who became a thorn in the side not only of the Protestants, but also of her own bishop, the Mount Benedict Academy and convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts became a lightning rod. It is hard to think of a book that so successfully dramatizes the anti-Catholicism of the 1830s.

Raymond L. Flynn Mayor of Boston, 1984-1993 and U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, 1993-1997 After reading Fire & Roses, a provocative and riveting book about a revealing period in Boston's history, I must ask the question, how did Boston's leaders of the time, these so-called proper Bostonians, deserve their title? Why was Boston called the 'Hub of the Universe' and the 'Athens of America'? Terms like 'bigot' and 'virulent anti-Catholic' seem more like it. As Nancy Schultz rightly makes clear, in many ways this story of the burning of the Charlestown convent in 1834 remains the story of today's America.

William M. Bulger President, University of Massachusetts Professor Schultz skillfully recalls a turbulent and troubling moment in Boston's history. This is a scholarly and carefully researched work, as gripping and galvanizing as a good detective novel. Fire & Roses offers a vivid depiction of an event that deserves to be remembered.

Thomas H. O'Connor University Historian, Boston College, and author of Boston Catholics Fire & Roses is an extremely well-written, carefully researched, and utterly absorbing account of the nativist attack on the Ursuline convent in 1834. Nancy Schultz has peeled away the layers surrounding the scandalous event to reveal the anti-Catholic bigotry of a Boston community where reaction against an educated and strong-minded group of religious women led to an outbreak of senseless violence.

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