Monk in the Middle: The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery and the Making of Catholic Identity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the controversy surrounding the publication in 1836 of Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery , a sensational exposé of life in a Montreal convent supposedly written by a former nun. Previous scholarship on the Monk episode has focused principally on anti-Catholic nativism and on the Awful Disclosures ' place in the larger genre of antebellum convent tales. This study will provide a new interpretation of the controversy surrounding Monk's book by demonstrating its usefulness for historians seeking to understand how Catholics apprehended their position in the American community. Catholics frequently used the Awful Disclosures to stake a claim as authentic Americans and often inverted anti-Catholic rhetoric to suit their political and social needs. Through their response to the Monk episode, Catholic leaders effectively redeployed anti-Catholic rhetoric to undermine the claims of Monk and her supporters, ultimately forging a distinctive form of Catholic anti-Protestantism and serving with their sectarian foes as partners, perhaps unwittingly, in a common antebellum project of defining and reasserting patriarchy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".