On 11 August 1834 a Protestant mob attacked the Irish quarter in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and burned down the Ursuline Convent. In America as elsewhere many Protestants harbored deep suspicions about what went on behind the walls of convents, or "priests' prisons." The celibacy practiced by priests and nuns seemed unnatural arid certain to provoke immoral acts. One Protestant rioter said of the convent he helped to destroy: "the institution was a bad one; . . . the bishops and priests pretended to live without wives, but the nuns were kept to supply the deficiency in that particular." This sentiment found popular expression in a new genre of anticonvent literature that included Rebecca Reed's Six Montis hi a Convent, an expose of convent life ostensibly written by a young girl who had escaped after three years'of captivity and abuse. Reed's book sold ten thousand copies in Boston in its first week of publication...