The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis [199]
13. I doubt they are murderers: “Doubt” is used in the archaic sense here; the meaning is “I fear they are murderers” (not “I don’t think that they are murderers”).
CHAPTER IX
1. Epigraph: Robert Blair, The Grave 11.431–37.
2. hostess: mistress of a lodging establishment.
3. caro sposo: Italian, dear husband.
4. calendar: calendar of days dedicated to the various saints on which rituals or festivals would be observed in their honor.
5. St. James of Compostella: See Chapter I, note for
p. 17, LL. 14–15. St. James’s relics were housed in the town of Compostela, in northwestern Spain.
6. Cain: the firstborn son of Adam. Cain murdered his brother Abel, and his punishment was to wander the earth and to have no crops bear fruit for him.
7. deal: boards of fir or pine.
8. eat flesh upon Fridays: Roman Catholics were supposed to avoid eating meat on Fridays. Fish was not considered to be meat, and some argued that fowl was not meat, either.
9. gallician: a type of chicken, bred in the Spanish province of Galicia.
10. ave-maria: Latin, Hail Mary. A prayer invoking the aid of the Virgin Mary.
11. temporal: temporary.
CHAPTER X
1. Epigraph: William Cowper (1731–1800), Charity, II.254–59.
2. suppositious: imagined, fictitious.
3. St. Lucia: Sicilian martyr whose persecutions included having her eyes put out and who was miraculously able to put them back in again.
4. St. Catherine: Alexandrian martyr. She was put on a spiked wheel that was supposed to kill her, but when it broke, she was beheaded.
5. St. Genevieve: See Chapter VIII, note for p. 234, L. 30.
CHAPTER XI
1. Epigraph: Matthew Prior (1664–1721), Solomon, 525–28, 531–32, 539–44.
2. crow: crowbar.
3. men have died … love”: Shakespeare, As You Like It, IV.i.96–98: “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
CHAPTER XII
1. Epigraph: James Thomson (1700–1748), The Castle of Indolence, II.1xxviii.1–4.
2. the Holy Office: the Inquisition. See Chapter IV, note for p. 147, L. 35.
3. Grand Inquisitor: the director of the court of Inquisition.
4. Auto da Fé: public execution of one (or many) condemned by the Inquisition.
6. sulphurous fogs … hoarseness: John Dryden (1631–1700), King Arthur, II.i: “I had a voice in Heav’n, ere Sulph’rous Streams / Had damp’d it to a hoarseness.”
7. Sierra Morena: mountain range in Spain, south of Madrid.
Suggested Reading
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Bruhm, Steven. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.
Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Clery, E. J. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800. Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Conger, Syndy M. Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans: An Interpretive Study of the Influence of German Literature on Two Gothic Novels. New York: Arno Press, 1980.
Frank, Frederick S., ed. Special Issue on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Romanticism on the Net 8 (Nov. 1997) http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mirrors/romnet/guest2.html.
Haggerty, George E. Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.
Howard, Jacqueline. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Irwin, Joseph James. M. G. “Monk” Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1976.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
MacDonald, David Lorne. Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Parreaux, André. The Publication of the Monk: A Literary Event 1796–1798. Paris: M. Didier, 1960.
Peck, Louis F. A Life of Matthew G. Lewis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day. Revised ed. 2 vols.