UNRECORDED EDITION - NOT IN ESTC. An edition, also printed by J. Raymond, dated 1755 is recorded in ESTC at BL, University of Bristol and National Library of Australia only. OCLC adds a copy at Columbia.
“…under a penitential Habit, cherish the Love of Pleasures“: a supposed exposé of the scandalous lives of the Capuchin Monks.
The anonymous author claims to have been an “Alms-gatherer” with an Order and thus privy to the secret machinations of the monks. He claims, “I could not persuade myself that Persons, whom I formerly regarded as Angels in human Form, were Traitors to their Friends, Whore-mongers, Adulterers; in short, were the most pernicious Instruments the Devil uses to place Souls on the Precipice of eternal Damnation” (p.10)
The author recounts various scandalous activities including isolating young women, “near a Bed-side, into a Closet or Anti-chamber, to examine her Conscience” (p.13); and extort young women by encouraging them to confess the “secrets of their heart” before using this information to “prey” on them like “wolves.” (p.18). He also recounts how - along with a monk - he visited the house of an important man who was away but found “his Wife in a Negligee-dress” and proceeded to have lunch with her (with “excellent wine”) and later he “transported her [the wife] into a Closet at a small Distance, where there was a bed of Repose…” (p.25). The author - left alone with a housemaid - finds she too is soon “wantonly” embracing him (p.25).
The work continues in this way with the monks supposedly living a grand lascivious life under the cloak of respectability. Presumably the primary intention of the work was as an anti-Catholic slur but must also have been seen as a piece of cheap titillation disguised behind a seemingly bland description of a religious order.
“Memoirs of the Voluptuous Conduct of the Capuchins is a better record of the fusion of French sensibility with English roguery than some more famous prose compositions, for it achieves a fluent if not perfect mixture of adventure with reminiscence. With its numerous and somewhat disconnected episodes, anecdotes and interpolated stories, the work goes further than the more familiar masterpieces of Henry Fielding, Eliza Haywood or Tobias Smollett in revealing the links joining such under-discussed forms as medieval Goliardic satire or Chaucerian or Boccaccian storytelling with the psychologically complex eighteenth-century novel.” (Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part II Vol 3, edited by Alexander Pettit (2004).
