In writing his scurrilous account of the convent in Lisbon, Robinson drew from standard anti-clerical and misogynistic stereotypes. He had a general distrust of men and women attempting to maintain platonic relationships, and, like other writers, was profoundly suspicious of the Catholic doctrine of clerical celibacy. Not surprisingly, his account underscored the hypocrisy he encountered at the Lisbon convent to detail how nuns and their confessor repeatedly violated their vows of poverty and chastity. An explanatory poem is keyed to the illustrations on the title page. For instance, the scene he reveals by drawing back a curtain is described in the poem: "(F) So on a bed they wanton clip and kisse, / There's nothing in a Nunnery amisse. / (G) Then doth a banquet on a Table stand, / And from the bed hee leads her by the hand; / Whereat they eate, carouse, and kisse againe; / And, in a word, doe no delight refraine." In the body of his text, Robinson went so far as to claim that he had discovered a burial place for the nuns' illegitimate offspring on the convent grounds, implying that the Lisbon nuns may have added infanticide to their list of crimes. Robinson also argued that priests manipulated nuns' vows of obedience in order to rationalize their immoral conduct.
For information on early modern English convents in exile on the Continent, consult Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993); Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (London: Longmans, Green, & Company, 1914); and Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
The Folger Library's second copy of STC 21124 is a defective copy of the 1623 edition, in which the first gathering (or signature) of pages has been added from the 1637 edition. The title page shown here is among the materials from the later edition that are bound in with the first. Thomas Robinson, who is shown pulling back the curtain in the lower right hand panel of the engraving, wrote this exposé of convent life. He alleged that the confessor to the English nuns at Lisbon tricked him into leaving his profession as a sailor to become "a holy Brother and Masse priest" in the convent, where he lived for two and a half years.
