The Monk

The Monk is a Gothic novel by the English writer Matthew Gregory Lewis, published in 1796 and subtitled A Romance.

The book is set in Madrid and in the monastery of the Capuchins, whose most celebrated member is Ambrosio, a monk famous for his sermons and his virtue. The novel follows the unravelling of that reputation: ambition, and then desire, take him from the breaking of his vows into obsession and murder, and the ground of the book is the difference between what he preaches and what he does. Around him Lewis assembles a large cast of characters who are also in the grip of appetites they cannot manage, and the plot uses the machinery of the Gothic, the crypt, the disguise and the supernatural, at a pitch that made the novel notorious when it appeared. Lewis wrote it while he was a very young man, and it remains one of the books that defined the form.

The novel was published in three volumes and was later revised by the author in response to criticism.