"Conventual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her conventual bringing up, of the rich and well placed Cecil; while Bluebell, to whom luxury was unknown, longed for wealth to take her into a sphere where taste was not starved by economy, nor all her horizon bounded by weekly bills. But in both cases their air castles were to ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... was a British community, first established in the French capital in Cromwell's time. It has now been removed, and its site, the Rue St. Victor, has undergone complete transformation. In 1817, however, it was in high repute among conventual educational establishments. To this retreat Aurore was consigned and there spent more than two years, an untroubled time she has spoken of as in many respects the happiest of her life. There is certainly nothing more delightful in her memoirs than the vivid picture ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a new kind of prison was inspected by her; this was a conventual institution and refuge for female penitents, under the control of the nuns of the order of St. Charles, who to the three ordinary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, added that of converting ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... the discerning eye, the purity would not be absolute. The careful searcher might detect, in the virgin soil, the first faint traces of an unexpected vein. In that conventual existence visits were exciting events; and, as the Duchess had many relatives, they were not infrequent; aunts and uncles would often appear from Germany, and cousins too. When the Princess was fourteen she was delighted by the arrival of a couple of boys from Wurtemberg, the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of this fine conventual house on the heights of Monsanto, above the suburb of Alcantara, where the Adjutant-General had taken up his quarters, Captain Tremayne stood a moment considering the panorama spread to his gaze, from the red-brown roofs of Lisbon on his left—that city which ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... stands the Nuns' House: a venerable brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: 'Seminary for Young Ladies. Miss Twinkleton.' The house- front is so old and worn, and the brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has reminded ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... tenants being elderly widows, widowers, bachelors or spinsters. There were, however, a few married couples, who, if they preferred it, could cook their own meals at home. For single, middle-class women here was a refuge answering to the conventual boarding ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... ask you as one who, I am sure, has learned to love Adele, and who, I hope, has not wholly given over a friendly feeling toward me. Consider well, however, that the mother is now one of the most rigid of Catholics; I learn that she is even thinking of conventual life. I know her spirit and temper well enough to be sure that, if she were to meet the child again which she believes lost, it would be with an impetuosity of feeling and a devotion that would absorb every aim of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... The stream bore us along where it would. We were carried through refectories, bare and crumbless; into cells over whose doors the conventual name of the occupant was written. Thus it was that I, with others, was forced into Sister Magdalen's cell. On her couch lay Gisborne, pale unto death, but not dead. By his side was a cup of water, and a small morsel of mouldy bread, which he had pushed out of his reach, and ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... century was in Scotland as elsewhere the great church-building period, and the number of churches in the south and east that reflect the Norman movement is very large. All the large ones were conventual. Parish churches of the period are generally small and aisleless—the most of them being single oblong chambers, with an eastern chancel, sometimes with an eastern apse, and occasionally with a western ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... In the conventual buildings attached to this church are the state archives of Venice. We did not see them, but they are said to number millions of documents. "They are the records of centuries of the most watchful, observant ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... them from those who enter the convents, and for baptisms, burials, and masses for the dead. The enslaving, enervating, and retarding effects of Roman Catholicism are nowhere better seen than in Lower Canada, where the priests exercise despotic authority. They have numerous and wealthy conventual establishments, both at Quebec and Montreal, and several Jesuit and other seminaries. The Irish emigrants constitute the great body of Romanists in Upper Canada; in the Lower Province there are more than ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... her new faith grew confirmed, Leila now inclined herself earnestly to those pictures of the sanctity and calm of the conventual life which Inez delighted to draw. In the reaction of her thoughts, and her despondency of all worldly happiness, there seemed, to the young maiden, an inexpressible charm in a solitude which was to release her for ever from human ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the dissolution of religious houses under Henry VIII., Peterborough was one of the most magnificent abbeys, and, having been selected as the seat of one of the new bishoprics, the buildings were preserved entire. In the civil wars, the Lady Chapel and several conventual buildings were pulled down and the materials sold. At present the cathedral is a regular cruciform structure of Norman character, remarkable for the solidity ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... windows, and the whole building bathed in a flood of most mellow light. There are in England many churches larger than that of Saint Sepulchre, and fault has been found with its proportions, because the roof is lower than in some other conventual buildings of its size. Yet, for all this, it is doubtful whether architecture has ever produced a composition more ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... clergy, religious, or people to enter. In consequence of this event, an impenetrable veil of secrecy long hung over the place where the body had been laid. In 1818, Pope Pius VII gave permission to the General of the Conventual Minors to make researches under the high altar. Many previous researches had been made; they grew to such gigantic proportions that the foundations of the massive structure were partly undermined. To prevent the ruin of the basilica at Assisi, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... old abbey little remains; but there is a cavern, formerly in communication with the conventual buildings, which contains sculptures cut upon the rock in relief, which are a great curiosity to ecclesiologists. They are the work of the monks, who used this old quarry as a chapel, and, it would ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Aymeric d'Hebrard, was the Bishop of a see in Spain, and he brought thence Moorish slaves to cultivate the land with which he had endowed his community of a hundred nuns. Down to the Revolution most of the daughters of the nobility in the Quercy were educated here. Little is now left of the conventual building; but the church contains architectural details of much interest, and the tombs of those irreconcilable enemies of the English, Bertrand de Cardaillac, Bishop of Cahors, and the Marquis de Cardaillac—the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of her conventual period drew nigh Eileen resolved never to go back to the spotted world, but to ask her father to pay her dowry as Bride to the Church, and she had just placed in Marcelle's niche the letter informing Lieutenant Doherty of her call to the higher ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of the Conventual house in which he had so lately spent hours of intense religious happiness closed upon him and possessed him. He was not to marry. He was reserved for the higher counsels, the Counsels of Perfection. The face and talk of his friend Brierly, who was so soon ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... religious speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would have been Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the conventual discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making total shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's Land of a religious epic only by the lucky help of Satan and ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... nearly inseparable from the conventual state. Set apart from the rest of the world, they, from their little world, are too apt to look down with contempt which may be mingled with envy, or modified by pity, but must be unsuited ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Peterborough, "finding that great establishment almost entirely destitute of relics, he returned to his own cathedral, and carried off with him the flagstones immediately surrounding the sacred spot, with which he formed two altars in the conventual church of his new appointment, besides two vases of blood and part of Becket's clothing." Benedict, though a member of the house and probably within the precincts, was not actually present at the Archbishop's murder. Besides his building operations (he built nearly all the ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... to write myself if I had the time to live it as he has done. He promised that he would show us a piece of the old Roman wall, but he showed us ever so much more, beginning with the fore court of the conventual church of Santa Paula, where we found the afternoon light waiting to illumine for us with its tender caress the Luca della Robbia-like colored porcelain figures of the portal and the beautiful octagon tower staying a moment before ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... women are kept in great seclusion: religion and oeconomy form a principal part of conventual acquirements, and the natural vanity of the sex is left to develope itself without the aid of authority, or instillation by precept—yet, when released from this sober tuition, manners take the ascendant here as in England, and a woman commences at her marriage the aera ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... acolyth[obs3], acolothyst[obs3], acolyte, altar boy; chorister. [Roman Catholic priesthood] Pope, Papa, pontiff, high priest, cardinal; ancient flamen[obs3], flamen[obs3]; confessor, penitentiary; spiritual director. cenobite, conventual, abbot, prior, monk, friar, lay brother, beadsman[obs3], mendicant, pilgrim, palmer; canon regular, canon secular; Franciscan, Friars minor, Minorites; Observant, Capuchin, Dominican, Carmelite; Augustinian[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful—beats even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet's story they seem tenacious to a degree, insisting on the fact—giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love. I have brought away a few pieces of the granite, to give to my daughter and my nieces. Of the other marvels of this city, paintings, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the Observance here referred to would appear to be that at Ferrara, founded by Duke Hercules I., father of the Marchioness of Mantua. The name of "Observance" was given to those conventual establishments where the rules of monastic life were scrupulously observed, however rigorous they might be. The monastery of the Observance at Ferrara belonged to the Franciscan order, reformed by the Pope ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... he one day became aware that he was stretched on a bed in a chamber somewhat luxuriously furnished, and tended by a woman advanced in years, who wore a gown of russet, and a wimple which gave her a conventual appearance. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... her longing to embrace the life of the cloister. Futile for a time were the parental arguments, unfruitful every effort! Anne Genevieve would not consort with worldlings, persisted in her distaste for mundane pleasures, and continued to cherish persistently her desire for conventual seclusion. At length the princess, in 1636, having resolved upon the adoption of more energetic measures, suddenly ordered her daughter to make preparations for appearing at a Court ball, and that, too, in three days. With what despair did the young princess hear the cruel sentence! What affliction, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... much contributed to the completion of the cathedral at Quimper. The square is surrounded by an interlaced circular arcade, forming trefoiled pointed arches, all in excellent preservation. The access to the cloisters is through the conventual building, now a private house and garden, the proprietor ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... in the woods and those who moved about in bands, frequenting rest houses. In the time of the Buddha the wandering life was a reality but later most monks became residents in monasteries. Already in the Vinaya we seem to breathe the atmosphere of large conventual establishments where busy superintendents see to the lodging and discipline of crowds of monks, and to the distribution of the gifts made by pious laymen. But the Buddha himself knew the value of forests and plant life for calming and quickening the mind. "Here are trees," he would say to his ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Lumley had ever seen in that house, so invisibly were the wheels of the domestic machine carried on) was leaning on her broom, "swallowing with open mouth a footman's news." It was as if, with the first slackening of the rigid rein, human nature broke loose from the conventual stillness in which it had ever paced its peaceful ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of it, the fourth being that which opens to the water. Two of these, that on our left and that in front of us as we approach from the canal, are so small that they might well be taken for the out-houses of the farm, though the first is a conventual building, and the other aspires to the title of the "Palazzo publico," both dating as far back as the beginning of the fourteenth century; the third, the octagonal church of Santa Fosca, is far more ancient than either, yet hardly on a larger scale. Though the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the sick and assisted the dying." (Ibid., p. 374.) There were five thousand priests in the temples of Mexico. They confessed and absolved the sinners, arranged the festivals, and managed the choirs in the churches. They lived in conventual discipline, but were allowed to marry; they practised flagellation and fasting, and prayed at regular hours. There were great preachers and exhorters among them. There were also convents into which females were admitted. ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... hung upon the very air of that apartment in which so much of my early youth was spent. And it had, too, an odour that is peculiarly full of character, the smell which is never absent from a sacristy and rarely from conventual chambers; a smell difficult to define, faint and yet tenuously pungent, and like no other smell in all the world that I have ever known. It is a musty odour, an odour of staleness which perhaps an open ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... forward many political considerations, which coincided with those arising out of religious doctrines, to make his measures intelligible to his people, and consequently easy to himself. Among the various plausible reasons which were urged against the continued existence of the conventual houses, one of the most likely to appeal to the practical sense of the multitude was the misuse of the resources with which they had been endowed. While it was admitted that in their earlier days they had ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... began seriously to reflect on the unpleasantness of her situation; the threat of a conventual seclusion sounded harshly to her ear. She fancied it would be more advantageous to society that her good offices should continue in requisition, than that they should be for ever lost by an untimely ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Ursula, to give her for the last time her conventual name, exchanged her stole, or loose upper garment, for the more succinct cloak and hood of a horseman. She led the way through divers passages, studiously complicated, until the Lady of Berkely, with ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one example—and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the French and German feudal lord had the right of cuissage, or, in plain English, the embraces of his serf-retainer's ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... she could have wished, and when she would have slept or maybe frolicked with him, he recounted to her the life of Christ and the preachments of Fra Nastagio or the Complaint of Mary Magdalene or the like. Meantime there returned home from Paris a monk hight Dom[164] Felice, Conventual[165] of San Pancrazio, who was young and comely enough of person, keen of wit and a profound scholar, and with him Fra Puccio contracted a strait friendship. And for that this Dom Felice right well resolved ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that is set upon it! Here we have evidence of it painfully wrought out by the hands of rude Indian artisans. The ancient bells have been carried away into unknown parts; the owl hoots in the belfry; the hills are shown of their conventual tenements; while the wind and the rain and a whole heartless company of iconoclasts have it ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... Protestantism as it is reflected in the Church of England, and who has made such earnest but as yet fruitless endeavors to have a bill passed for the periodical visitation and inspection of the monastic and conventual institutions of Great Britain. Her brother, Isaac P. Evans, still occupies that responsible position, and resides in the old homestead. The country around Mrs. Lewes's early home is rich in historic associations. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... were a company of some seven or eight, with an occasional neighbour or so for visiters, and used to sit up late in our friars' dresses, drinking burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not, out of the skull-cup, and all sorts of glasses, and buffooning all round the house, in our conventual garments. Matthews always denominated me 'the Abbot,' and never called me by any other name in his good humours, to the day of his death. The harmony of these our symposia was somewhat interrupted, a few days after our assembling, by Matthews's threatening to throw —— out of a window, in consequence ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... during four years, for royal displeasure in those days did not confine itself merely to lack of court favor. Reduced to great poverty, the composer who had been the favorite of the rich and great for so many years knew often the actual pangs of hunger, and eked out his subsistence by writing conventual psalms, as payment for the broken food doled ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... which the young lady told me she had learned to make at the nunnery of the Encarnacion at Popayan. She then confided to me that she had once intended to be a nun, but, after a little experience of a conventual existence before she had taken the vows, thought better of it, and had returned to her friends; adding, "And perhaps some day I may accept a husband, should a suitable ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... notice of the ingenious system of conventual prayers: after the prayers purely vocal like these, came mental prayer, personal petitions, stimulated and set a-going by the very ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... of physical and mental well-being such as can be bought only by an early rising, an inconsiderable breakfast, a long ride in the warmth of Tuscan mid-May, an abundant and repairing repast, taken, amid sweet conventual coolness, in company which leaves nothing to wish for beyond it, they went forth to spend the time that must be granted the horses for rest before the return ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... certainly come of the Setons of Windygoul. I wish you could have seen how prettily she blushed at her own ignorance. Amidst her noble and elegant manners, there is now and then a little touch of bashfulness and conventual rusticity, if I may call it so, that makes her quite enchanting. You see at once the rose that had bloomed untouched amid the chaste precincts of the cloister, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... numerous. These were probably expensive, so that the poorer classes were virtually debarred from the advantages of learning. The instruction of Catholic children was in the hands of the clergy, and it may be that in some of the conventual schools a certain number were admitted free of expense or at reduced rates. It would appear that some of the young ladies were sent to English boarding-schools, if we may judge by advertisements in which the advantages of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... there with her, you'll feel sorry for it; she'll become a religious monomaniac, and go in for High Church, auricular confession, and an empty stomach on Fridays. She's got a turn that way, remember. A conventual education in a High Church school in England isn't a very healthy preparation for a girl who afterwards marries a hulking, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... for themselves the garments in which they wished to be dressed before being laid in the coffin (indeed, some people had their last habiliments prepared long before the approach of their end); and the pious, more especially of the female sex, affected conventual vestments, men generally preferring their official attire. That Chopin chose for his grave-clothes his dress-suit, his official attire, in which he presented himself to his audiences in concert-hall and salon, cannot but be regarded as characteristic of the man, and is perhaps ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... cause: how much of the heroism, or other high quality, of their rejection has really been the growth of what they reject? Bruno, the escaped monk, is still a monk: his philosophy, impious as it might seem to some, a new religion. He came forth well fitted by conventual influences to play upon men as he was played upon. A challenge, a war-cry, an alarum; everywhere he seemed to be the creature of some subtly materialized spiritual force, like that of the old Greek ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... was deemed to run over upon her maid, and a young woman who wore the semi-conventual garb of those persons was safe from insult, and sure of help in time ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... new churches has also given rise to the production, in more than one semi-conventual establishment, of beautiful and effective works, such as the altar-cloth at Durham, and those at Canterbury and Worcester. Such works have revived the impulse of artistic and ecclesiastical taste, and in many small churches we have seen ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... rapidly rising and falling strain which is so full of pathos yet so adaptable to mirth—"and other honest solaces of grete pleasance and disport," the sound of trampling feet and angry voices broke upon the conventual stillness outside and the cheerful talk of the friendly group within. The King was taken at a disadvantage, apparently without even a gentleman of his Court near him, nothing but his wife and her ladies lingering for a last moment of pleasant ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... Indian neophytes were in no way bettered by the wealth they created. Their condition was one of pure slavery—the monks being their masters, and very often hard taskmasters they proved themselves—living in fine conventual style upon the sweat and labour of their brown-skinned converts. The only return made by them to the Indians was to teach the latter those trades, by the practice of which they themselves might be benefited, and that was their sole motive for civilising ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... says that "it was a common practice to grant under the conventual seal to benefactors and others a brotherly participation in the spiritual good works of the convent, and in their ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... St. Francis, Elias of Cortona, sprang up a branch of the order, made up of former members who wished a less strict rule, and those who wished to preserve the strict rule were persecuted. The members of the relaxed branch became known as "Conventuals" or "Minors Conventual" in contradistinction to the Friars Minor (or Minorites), who are known also as "Observants" or "Observantines." Three great branches sprang later from the Friars Minor: Reformed Minors, founded in 1419, by St. Bernardino of Siena; the Recollects, founded in 1500, by John of Guadalupe; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... and of all the East; and escorted by a priest and the shaykh we travelled by way of a short cut and terrible descent of three hours. It was no better than a goat-path. We at last arrived at Diman, the summer residence of the Patriarch, a conventual yet fortress-like building on an eminence commanding a view of the whole of his jurisdiction. We were charmed with the reception which his Beatitude gave us. We were received by two bishops and endless retainers. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... mind that the subject had long been a familiar decoration of conventual refectories before the time when Lionardo brought his profound knowledge of external human nature, and his unsurpassed powers of executive art, to bear on a subject which had before been treated in the dry, conventional, inanimate manner of the Middle Ages. The leading features of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... to garden until we came to a large terrace full of flowers, which surrounded the conventual buildings and commanded a magnificent ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... spirituality of life, fitly crowned and perfected her intellectual force and brilliant gifts. Although from the customs of the time the Marchesa lived much in convents, she never, in any sense, save that of her fervent piety, lived the conventual life. Her noble gifts linked her always to the larger activities, and her gifts and rank invested her with certain demands and responsibilities that she could not evade. She was one of the messengers of life, and her place as ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... which thou reignest king. POET of the present age, and of aeons yet to be, In this the chosen homestead of those who would be free— Free from feudal usage, from courtly sham and cant; Free from kingcraft, priestcraft, with all their rot and rant! PROPHET of a race redeemed from all conventual thrall, Espouser of equal sexship in body, soul, and all! PRIEST of a ransom'd people, endued with clearer light; A newer dispensation for those of psychic sight. We greet thee as our mentor, we meet thee as our friend, And to thy ministrations devotedly we lend The aid that comes from ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... the conventual buildings but a few scanty patches of masonry. The history of the Abbey was not a very edifying one and, although every effort was made to save the house at the Dissolution, chiefly by the exhibition of the imposing royal charters of foundation ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... ceased in her twentieth year, and it is even said that she had at that age a strong desire to enter a convent. Though the wish was not gratified, she lived from that time in a retirement almost conventual, avoiding all society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. The most valuable result of her labours was the Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventu italiana, a work of great merit, which was published at Milan in 1748. The first ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... I believe, be explained in the circumstance that "ten" and "four," in horary reckoning, were convertible terms. The old Roman method of naming the hours, wherein noon was the sixth, was long preserved, especially in conventual establishments: and I have no doubt that the English idiomatic phrase "o'clock" originated in the necessity for some distinguishing mark between hours "of the clock" reckoned from midnight, and hours of the day reckoned from sunrise, or more frequently from six A.M. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... their days, and devoting themselves to a certain routine of strict forms and ceremonies, they would very soon come to loggerheads, and do more harm to themselves and others than they could possibly do good. The wisest men in all the nations of Europe have seen the necessity of abolishing the conventual system, and I cannot suppose that English men and women are more likely to be holy and immaculate than the people of other countries. The whole thing is an illusion; and I am very sure that the system, if, as according to the wishes of some, it should again prevail ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... quarters. By some astonishing train of reasoning, frequent in persons in a state of excitement and self-deception, they had persuaded themselves that Mark Gardner's return to his evil courses had been for want of a monastery to receive him; and their tendency to romance about conventual institutions had been exaggerated by the present state of Emma's spirits, which gave her a desire to retire from the world, as well as a distaste to the projects in which she had lately given her false lover but too large a share. 'Peace dwells ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her, and took refuge-sometimes with his sisters, for, like Charles Lamb, Pater was "Conventual" in his taste—and sometimes with the "original" of Marius the Epicurean. But what matter where he fled—he who always followed the "shady side" of the road? He has not only managed to escape, himself, with all his "Boxes of Alabaster," into the sanctuary of the Ivory Tower, that even Oxford ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... braziers, reminded Odo of the narrow elongated saints squeezed into the niches of a church-door. The old Marchioness wore the high coif and veil of the previous century; the aunts, who, as Odo afterwards learned, were canonesses of a noble order, were habited in a semi-conventual dress, with crosses hanging on their bosoms; and none spoke but when the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... wealthy and winning, Eloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round, wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often expressed his film of dissatisfaction with the conventual results, and had planned an attack on matters of more solid learning; but, tricksy as a sprite, Eloise had escaped his designs, broken through his regulations, implored, just out of shackles, a year's gambol in liberty, and had made herself too charming to be resisted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... Chaumont. Built upon the highest hill of the shore, it frames the broad summit with its lofty walls and its enormous towers; high slate steeples increase their loftiness, and give to the building that conventual air, that religious form of all our old chateaux, which casts an aspect of gravity over the landscape of most of our provinces. Black and tufted trees surround this ancient mansion, resembling from afar the plumes that encircled the hat of King Henry. At the foot of the hill, connected with the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... weakening the sense of personal responsibility in those Christian women who are not thus wholly set apart to charitable and spiritual work? Can they be multiplied without danger of introducing into Protestant communions the evils of the conventual life? Are there modern instances of safe and successful organizations? What good have they achieved, and what further good do they promise? In what relation should such organizations stand to the authority and fostering care of the Church? What should be their scope, spirit, methods? What ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... penny-a-lining account is, that there were exercises and disputations in Greek, Latin, and other languages! The official records, however, show that the College at that very time had sunk into a convent and conventual school. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... was impossible to move her. Whether she had really resolved before on the conventual life, or whether she feared to separate the two friends, no one knew. From that time neither O'Donnell nor Jim Rooney was seen at the white house, and in the harvest-time Ellen, as she said she would, entered St. Mary's Convent. Jim Rooney never ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... to common sense. The church authorities wanted to bring the order into practical use, and suspected it of the heresies of Florus. It therefore split into "conventuals," who conformed to the methods of conventual life, and the "spirituals," who clung to the doctrines and rules of the founder. The latter became "observantines" (1368) and "recollects" (1487).[453] The two branches hated each other and fought on all occasions. In 1275 the spirituals were treated as heretics, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... nevertheless true that the monks were the most unpopular class of all, and that they were reckoned a living proof of the worthlessness of conventual life, of the whole ecclesiastical organization, of the system of dogma, and of religion altogether, according as men pleased, rightly or wrongly, to draw their conclusions. We may also assume that Italy retained a clearer recollection of the origin of the two great ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... of rare books and tracts in various languages and faculties; including the Ancient Conventual Library of Missenden-Abbey, in Buckinghamshire; together with some choice remains of that of the late eminent Serjeant at law, WILLIAM FLETEWODE, Esq., Recorder of London, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth; among which are several specimens ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... himself to its influence, for a moment the scene around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68] Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening, they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the country, the cream, the onions,—fine Camille, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... parted, and Giulia was confined in the conventual fortress, and carefully guarded. Pope Paul, it appears, did not relax the imprisonment of the unfortunate girl, as he surely ought to have done, in recognition of the Cardinal's successful advocacy of his ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... disappeared of the abbey church in which lay Stephen, his Queen, and their son. It stood on the northern side of the town, where indeed the Abbey Farm still remains. It is to the parish church of Our Lady of Charity that we must turn for any memory of the conventual house where many a pilgrim must often have knelt to venerate the relic ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... girl he could not govern, Castiglione sent her to this convent, then one of the few houses of barefoot Carmelite nuns in Italy. He stipulated that she should take the name of Maddelena, that he should never hear of her again, and that she should be held an absolute prisoner in this conventual castle. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... a boat to Crowland Isle, and there lived a hermit's life till his death in 817. On the spot where he died Ethelbald founded and endowed a monastery on the island, and it flourished exceedingly. The larger part of the conventual church is now destroyed, but the north aisle is used as the Parish Church ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... slept till mid-day, for his mother would not have him wakened. Mariotte served the spoiled child's breakfast in his bed. The inflexible and semi-conventual rules which regulated the hours for meals yielded to the caprices of the chevalier. If it became desirable to extract from Mademoiselle du Guenic her array of keys in order to obtain some necessary article of food outside of the meal hours, there was no other ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... hermitage—is seen the operation of the Camaldolese rule in its original strictness and perfection. At the convent itself it is, or has become, much relaxed in many respects. The Camaldolese, like other Carthusians, are properly hermits, that is to say, their life is not conventual, but eremitical. Each brother at the Sagro Eremo inhabits his own separately built cell, consisting of sleeping chamber, study, wood-room, and garden, all of microscopical dimensions. His food, exclusively vegetable, is passed in ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... &c. Among those who had taken degrees in Theology, as Doctors, Licentiates, or Bachelors, there are seven with the title of Master, and three with F. or Frater prefixed to their names. Of the Preaching Friars, there were four, all designed F. or Frater. The Conventual and other Orders, included Provosts of Collegiate churches, Deans, Archdeacons, Subdeacons, Rectors, Canons, and Subpriors; of whom there are fifteen with the title of M. or Magister, and only six with D. or ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... validity, and feelings which had a stronger hold of the national mind than at any former period. Roman Catholic chapels rose all over the country. Cowls, girdles of ropes, and strings of beads constantly appeared in the streets, and astonished a population, the oldest of whom had never seen a conventual garb except on the stage. A convent rose at Clerkenwell on the site of the ancient cloister of Saint John. The Franciscans occupied a mansion in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The Carmelites were quartered in the City. A society ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... dilapidated remains of conventual buildings on the southern side of the church, mean, and of a date some thousand years subsequent to that of the Basilica. They are nearly ruinous, but are still—or were till within a few years—inhabited by one Capucin friar, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... two of her oldest ladies, make their appearance before the conqueror. Conqueror as he is, they heard him in their sacred halls. They have heard of his violent behaviour in conventual establishments before. That hammer, which he always carries in action, has smashed many sacred images in religious houses. Pounds and pounds of convent plate is he known to have melted, the sacrilegious plunderer! No wonder ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of Virex, in Italy—a pleasing picture of what may be termed an architectural village; for some of the dwellings almost approach to palaces, and others have a conventual character, which harmonizes with the sublime beauties of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... the ideal her preceptress at the Washington finishing school had held as to what constitutes a perfect lady. Occasionally her activities shocked Manuel, who held to the ancient view that maidens should come to matrimony with the innocence born of conventual ignorance. He would have preferred his wife to be a clinging vine, but in the case of Valencia this would ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... convent, knew anything of his name or family. The gay, the amiable Theodosius had now taken upon him the name of Father Francis, and was so far concealed in a long beard, a shaven head, and a religious habit, that it was impossible to discover the man of the world in the venerable conventual. ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... had been cast into the river before his departure! Another account relates that the fish who had swallowed the key leapt on board before the travellers reached their destination! The legend of the foundation of the Abbey is engraved on the conventual seal in a series of scenes; and we know it was also depicted in the glass of one of the large windows in ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... be observed in this design of any distinctive merit; it is only a somewhat completer version of the ordinary representation given in illuminated missals and other conventual work, suggesting, as if they had happened at the same moment, the answer, "If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil," and the accusation of blasphemy which causes the high-priest to ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... two electricians set, and after two days of business and sight-seeing in London, went down to Bexley. In the third-class carriage in which they travelled they were struck by the sight of a tall lady in mourning—a sort of compromise between a conventual and a secular bonnet over short fair hair, and holding on her lap a tiny little girl of about six years old, with a small, pinched, delicate face and slightly red hair, to whom she pointed out by name each spot they passed, herself wearing ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... with the same aggressive spirit as the men, but softened somewhat by Christianity, many women of high station among the German tribes founded convents and developed institutions of much renown. This provided a rather superior class of women as organizers and directors, and a conventual life continued, throughout the entire Middle Ages, to attract an excellent class of women. This will be understood when it is remembered that a conventual life offered to women of intellectual ability and scholarly tastes the one opportunity for an education and a life of learning. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an oratory, with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion. Behind a white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed arranged on a principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits and lack of softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of the premises a certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which Redclyffe liked. A table was covered with books, many of them folios in an antique binding ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... carried out through the whole composition, of representing all the just made perfect as actually converted into little children. Kings with crowns, popes, bishops, cardinals in hats and mitres, monks cowled and robed in conventual habiliments, are all philandering together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... sentiments and disposition as the Poles of the earth. Madame de l'Enclos was a prudent, pious Christian mother, who endeavored to inspire her daughter with the same pious sentiments which pervaded her own heart. The fact is that the mother attempted to prepare her daughter for a conventual life, a profession at that period of the highest honor, and one that led to preferment, not only in religious circles, but in the world of society. At that time, conventual and monastic dignitaries occupied a prominent place in the formation of public and ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... other remote places, they ever remained in the convents, celebrating the divine office according to the custom of religious, their preachers preaching to the people and performing their other functions, training up novices and preserving the conventual buildings, holding it sinful to lay aside, or even hide, their religious habit, though for an hour, through any human fear. And, every three years, they held their regular provincial chapters in the woods of the neighborhood, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... be given the rough draft of the settlement of the see by King Henry VIII. at the Reformation. Although departed from in many instances, it throws a curious light on the king's intentions to keep up some semblance of a conventual institution with an active ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... Devil stood in their disguises before the gate of the convent of White Nuns. The portress ran as fast as she could in order to inform the abbess of the unexpected visitors. The abbess received them with conventual greetings, to which the Devil answered in a similar tone. Sweetmeats and wines were then brought in, and while partaking of them the two abbesses talked together, of cloister affairs, and of the wicked world; and the Devil, with a deep sigh, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... speech was lost, for Father Arnold, muttering some word belonging to his "centurion" days, dived into the kitchen, to reappear presently dragging a little withered old woman after him who was dressed in a robe of conventual make. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... poem, in eight books, and was first printed by Caxton in the year 1483. The 'Speculum Meditantis,' 'Vox Clamantis,' and 'Confessio Amantis,' are, properly speaking, parts of one great work, and are represented by three volumes upon Gower's curious tomb in the old conventual church of St Mary Overies already alluded to—a church, by the way, which the poet himself assisted in rebuilding in the elegant shape which it retains ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... couleur de feu. Here she entertained the President Henault, Bulkeley, Montesquieu (whose own house was in the same street), Lord Bath, and all the philosophes, giving regular suppers on Mondays. In the same conventual chambers resided, in 1749, Madame de Talmond, Madame de Vasse, and her friend Mademoiselle Ferrand, whose address Charles wrote, as we saw, in ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... under fixed rules; and these were naturally followed by confederacies of such communities under one organization. The monastic vows were poverty, or the renunciation of property; celibacy, or abstinence from marriage; and obedience to the conventual superior. Sometimes in the early centuries great evils and abuses sprang up in connection with monastic life. For example, monks might become fanatical and violent. But they furnished numerous examples of sincere piety, and of unselfish and intrepid self-sacrifice ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... And, as the Priory was not within the walls of the city, whilst the river Dee, flowing immediately below, secured it from annoyance on one side, and the church, with its adjacent church-yard, insulated it from the tumults of life on all the other sides, an atmosphere of conventual stillness and tranquillity brooded over it and all ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... was in it none of the tranquillity which death inspires. Liza was still living somewhere, dully, far away; he thought of her as among the living, but did not recognise the young girl whom he had once loved in that pale spectre swathed in the conventual garment, surrounded by smoky clouds of incense. Lavretzky would not have recognised himself, had he been able to contemplate himself as he mentally contemplated Liza. In the course of those eight years the crisis had, at last, been effected in ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... call to a religious and conventual state of life, she conceived a great desire to become a nun, in the poor, austere, and edifying convent of St. Martha, of the order of St. Austin in Milan. To qualify herself for this state, being busied the whole day at work, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... religious house, as the term is, and was encircled by a high wall, which enclosed the garden and outhouses. It was a dark, red brick, sombre pile, and the additions lately made to it had given it a thoroughly conventual appearance. The carriage drove under an archway in front of the entrance, closed on the outside, Mr Lerew got out and tugged at a large iron bell-pull, when a slide in the door was pulled back, and the face of a female, who narrowly scrutinised the visitors, ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... Moore's phrase, a literature still at nurse. It is on the side of sex that the appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it is sex that especially fascinates the lubricious Puritan mind; but the conventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one field extends itself to all others. Our fiction, in general, is marked by an artificiality as marked as that of Eighteenth Century poetry or the later Georgian drama. The romance in it runs to set forms and stale situations; ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... dissolution of the Priory, had passed under the jurisdiction of the Crown, and hence the Lord Mayor and the Aldermen could not enforce municipal ordinances there. Moreover, it was distant from the city wall not much more than half a mile. The old conventual church had been demolished, the Priory buildings had been converted into residences, and the land near the Shoreditch highway had been built up with numerous houses. The land next to the Field, however, was for the most part undeveloped. It contained some dilapidated tenements, a few old barns formerly ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... intended to represent the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone: one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and mediaeval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes; features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... rising to lips.) Hold your little tongues, children; it's very late, and you'll make me forget what I've to say. Fancy yourselves in pews, for five minutes. There's one point of possible good in the conventual system, which is always attractive to young girls; and the idea is a very dangerous one;— 0the notion of a merit, or exalting virtue, consisting in a habit of meditation on the "things above," or things of the next world. Now it is ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... tribe of variously gifted artists, labouring rapidly at the many works on hand for the final embellishment of the cathedral of St. Etienne, made those conventual buildings just then cheerful enough to lighten a melancholy, heavy even as that of our friend Denys. He took his place among the workmen, a conventual novice; a novice also as to whatever concerns any actual handicraft. He could but compound sweet incense for the sanctuary. And yet, again ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... little nun yourself," said Ebbo, for she wore a little conventual dress, "but we must take each other for such as we are;" and, as she hid her face and clung to his mother, he added in a more cheerful, coaxing tone, "You once said you would ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge |
