Then in 1153 came Fulke de Newenham and founded here and built a Benedictine nunnery in honour of St Mary Magdalen.

Of the Austin Canons, the Priory of St Gregory founded by Lanfranc in 1084 near St John's Hospital, also a foundation of Lanfranc, in Northgate Street, really nothing, a fragment of old wall; of the Nunnery of St Sepulchre, a Benedictine house, nothing at all.

You can arouse her and bring her to me and no one need know that she has had a visitorexcept, I suppose, the peeping eyes that haunt a nunnery corridor.

And so more than one girl in that nunnery, and out of it, too, believed in her inmost heart, though her 'Catholic principles,' by a happy inconsistency, forbade her to say so.

She had never before been compelled to face her own feelings, either about the nunnery or about Lancelot.

She had looked to this nunnery, too, as an escape, once and for all, from her own luxury, just as people who have not strength to be temperate take refuge in teetotalism; and the thought of menial services towards the poor, however distasteful to her, came in quite prettily to fill up the little ideal of a life of romantic asceticisms and mystic contemplation, which gave the true charm in her eyes to her wild project.

THE NEIGHBORING NUNNERY.

I am starting the revolution, because only a revolution can open the doors of the nunneries.

For let them but consider what fearful maladies, feral diseases, gross inconveniences, come to both sexes by this enforced temperance, it troubles me to think of, much more to relate those frequent abortions and murdering of infants in their nunneries (read Kemnisius and others), and notorious fornications, those Spintrias, Tribadas, Ambubeias, &c., those rapes, incests, adulteries, mastuprations, sodomies, buggeries of monks and friars.

If these men should but survey our multitudes of religious houses, observe our numbers of monasteries all over Europe, 18 nunneries in Padua, in Venice 34 cloisters of monks, 28 of nuns, &c. ex ungue leonem, 'tis to this proportion, in all other provinces and cities, what would they think, do they live honest?

"To come to the present, the eldest child of the reigning family is a girl and she has been often teased and warned in jest by her friends and relations that she is the first girl to be the eldest for seven generations and that she would have to keep her men friends at arm's length or go into a nunnery if she hoped to escape the haunting.

Of the exile's family, three sons died young; the daughter went into a nunnery; and the two remaining brothers, who ultimately joined their father in his banishment, became respectable men of letters, and left families in Ravenna; where the race, though extinct in the male line, still survives through a daughter, in the noble house of Serego Alighieri.

It has been suggested that this method of seeking to benefit the deserving poor denoted a morbid tendency in Michelangelo's nature; but any one who is acquainted with Italian customs in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance must be aware that nothing was commoner than to dower poor girls or to establish them in nunneries by way of charity.

He is simply a human monster, who kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, and invents infernal machines.

Roberto was disgusted at his brother, Aurelia rejected him with scorn, and Camiola retired to a nunnery.

At that time they placed no women into nunneries save those who were ugly, ill-made, foolish, humpbacked, or corrupt; nor put any men into monasteries save those that were sickly, ill-born, simple-witted, and a burden to their family.

If he did not so desire, or if he died, the woman was shorn and forced to spend the rest of her life in a nunnery; two thirds of her property were given to her relatives in descending line, the other third to the monastery; if there were no descendants, ascendants got one third and the monastery two thirds; relatives failing, the monastery took all; and in all cases goods inserted in the dowry contract were to be kept for the husband.

Gregory of Tours informs us that according to the Council of Nicaea325 A.D.a wife who left her husband, to whom she was happily married, to enter a nunnery incurred excommunication.

She was not allowed to bring a criminal action except in cases of high treason or to avenge the death of near relatives.[370] Parents could dedicate a daughter to God while she was yet an infant; and this parental vow bound her to the nunnery when she was mature, whether she was willing or not.

Involuntarily the words of Hamlet come in my mind: "Get thee to a nunnery; why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?"

In pictures of the throned Madonna painted expressly for nunneries, the Child is, I believe, always clothed, or the Mother partly infolds him in her own drapery.

This was, for intelligible reasons, a favourite subject in nunneries.

" It is a subject of great importance, not only as a principal incident in a series of the Life of the Virgin, but because this consecration of Mary to the service of the temple being taken in a general sense, it has often been given in a separate form, particularly for the nunneries.

The round arched doorway was set in a succession of elaborate zigzags, birds' heads, lions' faces, twists and knots; and within, the altar- hangings and the priest's robes were stiff with the exquisite and elaborate embroidery for which the English nunneries were famed.

She would not be left behind, she declared; and if she must go to a nunnery, why there were nunneries in plenty in France to which they could send her.