"Nunnery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio. But for the gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery, for whenever Miss Quincey thought of a man she thought of something like Louisa's husband, Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and wore flannel shirts with celluloid collars, and coats that ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... they not only suffered a cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of those times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or accept a disdainful patronage that was ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... hand, 'That's their serpentine way; that's their subtlety; that's their casuistry; which arguments you may imagine to refer, as your fancy pleases, to the village curate, or the tonsured priest of the monastery over the hill. For the tonsured priest, and the monastery, and the nunnery, and the mass, and the Virgin Mary, have grown to be a very great power indeed in English lanes. Between the Roman missal and the chapel hymn-book, the country curate with his good old-fashioned litany is ground very small indeed, and grows less and less between these millstones till he ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... odds. Of course, if they are favourably made and are not tied by kinship duties, they may run away from the industrial battlefield. In which event the safest thing the man can do is to join the army; and for the woman, possibly, to become a Red Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home and children and all that makes life worth living and old ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... style—and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... A nunnery, glorying in so pure a foundress, grew and flourished, and for "two hundred years existed in the full observance of monastic discipline;" but on the coming of the Danes in the year 870, those sad destroyers of religious establishments laid it in a heap of ruins, in which desolate ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... taken trouble to go where he could see her, he at last made her come whithersoever it pleased himself. Her mother discovered this, and being a very virtuous woman, she forbade her daughter ever to speak to the merchant on pain of being sent to a nunnery. But the girl, whose love for the merchant was greater than her fear of her mother, went after him more ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... while half-a-mile away the parish church that was there before it—having been rebuilt indeed upon Saxon foundations in the days of William Rufus—yet lies among its ancient elms. Farther on, situate upon the slope of a vale down which runs a brook through meadows, is the stark ruin of the old Nunnery that was subservient to the proud Abbey on the hill, some of it now roofed in with galvanised iron sheets ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... girl of thirteen or fourteen years changes into a woman as the bud of the night becomes a flower in the morning. At this period of change, so full of mystery and romance, Maria Clara was placed, by the advice of the curate of Binondo, in the nunnery of St. Catherine [43] in order to receive strict religious training from the Sisters. With tears she took leave of Padre Damaso and of the only lad who had been a friend of her childhood, Crisostomo Ibarra, who himself shortly afterward went away to Europe. There ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... from the limb! The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush! Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, Silently hops the hermit-thrush, The withered leaves keep dumb for him; The irreverent buccaneering bee Hath stormed and rifled the nunnery 30 Of the lily, and scattered the sacred floor With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door; There, as of yore, The rich, milk-tingeing buttercup Its tiny polished urn holds up, Filled with ripe summer to the edge, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... concluded his essay in the pooh-pooh tone of voice. He first gives a sketch of abnormalities in mortal experience, as in the case of mental epidemics, of witchcraft, of the so-called prophets in the Cevennes, of the Jansenist marvels. He mentions a nunnery where, 'in the sixteenth century,' there occurred, among other phenomena, movements of inanimate objects, pottery specially distinguishing itself, as in the famous 'Stockwell mystery'. Unluckily he supplies no references for these adventures.' ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... brain, but knows what he likes, and usually does it without wasting time on pros and cons. Consequently, I'm just as likely to end in prison as anywhere else, and take it without much concern as all in the day's work. You are more likely to end in a nunnery, as the most ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... few years of Nicholas Ferrar's death, some of his enemies had a pamphlet printed and distributed "not by hundreds, but by thousands, and given into the hands of the parliament men as they went daily to the House of Commons." The title was, "The Arminian Nunnery; a description of the newly erected Monastical Place, or the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding." The books were also given to the Puritan soldiers when near Gidding to excite them to offer violence to the family. But why should the title "Nuns of Little Gidding" be still the ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland
... education of young artists and the encouragement of their seniors. He was the principal director of a board of "publica beneficenza." He was the manager, and what we should call the trustee for the property of more than one nunnery. He was intimate with the Cardinal Legate, and a frequent and honoured guest at the palace. Of course in matters of orthodoxy and well-affected sentiments towards the Church and its government he was all that the agents of that government could desire. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... exercises her authority in the Iron Fence Temple. Ch'in Ching-ch'ing (Ch'ing Chung) amuses himself in the Man-t'ou (Bread) nunnery. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Cabot—their Christian names were Priscilla and Hortense—she found to be middle-aged maiden ladies, eminently prim and proper, and the educational establishment over which they presided a sort of Protestant nunnery ruled according to the precepts of the Congregational Church and the New England aristocracy. Miss Priscilla was tall and thin and her favorite author was Emerson; she quoted Emerson extensively and was certain that real literature died when he did. Miss Hortense was ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the dreary village,—decay without its grandeur, change without the awe of its solitude! On the site on which Drusus raised his Roman tower, and the kings of the Franks their palaces, trade now dribbles in tobacco-pipes, and transforms into an excellent cotton factory the antique nunnery of Konigsberg! So be it; it is the progressive order of things,—the world itself will soon be one excellent ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its modern successor, and seemed the queen of the valley, although, on the opposite side of the river, the strong walls of Elcho appeared to dispute the pre-eminence. Elcho, however, was in that age a peaceful nunnery, and the walls with which it was surrounded were the barriers of secluded vestals, not the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... period for mourning was over, the relations of the marquise and Sainte-Croix were as open and public as before: the two brothers d'Aubray expostulated with her by the medium of an older sister who was in a Carmelite nunnery, and the marquise perceived that her father had on his death bequeathed the care and supervision of her to her brothers. Thus her first crime had been all but in vain: she had wanted to get rid of her ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one Episcopalian, one Roman Catholic, one Methodist mission, one Congregational mission, one nunnery school, Sisters of St. Ann's, one private educational institute (by the author) for both sexes, and one Young ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... universally admired. The fact is, he was possessed of, at least, some requisites of a 'lover.' He had assiduity, flattery, fine clothes—and as much wit as the ladies he addressed. Accordingly he used to say—'Wit, flattery, and fine clothes are enough to debauch a nunnery!' This is certainly a fouler calumny of women ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Marcella cared nothing for men's admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar temperament, would have gone mad in a nunnery. "But," you may argue, "ought not she to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her reason, rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but Marcella knew quite ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... who, centuries after, drew those obscene figures on the wall of your church—the devil, the nun, and the barred convent—when Julia, another Julia but the same soul, was denied to me and forced into a nunnery. For the frescoes, too, tell my history. I was that figure in the dark habit, standing a little back from the cross. Tell me, sir, did you never hear of Joseph ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... alterations in his play, in order to ridicule several dramatic performances, that appeared since the first writing it. Those of Mr. Dryden, which fell under his grace's lash, were the Wild Gallant, Tyrannic Love, the Conquest of Granada, Marriage A la-Mode, and Love in a Nunnery: Whatever was extravagant, or too warmly expressed, or any way unnatural, the author ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... these two months. We might as well have said that we would live on manna from heaven. The things we had fixed on were just the impossible things. Oh, that bread, with the fetid smell, which stuck in the throat like Macbeth's amen! I am not surprised, you recollect it! The hens had 'got them to a nunnery,' and objected to lay eggs, and the milk and the holy water stood confounded. But of course we spread the tablecloth, just as you did, over all drawbacks of the sort; and the beef and oil, as I said, and the wine ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... in no wise," answered Agatha, laughing again, though in a more subdued manner than before. "I never loved to dwell in a nunnery, and this house is little better. 'Satisfied!'" she said again, as though the word perplexed her. "I never thought of no such a thing. Doth Master Norman look satisfied? ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... not, sweet, I am unkind, That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, To ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... is supposed, by way of penance for her yielding to the Conqueror, founded a nunnery at the village of Hatfield Peverell, mentioned above, and there she lies buried in the chapel of it, which is now the parish church, where her memory is preserved by a tombstone ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... hanged if I don't think it's a nunnery," he said. By and by he let his gaze wander back to the town, in which he detected an appearance of liveliness and bustle not usual in New England villages, large or small. The main street was dotted with groups of men and ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Orders of nuns, certain corresponding features were becoming usual. But little in the way of religious guidance could fall to the lot of a sisterhood presided over by such a "Prioress" as Chaucer's Madame Eglantine, whose mind—possibly because her nunnery fulfilled the functions of a finishing school for young ladies—was mainly devoted to French and deportment, or by such a one as the historical Lady Juliana Berners, of a rather later date, whose leisure hours produced treatises on hunting and hawking, and who would probably have on behalf ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Hamlet now to the scene with Ophelia, where, 'in an ecstasy of divine inspiration, equally weak in reason, and violent in persuasion and dissuasion,' [12] he calls upon her to go to a nunnery, we must direct attention to the concluding part of an Essay [13] of Montaigne. It is only surprising that nobody should as yet have pointed out how unmistakeably, in that famous scene, the inconsistencies of the whimsical ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... lady-bells Of the nunnery by the Fosse:— Say the hinds, "Their silver music swells Like the blessed angels' syllables, At his birth who ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... there any hope for her? Could he not take her to some nunnery midway, and let her write to her uncle to ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... comes through environments of temptation unprotected from the assaults of the devil to glory and immortality will have a more exceeding and eternal weight of glory than she who has been shut in, as it were, by the walls of a nunnery." "If we could have kept the Negro from the Bible, kept the religion of Jesus Christ out of his heart, the massacre of November 10th might have the effect that those who planned it desired. But such demonstrations of barbarism will never be the means of vanquishing a trusting people. There's ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... Colonel and his sweet unselfish wife, with affection; and Sylvia, John's betrothed, with a strange passion, defend the old faith, Sylvia to the point of breaking with her lover and getting her to a nunnery—a business which will in the end, I should guess, lay a heavier burden upon the nuns than upon John. The indecisive battle sways hither and thither. It is the Doctor who sums up in a compromise which would shock the metaphysical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... dell—a deep hollow cup, lined with turf as green and short as the sod of this Common: the very oldest of the trees, gnarled mighty oaks, crowd about the brink of this dell; in the bottom lie the ruins of a nunnery. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... government; the church of S. Ambruogio at Pavia, built by Grimoald, King of the Lombards, who drove from the kingdom Aribert's son Perterit. This Perterit being restored to his throne after Grimoald's death built a nunnery at Pavia called the Monasterio Nuovo, in honour of Our Lady and of St Agatha, and the queen built another dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Pertica outside the walls. Cunibert, Perterit's son, likewise built a monastery and church to St George called di Coronato, in a similar style, on the spot where ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... of Aloysia, do you wish to know? She joined her sister Bridget in the nunnery, and after atoning by her tears and repentance for the material heresy of her youth, she lately fell a victim to fever, contracted by her in caring for the poor negro slaves of New Orleans. She preferred to die a saint than live ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... additional details: for instance, in the memoirs of the Countess Kaunitz, mother of the well-known statesman Kaunitz, we find an account of the severe whippings which were administered to her during her childhood spent in a nunnery. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... plenty of sport in their visits to these fine sheets of water. In Cumberland there are several waterfalls, namely, Scale Force and Sour Milk Force, near Buttermere; Barrow Cascade and Lowdore Cascade, near Keswick; Airey Force, Gowbarrow Park; and Nunnery Cascade, Croglin. The highest mountains in the same county are,—Scaw Fell (Eskdale), 3166 feet, highest point; Helvellyn (Keswick), 3055; and Skiddaw (Keswick), 3022. The climate of Cumberland is various; the high land cold and piercing; ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... hurried to explain. "I never loved but once, and then would die for it." The jasmine trembled in its chaste white nunnery, and her lips were temptingly apart. He bent forward ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... months, they came back for his wife. Her they placed in the nunnery of the Carmelites—that prison where, but a few months before, a mob relieved the keepers of their vigils ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... moor, The grey moor sinks to the gleaming Skelt— Sudden and sullen, and swift and sure, The whirling water was round my belt. She breasted the bank with a savage snort, And a backward glance of her bloodshot eye, And "Our Lady of Andover's" flash'd like thought, And flitted St. Agatha's nunnery, And the firs at "The Ferngrove" fled on the right, And "Falconer's Tower" ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled the species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester, formed a very mixed community, which included the daughters of mechanics, curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairy-men, soldiers, sailors, and villagers. They sat in the large school-room of the establishment on the evening ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... monastery of the Carmelites, or White Friars, with the church and houses of the Knights Templars beyond it. Within the City, to the east, were the great establishments of the Austin Friars and St. Helen's nunnery, while east and west the churches spread—many of monastic origin—culminating in two of the most important buildings in Europe, the Tower of London and the palace of Westminster, each with its ecclesiastical dependencies, the whole dominated by the mediaeval spirit about ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley
... becke, then I haue thoughts to put them in imagination, to giue them shape, or time to acte them in. What should such Fellowes as I do, crawling betweene Heauen and Earth. We are arrant Knaues all, beleeue none of vs. Goe thy wayes to a Nunnery. Where's your Father? ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Ministers of State and nobles of every rank, from the Prince who is the heir of the last of the Shoguns down to democratic Barons who prefer to be called "Mr.", I chatted with farmers' wives and daughters, I interrogated landladies and mill girls, and I paid a memorable visit to a Buddhist nunnery. I walked, talked, rode, ate and bathed with common folk and with dignitaries. I discussed the situation of Japan with the new countryman in college agricultural laboratories and classrooms, and, in ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the place where such an ornament was made? Ickleton, in Cambridgeshire, appears to have been of some note in former days, as, according to Lewis's Topog. Hist., a nunnery was founded there by Henry II., and a market together with a fair granted by Henry III. As it is only five miles from Linton, it may have formerly borne the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 32, June 8, 1850 • Various
... purse.[256] A woman guilty of adultery was at once sent to a monastery. After a space of two years her husband could take her back again, if he so wished, without prejudice. 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; ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... miraculously escaped their industry, being very richly laden with all the King's plate and great quantity of riches of gold, pearl, jewels and other most precious goods, of all of the best and richest merchants of Panama. On board of this galleon were also the religious women, belonging to the nunnery of the said city, who had embarked with them all the ornaments of their church, consisting in great quantity of gold, plate, and other ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... as best she might. The quarrel to her had been as the disruption of the heavens. She had declared to herself that she would bear it; but the misfortune to be borne was a broken world falling about her own ears. She had thought of a nunnery, of Ophelia among the water-lilies, and of an early death-bed. Then she had pictured to herself the somewhat ascetic and very laborious life of an old maiden lady whose only recreation fifty years hence should consist in looking at the portrait of him who had once ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... have in their old cellars! It's such fun drinking it out of great silver vessels as old as Methuselah. 'There's much treasure in the house of the righteous,' as David says; and any one who has ever sacked a nunnery knows that." ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... James, 'then will we take Mary and the weans to the nunnery in St. Mary's Wynd, where none will dare to molest them, and I shall go on to St. Andrews or Stirling, as may seem fittest; while we leave old Seneschal Peter to keep the castle gates shut. If the Hielanders come, they'll find the nut too hard for them to crack, and the kernel gone, ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Siege Perilous. At last, one vigil of the great feast, a lady came to Arthur's court at Camelot and asked Sir Launcelot to ride with her into the forest hard by, for a purpose not then to be revealed. Launcelot consenting, they rode together until they came to a nunnery hidden deep in the forest; and there the lady bade Launcelot dismount, and led him into a great and stately room. Presently there entered twelve nuns, and with them a youth, the fairest that Launcelot had ever seen. "Sir," said the nuns, "we ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... carries it out—'if'!" exclaimed Marise, with a lurch of the shoulders and a flirt of her pudgy hand. "Soul of me! that's where the difference lies. Had it been the cracksman, there would have been no 'if'—it were done as surely as he attempted it. Name of misfortune! I had gone into a nunnery had I lost ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... could be supposed to attend to any thing else, when the lovely Harriet Byron continued in suspence, when the fate of Lady Clementina was undetermined, when it was not yet settled, whether she was to marry Grandison, retire to a Nunnery, or continue crack-brain'd all her lifetime. After all, I am well-pleased to see Grandison and Harriet fairly buckled. And I hope soon to hear, that the ceremony is performed between the Count de Belvedere and Lady Clementina. I am afraid there could have been no compleat happiness ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... find few friends. Be as it may, said Sir Lancelot, keep you still here, for I will forth on my journey, and no man nor child shall go with me. So it was no boot to strive, but he departed and rode westerly and sought seven or eight days, and at the last he came to a nunnery. And then was Queen Guinevere ware of Sir Lancelot as he walked in the cloister. And when she saw him there she swooned thrice, that all the ladies and gentlewomen had work enough to hold the Queen up. So when ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... embroidery, and so pictured lives which were lived in the days of knights and ladies drifted on. The sword and the needle expressed the duties, the spirit, and the essence of their several lives. The men were militant, the women domestic, and wherever in castle or house or nunnery the lives of women were made safe by the use of the sword the needle was devoting itself to comforts of clothing for the poor and dependent, or luxuries of adornment for the rich and powerful. So the needle lived on through all the civilizations of the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... Ely. The Goldies were an old Manx family; Col. Goldie, his brother, of the Scotts Guards Regiment, being President of the House of Keys, the local parliament. Their residence in that island is "The Nunnery," near the town of Douglas, so called from the ruin close at hand of an ancient priory, said to have been founded by St. Bridget in the sixth century. Mr. Goldies' nephew is the present Sir George Dashwood Tanbman Goldie, Privy Councillor, K.C.M.G., F.R.G.S., &c, formerly of the Royal Engineers, ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... is really a worthy vocation for me to go to Quedlinberg and become the shepherdess of that fearful flock of old maids who took refuge in a nunnery because no man desired them? No, your majesty, do not send me to Quedlinberg; it is not my calling to build up the worthy nuns into saints of the Most High. I am too unsanctifled myself to be an ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... We rose very early, and came through St. Quintin to Cambray, not long after three.—We went to an English nunnery, to give a letter to Father Welch, the confessor, who came to visit us ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... remained to take charge of the household and the newly-arrived family of grandchildren. She was one of those calm, quiet, big-souled women who in the early centuries would have been a saint, and in mediaeval times the abbess of a nunnery, but happening to be born in the nineteenth century, her mental outlook had a modern bias, and both her philanthropy and her religious instincts had developed along the latest lines of thought. She had schemes of her own ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... these deliberations gave surprise to the public; it was the seizure of the queen dowager the forfeiture of all her lands and revenue, and the close confinement of her person in the nunnery of Bermondsey. The act of authority was covered with a very thin pretence. It was alleged that, notwithstanding the secret agreement to marry her daughter to Henry, she had yet yielded to the solicitations and menaces of Richard, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... fringe! That is the burden of what I have to say to you this time; for indeed and indeed this is to be a fringe-and-tassel season, and you must cover yourself all over with fringe and the rest of yourself with tassels, or else "to a nunnery go." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... make the instrument of his wiles assume the figure of one of his reverence's family." The Chapter conducted itself in this case exactly in the same manner as hereditary princes do whose fathers live too long. But what served more completely to confuse the case was a report from the nunnery. The nuns had assembled in the refectory, and were busied in dressing up a Madonna for the next festival, hoping to surpass by its magnificence their rivals the black nuns, when suddenly the old porteress entered, told the licentious story, and added, that the Dominican, whose ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... near it, or in connexion with it, and standing upon the level field, which belonged to it, its own domain, the whole scene together brought to our minds an image of the retiredness and sober elegance of a nunnery; but this might be owing to the greyness of the afternoon, and our having come immediately from Glasgow, and through a country which, till now, had either had a townish taint, or at best little of rural beauty. While we were looking at the house we overtook a foot-traveller, who, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... person sending shall forfeit 100l. which[y] shall go to the sole use and benefit of him that shall discover the offence. And[z] if any parent, or other, shall send or convey any person beyond sea, to enter into, or be resident in, or trained up in, any priory, abbey, nunnery, popish university, college, or school, or house of jesuits, or priests, or in any private popish family, in order to be instructed, persuaded, or confirmed in the popish religion; or shall contribute any thing towards their maintenance when abroad by any pretext ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... disquiet. Here was the struggle of the natural human impulse against the constraint of ascetic vows; the irresistible yielding to nature and to the call of a passion interwoven with the very fibres of humanity. The sombre Boston parlor vanished, and he seemed to be in some old-world nunnery with the unknown lovers. He felt all their guilty bliss and their scalding remorse. He sighed so deeply that the soft laugh behind him seemed almost an echo. Turning quickly, he found Berenice watching him with a ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... that we may not travel well together: at this station let us stop, freely forgiving each other for mutual misliking; to your books, to your business, to your fowling, to your feasting, to your mummery, to your nunnery—go: my track lays away from the highroad, in and out between yonder hills, among thickets, mossy rocks, green hollows, high fern, and the tangled hair of hiding river-gods; I meet not pedlers and bagsmen, but stumble upon ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... husband were honoured as founders of the Benedictine monastery at Coventry, which rose upon the ruins of an earlier house of Benedictine nuns founded by Osburg, a lady of the royal house, nearly two hundred years before. This nunnery had been destroyed in the Danish wars about the year 1016. Consequently, if any legend, or ceremony, was known or practised at Coventry in connection with some traditional patroness, the name of Godgifu was ready to hand to be ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the scene of this ancient drama acted by the clerks of London, but some traces of the association of the fraternity with the neighbourhood can still be found. The two famous conventual houses, for which Clerkenwell was famous, the nunnery of St. Mary and the priory of St. John of Jerusalem, founded in 1100, have long since disappeared. Clerks' Close is mentioned in numerous documents, and formed part of the estate belonging to the Skinners' Company, where Skinner Street now runs. Clerks' Well was close to the modern ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the country which had formerly been granted by the king's predecessors;" and, being firmly established in the monastery, he turned his attention to the improvement of the town. He founded a hospital for the sick in Spitalfield; built St. Martin's church and St. Michael's nunnery, at Stamford—besides settling a yearly sum upon the church of St. John Baptist,[7] Peterburgh—covering the monastery with lead, and founding the chapel ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... be a chance of repudiating it as a forgery. Also he instructed his agents at Rome to persuade the Pope to give him a dispensation for re-marriage, without a divorce, if Katharine retired into a nunnery; [Footnote: L. & P., iv., 2157, 2161. Brewer, ii., 312, 313, and note. Such a marriage was admissible according to some of the Lutherans.] or even for an openly bigamous union. Moreover about the same time, Henry openly ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... said I, "means the head of the wood. I suppose that in the old time the mountain looked over some extensive forest, even as the nunnery of Pengwern looked originally over an alder-swamp, for Pengwern means ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... the cheerful residence of elegant sufficiency, in which I was to sing to my De Vallance? Eustace only speaks of his own adventures. Oh, this merchant's daughter of St. Helier; I wish she had been locked up in a nunnery. Doubtless, she is young and beautiful; but prosperity is a becoming ornament. I will take courage, and ask ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... was of Castile, his Dam from Aragon) Then, for accomplishments of chivalry, In case our Lord the King should go to war again, He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale a fortress—or a nunnery. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a nunnery,' the King said; 'for before three months are out we will have many nunneries ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... illustrated by the literary history of Lenglet du Fresnoy. He opened his career by addressing a letter and a tract to the Sorbonne, on the extraordinary affair of Maria d'Agreda, abbess of the nunnery of the Immaculate Conception in Spain, whose mystical Life of the Virgin, published on the decease of the abbess, and which was received with such rapture in Spain, had just appeared at Paris, where it excited ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... in itself no loss to Anne. Her experience of the nunnery at Boulogne, where had been spent three days in expectation of the King, had not been pleasant. The nuns had shrunk from her as a heretic, and kept their novices and pensionnaires from the taint of communication with her; and all the honour she might have deserved ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasioned by orders given to Mr. Grimes to go on with the building instantly, unless he intended to withdraw from the job. "I don't think, Grimes, that I can call a place of Christian worship a nuisance," said the Vicar. To this Grimes rejoined that he had known a nunnery bell to be stopped because it was a nuisance, and that he didn't see why a Methodist chapel bell was not as bad as a nunnery bell. Fenwick had declared that he would fight if he could find a leg to stand upon, ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... beauty. To-night—gazing at her face, reflected, intent and mournful, in the mirror—she saw that position more clearly, in all its aridity, than she had ever seen it. What was the use of being pretty? No longer use to anyone! Not yet twenty-six, and in a nunnery! With a shiver, but not of cold, she drew her wrapper close. This time last year she had at least been in the main current of life, not a mere derelict. And yet—better far be like this than go back to him whom memory painted ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... at sojournyng In a nunnery here besyde; My two sonnes shall wyth her go, And there they ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... 13 churches, chapels, hospitals, convents, beside one nunnery, namely the ecclesia major or cathedral, the Jesuits' college, which are the chief, and both in sight from the harbour: St. Antonio, St. Barbara, both parish churches; the Franciscans' church, and the Dominicans'; and 2 convents of Carmelites; a chapel for seamen ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... for one galleon, which miraculously escaped, richly laden with all the king's plate, jewels, and other precious goods of the best and richest merchants of Panama: on board which were also the religious women of the nunnery, who had embarked with them all the ornaments of their church, consisting in much gold, plate, and other things ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... pretty Character! a Woman of my Beauty, and five Thousand Pound, marry a Merchant—a little, petty, dirty-heel'd Merchant; faugh, I'd rather live a Maid all the days of my life, or be sent to a Nunnery, and ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... then black, and the Lion lay dying. He made his will, a generous and charitable one, confessed his sins, was houselled and anhealed, and died on Passion Tuesday, April 6th. His brain and bowels were buried at Charroux, his heart at Rouen, and his body at his father's feet, in penitence, in the nunnery of Fontevrault. Hugh was on his way to the Cathedral at Angers to take duty the next day, Palm Sunday, when Gilbert de Lacy, a clerk, rode up to him and told him of the king's death and of the funeral next day in Fontevrault. Hugh groaned deeply and announced at Angers that he should set ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... protects them a little. It is not as in the old days of heathen against Christian. There is this to be said for Cnut, that he will have no monastery or nunnery harried if his ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler
... angels in roundels with scrolls. The caps have the same kind of foliage as is seen at Curzoia and Sebenico. The Austrian-Lloyd office is on the ground floor of a tower of the Venetian period, now a nunnery. It has a trefoiled ogee-window and a great balcony above it, with trellises behind which the nuns can take the air without being seen, recalling those of Sicilian nunneries. All ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... and picture for ourselves their home. Chixon, Chikesonds, or Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, as it now stands,—what a pleasing various art was spelling in olden time,—was, in the reign of Edward III., a nunnery, situated then, as now, on a slight eminence, with gently rising hills at a short distance behind, and a brook running to join the river Ivel, thence the German Ocean, along the valley in front of the house. The neighbouring scenery of Bedfordshire ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... had dawned, Morgan le Fay arose and, taking her horse, departed unattended from Camelot. All that day and most of the night she rode fast, and ere noon the next day, she was come to a nunnery where, as she knew, King Arthur lay. Entering into the house, she made herself known to the nuns, who received her courteously and gave her of their best to eat and to drink. When she was refreshed, ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... confessor who occupied an arm-chair in the church would have somewhat of novelty to enliven what some priests have stated to be the most wearisome of the work, namely, the hearing of confessions in a nunnery. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... to his people. The wine made in England was sweetened with honey, and probably flavoured and coloured with blackberries.[328] At the dissolution of the monasteries there was a vineyard at Barking Nunnery. 'We might have a reasonable good wine growing in many places of this realme', says Barnaby Googe, about 1577, 'as doubtless we had immediately after the Conquest, tyll, partly by slothfulnesse, partly by civil ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... syde of the toune to garde and defend, who on some onset behaving themselfes gallantly the Captain got that great plot of ground which goes now under that name gifted him by the toune, who after mortified to a nunnery neir hand, who at present are in possession of it. The church we fand to smell ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... a nunnery of the order of St. Dominic. In the chapel was a fine statue of the Virgin Mary, with four wax candles burning before her. Peeping through the bars, we perceived several fine young women at prayers. A middle-aged woman opened the door halfway, but would by no means suffer ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... I don't mind dropping in as I come home, to tell you about it. One of them Catholic Nunnery schools, I expect, which it's sudden death to a man but to set ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... accomplish the thirty miles that lay between; so utterly is that unearthly strength, before which lance-shafts were as reeds, and iron bars as silken threads (remember the May night in Meliagraunce's castle), enfeebled and broken down. He stands in the nunnery-church at Almesbury; he hears from the queen's maidens of the prayer that was ever on her lips through those two days when she lay a dying, how "she besought God that she might never have power to see Sir Launcelot with her worldly eyes." Then, says the chronicler, "he saw her visage; ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... of her, and the bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made jealous. But I am afraid—I say afraid, because I like the story so much—that there was no bower, no labyrinth, no silken clue, no dagger, no poison. I am afraid fair Rosamond retired to a nunnery near Oxford, and died there, peaceably; her sister-nuns hanging a silken drapery over her tomb, and often dressing it with flowers, in remembrance of the youth and beauty that had enchanted the King when he too was young, and when his ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... within herself again, 'Will the child kill me with her foolish prate?' But openly she spake and said to her, 'O little maid, shut in by nunnery walls, What canst thou know of Kings and Tables Round, Or what of signs and wonders, but the signs And ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the Danube, at the sky, and at the sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep! How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the faraway blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and the pine forests veiled in the mist of their summits... There was peace and happiness... "I should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I were there," thought Rostov. "In myself alone and in that sunshine there is so much happiness; but here... groans, suffering, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... thine own Ophelia, Come back to earth with heaviness o' grief Thy madness ne'er begot, for I have seen The efforts of a lisping, smirking maid, As graceful as a bean-pole, and as lean. Attempt to paint the sorrow of my heart. Oh, I would get me to a nunnery. ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... dissector has, to my knowledge, affirmed that Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "Get thee to a nunnery," and his assertion, "I have heard of your paintings, too," prove that Ophelia was an artist and a nunnery a favorable place in which to set up a studio. Yet I think I could make this assumption as convincing as many that have been "proved" by the post obitum atomizers of the great ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... reared in a manner as near to that of the nunnery as tribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and maidenly anxiety that she peeped out at the man who had surely come for her, at the husband who was to teach her all that was yet unlearned of life, at the masterful being whose word was to be her law, and who was to mete and bound her ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... should be doing their greater work of reproducing a race. Even an open-air cell seems to me out of place in our century. It will be entirely out of fashion in time, doubtless, as the mediaeval cell has gone along with the old castle life, whose princely mode of doing things made a nunnery the only respectable hiding-place for the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... awful happenings he had witnessed from the buffoon who had hidden under the table, to dispose their plans for the future (for Ottavio and Anna, marriage in a year; for Masetto and Zerlina, a wedding instanter; for Elvira, a nunnery), and platitudinously to moralize that, the perfidious wretch having been carried to the realm of Pluto and Proserpine, naught remained to do save to sing the old song, "Thus do the wicked find their end, dying ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... took place, and four figures in dark coats stole down the stairs. Though the building of the College might be absolutely modern, the garden was a relic of mediaeval days. It had formerly belonged to the nunnery of St. Mary's, and had adjoined the Abbey. Parts of the crumbling old wall were still left, and a flagged path led from a sun-dial to some ruins. In the day-time it was a cheerful place, and a blaze of color. The girls had never before ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... burn them,' she says. 'No, wait, I'll tear them to bits now myself and put them in the stove here.' And then she started pulling them to pieces, taking ever so many pages at a time and throwing them in the stove. 'Don't be so excited, Lovise,' said the Captain. 'The Nunnery,' she said—that was one of the books. 'But I can't go into a nunnery. There's nothing I can do. When I laugh, you think I'm laughing,' she said to the Captain, 'but I'm miserable all the time and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... irresponsibility. But Henry was determined to have such a sentence as would preclude all doubts of the legitimacy of his children by the second marriage, and was as anxious to shift the responsibility to Clement's shoulders as the Pope was to avoid it. Clement next urged Catherine to go into a nunnery, for that would only entail injustice on herself, and would involve the Church and its head in no temporal perils.[594] When Catherine (p. 214) refused, he wished her in the grave, and lamented that he seemed doomed through her to lose the spiritualties of his Church, as he had lost its temporalties ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... difficulty dragged himself in to Ravensburg. For three months he lay ill, and death came very close. As its unearthly glow irradiated the world around him, reversing its light and shade, the visions of the nunnery recurred. He vowed that if his life were still his to give, it should be given to God's service; and on recovering ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... that contain prayers, passages from the Bible, and images of the Star of David, http://www.visionartonline.com, which was blocked in Websense's "Sex" category; and the home page of Tenzin Palmo, a Buddhist nun, which contained a description of her project to build a Buddhist nunnery and international retreat center for women, http://www.tenzinpalmo.com, which was categorized as ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... have known * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * What they say of the example, so holy, so pure, That Ninon gives to worldlings all, By dwelling within a nunnery's wall. How many tears the poor lorn maid Shed, when her mother, alone, unafraid, Mid flaming tapers with coats of arms, Priests chanting their sad funereal alarms, Went down to the tomb in her winding sheet To serve for the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... has done me the favour of allowing me to build a nunnery for ladies here at the foot of Monte Cavallo, by the broken portico, where it is said that Nero saw Rome burning, so that the wicked footprints of such a man may be trodden out by others more honest of ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... humble blooms; with the low paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... retribution were beginning already; I began crying and trembling with terror. I felt as though the ceiling would fall upon me, that I should be dragged off to the police-station at once, that you would grow cold to me—all sorts of things, in fact! I thought I would go into a nunnery or become a nurse, and give up all thought of happiness, but then I remembered that you loved me, and that I had no right to dispose of myself without your knowledge; and everything in my mind was in a tangle—I was in despair ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov |
