Free TranslationFree Translation
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Conventual   Listen
Conventual

adjective
1.
Of communal life sequestered from the world under religious vows.  Synonyms: cloistered, cloistral, monastic, monastical.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Conventual" Quotes from Famous Books



... most worthy of imitation— only, thinks Madelon, she would have taken care not to have been caught, and brought back again. The subsequent history of the saint she found less edifying; nothing that savoured of conventual life found favour in Madelon's eyes in these days; and indeed her whole faith in saints and legends was rudely shaken one day by a broad and somewhat reckless assertion on the part of Soeur Lucie, that ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... schools for both sexes were 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

... intention,—is proved by (p. 036) evidence most painfully conclusive. Indeed, the enormities which had grown up, and which were defended and cherished by the agents of Rome, far exceed both in number and magnitude the present general opinion with regard to those times. The Conventual system[34] had well nigh destroyed the efficiency of parochial ministrations: what was intended for the support of the pastor, was withdrawn to uphold the dignity and luxury of the monastery; parsonage houses were left to fall to decay, and hirelings of a very ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... and imposing size; it is the chateau of 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 ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... succeeding century. Her nobility of character, her lofty 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 a brilliant ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... origin of all systems of education has had a very injurious influence, on that of women especially, because the conventual spirit has been ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... "stage-fright." Artists of marked pretension have been compelled to abandon a public career because of this affliction. There are other examples of it even more difficult to understand. I have in mind a case of a singing-teacher in a conventual school, who was under a peculiar strain of preparation for the commencement exercises of the school and of her own class and their appearance in public. She brought her class up to the appearing-point. Then her nervous system gave ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... and should be inherited by him free and independent; that the military tenants of the crown should never be obliged to go out of Scotland, in order to do homage to the sovereign of the united kingdoms, nor the chapters of cathedral, collegiate, or conventual churches, in order to make elections; that the parliaments summoned for Scottish affairs should always be held within the bounds of that kingdom; and that Edward should bind himself, under the penalty of one hundred thousand marks, payable to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... the way. Close to Velate, for example, there is the magnificent bit of ruin which is so striking a feature as seen from the Sacro Monte. A little further on, at Luinate, there is a fine old Lombard campanile and some conventual buildings which are worth sparing five minutes or so to see. The views hereabouts over the lake of Varese and towards Monte Rosa are exceedingly fine. The driver should be told to go a mile or so out of his direct route in order to pass Oltrona, near Voltrone. Here ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... "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

... ideal, in 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 ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... to know their names. Here they are: Dupierreux of the Society of Jesus, Brothers Sebastian and Allard of the Congregation of the Josephites, Brother Candide of the Congregation of the Brothers of Mercy, Father Maximin, Capuchin, and Father Vincent, Conventual; Lombaerts, parish priest at Boven-Loo; Goris, parish priest at Autgaerden; Carette, professor at the Episcopal College of Louvain; de Clerck, parish priest at Bueken; Dergent, parish priest at Gelrode, and ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... little remains to him to use in other ways. He is a monk, vowed to the Rule of St. Francis. As you know, since the promulgation of the Laws of the Reform, monks are not permitted in our country to live in communities; but, with only a few exceptions, the conventual churches which have not be secularized still are administered by members of the religious orders to which they formerly belonged. Fray Antonio has the charge of the church of San Francisco—over by the market-place, you know—and virtually is a parish priest. He is a ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... in 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. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various

... different vein from that of 'Manon,' or indeed any of his earlier works. The voluptuous passion of his accustomed style is exchanged for the mystic raptures of monasticism. Cupid has doffed his bow and arrows and donned the conventual cowl. 'Le Jongleur' is an operatic version of one of the prettiest stories in Anatole France's 'Etui de Nacre.' Jean the juggler is persuaded by the Prior of the Abbey of Cluny to give up his godless life and turn monk. He enters the monastery, but ere long is distressed to find that while ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... standing high and lonely on its hill, begirt with the vine-clad, crumbling walls of Michel Angelo,—the repose of the dome-crowned city in the vale below,—seemed to have wrought their impression with peculiar force upon her mind that afternoon. On their way home, they had entered the conventual church that stands half way up the hill, just as the vesper service was beginning, and she spoke of the simple spirit of devotion that filled the place, and of the gentle wonder with which, to use her own words, the "peasant women turned their ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... 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 been extremely useful in mitigating distress among the poor, it was now argued that their indiscriminate ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Priory Church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield • George Worley

... 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

... learning her own pedigree, and was obliged to me for informing her, that she must 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 Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... determine. Shall I use it? I 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

... remained, always recruiting their numbers from England, till 1861, when they returned to England. Syon House is now established at Chudleigh in Devon, the only English community that can boast an unbroken conventual existence since pre-Reformation times. Some six other Bridgittine convents exist on the Continent, but the order is now composed ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... 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? ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... itself is one of the two erected by St. Hugh, partly with his own hands. It is the lay brothers' church (called since pre-Franciscan days, the Friary). The conventual church has left no wrack behind. The style is entirely Burgundian, a single nave, with Romanesque windows, ending in an apse. The "tortoise" roof, of vaulted stone, is as lovely as it is severe. In 1760 the Tudor oaken bell-turret survived. The horrid story of how a jerry-built ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson

... threw off her waterproof and unloosed the strings of her black bonnet. Her dark serge dress with its white turn-down collar and armlets—worn these last for the sake of her embroidery work—gave her a dedicated conventual look. She was paler than of old; the eyes, though beautiful and luminous, were no longer young, and lines were fast deepening in the cheeks and chin, with their round childish moulding. What had been naivete and tremulous sweetness at twenty, was now conscious strength ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... heavy day to us all," said Baccio della Porta, the amiable and pure-minded artist better known to our times by his conventual name of Fra Bartolommeo. "Never have we had among us such a man; and if there be any light of grace in my soul, his preaching first awakened it, brother. I only wait to see him enter Paradise, and then I take farewell of the world forever. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... heathenish invention, and the voice of the female womankind I rejected as equally shrill and dissonant; wherefore, contrary to the said Mahommed, or Mahomet, I have resumed the bell. It has a local propriety, since it was the conventual signal for spreading the repast in their refectory, and it has the advantage over the tongue of my sister's prime minister, Jenny, that, though not quite so loud and shrill, it ceases ringing the instant you drop the bell-rope: whereas we know, by sad experience, that any ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... materials the brethren had to work on, must have been a laborious undertaking. There is neither priest nor schoolmaster in the town, but I was pleased to observe a number of children taught by one of the inhabitants. The cultivated lands attached to all these conventual establishments in Angola are now rented by the government of Loanda, and thither the bishop lately removed all the gold and silver vessels belonging ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... Why should students and men of learning be expected to be holier than other people? When Merton started his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes that he did not intend to found a society after the old conventual type, but to enter upon ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... to take them. Four of the ancient backs were found in a corner of the sacristy, and eight carried to Siena and found superfluous were returned, as well as one which a neighbouring villager had taken. Some of them show the conventual buildings as they were at the beginning of the 16th century. The frames resemble friezes, and are decorated with flowers, fruit, birds, musical instruments, arms, and ornament. Each back is separated from the next ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... of a conventual hush in her voice, she said to the butler, "Please tell my maid that we are leaving by a very early train to-morrow, and that she ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... open for fear of attracting attention, Francis observed but little to indicate the manners of the inhabitants, and that little argued no more than a close reserve and a taste for solitude. The garden was conventual, the house had the air of a prison. The green blinds were all drawn down upon the outside; the door into the verandah was closed; the garden, as far as he could see it, was left entirely to itself in the evening sunshine. A modest curl of smoke ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the episcopal palace, or "casa parochial," by Bishop Don Bernardo de Valbuena, poet and author of a pastoral novel entitled the Golden Age, and other works of literary merit. This library, together with that of the Dominicans, and the respective episcopal and conventual archives were burned by the Hollanders during the siege of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... 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 Dominus, so usual was it to find that a regular academical course of study was requisite ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... Bork and George Putkammer are at length betrothed— Item, how Sidonia is degraded from her conventual dignities and carried to the witches' ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... or three mud-stains on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt that were obtrusively incongruous. Her voice, which had, however, a ring of honest intention in it, was somewhat over-strained, and evidently had not yet adjusted itself to the low-ceilinged, conventual-like building. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... year 1429, Christine was sixty-seven years old; she had been living in some conventual establishment for eleven years. Her verses in praise of Joan of Arc—which number several hundred stanzas—were undoubtedly written in the heroine's life-time. They are supposed to have been the last lines she wrote. These stanzas were completed ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower

... 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 ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... breathless and in tears, because she felt sure that she could not chant holy songs if she were being burned at the stake. She had been vowed to the Virgin in her babyhood, and was always dressed in white and blue, but her little dress was a small conventual robe, straight and narrow cut, of white woollen stuff, and banded plainly with blue at the waist. She did not look like other children, but she was very sweet and gentle, and her pure little pale face and large, dark eyes had a lovely dreamy look. When she was old enough to visit the poor ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... 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

... 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 him his ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... an Egyptian hermit, the founder of conventual monachism, who established the first institution of the kind at Tabenna, an island in the Nile; he also established the first nunnery under his sister (292-348). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... 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 out by ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... was an old conventual building on the river-side, consisting of a number of sets of separate chambers, like those of a college, opening on a quadrangle in the centre, and with one side occupied by the state apartments and ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Severn, and on the Great Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3067. It occupies the slope of a hill on the western (left) bank of the river, and is environed by beautiful scenery. The church of St Mary, originally the conventual chapel of a Benedictine priory of Norman foundation, has remains of that period in the west front and the nave, but a rebuilding of the chancel and transepts was effected in the beginning of the 19th century. The church contains many interesting monuments. The castle, still a magnificent pile, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... mansion was a white horse,[101] which was being submitted to her inspection as on former occasions. When he entered, he noticed that all the hangings of the room and the dresses of the inmates were of the dark hues of conventual life. The only things that there seemed to herald spring, were the melting of the thin ice on the surface of the lake, and the budding of the willows on its banks. The scene suggested many reflections to his mind; and, after the usual greetings of the season, and a short ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... 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 love, and render her entirely up to sacred ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book III. • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... life's rough way, sought peace in the ascetic life. He drifted in 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 ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... irreparable mutilation. He tells the story with perfect frankness and with hardly more than formal expressions of compunction, and thereafter follows the narrative of their separation, he to a monastery, she to a convent, and of his care for her during her conventual life, or at least for that part of it that had passed before the "History" was written. Through the whole story it is Heloise who shines brightly as a curiously beautiful personality, unselfish, self sacrificing, and almost virginal in her purity in spite of her fault. One ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard

... tumult of his feelings; but he mastered them, and entered. There was a long interval. I pictured to myself the scene passing within: the poor novice despoiled of her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow. I saw her extended on a bier; the death-pall spread over her; the funeral service performed that proclaimed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... 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 most famous warrior of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... great repairs, the books being sorted over by a most ignorant person, whose selection seems to have been determined by the coat. All books without covers were thrown into a great heap, and condemned to all the purposes which Leland laments in the sack of the conventual libraries by the visitors. But they found favour in the eyes of a literate gardener, who begged leave to take what he liked home. He selected a large quantity of Sermons preached before the House of Commons, local pamphlets, tracts from 1680 to 1710, opera books, ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades

... the Father gently. "She left her vocation to me, and I decided for her to become a Sister of Mercy. I have little sympathy," with a shrug half argumentative, half deprecatory—"but little sympathy with the conventual system for spirits like hers. She would have wasted and worn away in the offices of prayer. She needed action. And she had the full of it in her calling. She went from bedside to bedside of the sick and dying—here a child in a fever; there a widow-woman in the last stages of consumption—night ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell

... very words, liberty, order, justice, people, honour, influence, &c., could not have the same signification at Rome, as they have, or ought to have, at Paris. How can you expect that all these youths who have been at university or conventual schools, with Livy and Quintus Curtius for their catechism, will not understand liberty like the Gracchi, virtue like Cato, patriotism like Caesar? How can you expect them not to be factious and warlike? How can you expect them to take ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... visiting the fort of Quebec would have been astonished at its air of conventual decorum. Black Jesuits and scarfed officers mingled at Champlain's table. There was little conversation, but, in its place, histories and the lives of saints were read aloud, as in a monastic refectory. Prayers, masses, and confessions followed one another with an edifying ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... 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 private manners and customs, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... sainted," come with the quiet of the cloister as a relief to this lust and pride of life: like some grey monastic picture hung on the wall of a gaudy room, their presence cools the heated air of the piece. For a moment we [176] are within the placid conventual walls, whither they fancy at first that the Duke has come as a man crossed in love, with Friar Thomas and Friar Peter, calling each other by their homely, English names, or at the nunnery among the novices, with their ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... he took this step even without the consent of his parents. "He knew little about the ways of God, and was not well informed of the gravity and responsibilities of the step he was taking." "He was not called by God to conventual life; . . . he was driven by despair, rather than the love of higher perfection, into a religious career." Catholics feel so sure that they have a case against Luther that in all seriousness they ask Protestants the question: ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... 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 novice had ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... opening from the great hall, and thither were bidden Francesco and Gonzaga. The company was waited upon by the two pages, whilst Fra Domenico, with a snow-white apron girt about his portentous waist, brought up the steaming viands from the kitchen where he had prepared them; for, like a true conventual, he was something of a master in the confection—and a very glutton in the consumption—of delectable comestibles. The kitchen was to him as the shrine of some minor cult, and if his breviary and beads commanded ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... Syr. abba, father), a monastery, or conventual establishment, under the government of an ABBOT or an ABBESS. A priory only differed from an abbey in that the superior bore the name of prior instead of abbot. This was the case in all the English conventual cathedrals, e.g. Canterbury, Ely, Norwich, &c., ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... its importance. They can find little help in the fashionable boarding-schools for finishing young ladies; and, in general, these schools only aggravate the evils to be cured. The best and the only respectable schools for daughters that we have in the country are the conventual schools taught by women consecrated to God, and specially devoted to the work of education. These schools, indeed, are not always all that might be wished. The religious cannot, certainly, supply the place of the mother in giving their pupils that practical home-training so necessary, and which ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... however, consciousness returned; and 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

... of Brandywine & Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one would be waited on by a lady—for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was, for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had belonged to Stuart's cavalry and had fallen at Yellow Tavern; there was Miss Meason of the glove counter, and there was Mrs. Burwell Smith of the ribbon ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... father—an officer in India—to the care of an elderly aunt residing near Paris. The accounts of the various persons who have an after influence on the story, the school companions of Margery, the sisters of the Conventual College of Art, the professor, and the peasantry of Fontainebleau, are singularly vivid. There is a subtle attraction about the book which will make it a great ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... a degree involving the destruction of the paintings. He was the principal assistant of Fra Filippo in the grand frescoes which may still be seen at the east end of the cathedral of Prato. In the midst of the work he was recalled to Florence by his conventual superior, and a minute of proceedings of the commune of Prato is still extant, in which it is determined to petition the metropolitan of Florence to obtain his return to Prato,—a proof that his share in the work was so important that his recall involved the suspension ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... menees of the Greeks, on the 15th of October, that a monk of the Desert of Sheti, having been excommunicated by him who had the care of his conduct, for some act of disobedience, he left the desert, and came to Alexandria, where he was arrested by the governor of the city, despoiled of his conventual habit, and ardently solicited to sacrifice to false gods. The solitary resisted nobly, and was tormented in various ways, until at last they cut off his head, and threw his body outside of the city, to be devoured by dogs. The Christians took it away in the night, and having embalmed it and enveloped ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... bare. It almost looked like the parlour of a convent; with a little more austerity, whitened walls and a few thick velvet and gilt lives of the saints on the tables, the likeness would have been complete. The house itself was conventual in aspect, and Lady Channice, as she stood there in the quiet light at the window, looked not unlike a nun, were it not for her crown of pale gold hair that shone in the dark room and seemed, like the roses, to bring into it the brightness of an ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... nave, aisles, choir, unaisled transepts, western tower, and Lady Chapel. The cloisters and the domestic buildings have disappeared. It is highly probable that there was once a central tower, an almost invariable accompaniment of a Norman conventual church. There is no documentary evidence relating to a central tower, but the massive piers and arches at the corners of the transepts seem to indicate that provision was made for one, and the representation of a tower of two stages on an old Priory seal, may be either the record ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath

... great magnificence. His niece, Mme. de Cambalet, was made Duchesse D'Aiguillon that she might adorn the sphere in which the Cardinal moved so royally. She was a beautiful woman of simple tastes, and yearned for a life of conventual seclusion as she received the homage of Corneille or visited the salon of the ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... be wholly transferred to that medium where lay the creature's spiritual affinities; his origins would be disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast his disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate, conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning, nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have seen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in that ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... sitting on the steps of the church and watching certain white-cowled friars who were sure to be passing there for the delight of my eyes. There are fewer friars now, and there are a great many of the king's recruits, who inhabit the ex-conventual barracks adjoining Santa Croce and are led forward to practise their goose-step on the sunny turf. Here too the poor old cardinals who are no longer to be seen on the Pincio descend from their mourning-coaches and relax their venerable knees. These members ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... confectionery was consummate, so that half the ladies in Dorset and Wilts longed to send their daughters to be educated at Hurst Walwyn. Her small figure and soft cheeks had the gentle contour of a dove's form, nor had she lost the conventual serenity of expression; indeed it was curious that, let Lady Walwyn array her as she would, whatever she wore bore a nunlike air. Her silken farthingales hung like serge robes, her ruffs looked like mufflers, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 prophets, like the primitive ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater

... exhibiting the effect of four bottles of "Jones's Freckle Eradicator," and in a pleasant and unobtrusive way revived the memory of the saint. Still, she felt weary and was growing despondent, and had a longing for the good Sisters and the blameless lethargy of conventual life, and then— ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte

... inside, he found the sunshine pouring through the south 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... 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

... unique fact that mass is celebrated at midnight. I say, advisably, is celebrated, because, although Cardinal Manning abolished public mass at that hour within the diocese of Westminster about 1867, yet in conventual establishments it is still kept up, and in every church three masses are celebrated. The ancient, and, in fact, the modern use, until interrupted by Cardinal Manning, was to celebrate mass at midnight, at daybreak, and at the third hour (9 a.m.) This use is very old; ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... 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 ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall

... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... imposing assembly was gathered in the spacious conventual refectory.[1110] On an elevated seat, upon the dais at its farther extremity, was the king, on whose youthful shoulders rested the crushing weight of the government of a kingdom rent by discordant sentiments and selfish factions, and already upon the verge of an open civil war. Near him ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... triforium and the choir aisles; but judging from fragments discovered from time to time, such as the capital to a nook shaft shown in fig. 1, which clearly belong to this period, he had completed other works which have now been destroyed. Perhaps during his life-time the conventual buildings, as was the case at Merton, were mainly of wood, and of a merely temporary character; but it may be assumed that these, together with the cloisters, had been built when the great arch, which formed the entrance to the priory (shown in fig. 2), was completed about the middle of the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... 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 746,000 adherents to ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... we should endeavour to gain some notion of the general plan of these buildings first, and when we have done that that we should proceed to deal next with the constitution of the society itself and the daily routine of conventual life. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp

... she hooked on her skirt she reflected on the necessity of not leaving bottles of scent nor too many sponges for the observation of the nuns; and the nightgown she had brought was certainly not a conventual garment. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... life from the point of view of the convent. As a guest, I felt it to be impossible to remain in the convent for three months, and it pleased me, I admit it, and interested me, I admit it, to try to become part of this conventual life, so different, so strangely different, from the life of the world, so remote from common sympathies. In speaking of this life, one hardly knows what words to employ, so inadequate are words to express one's meaning, or shall I say one's feeling? 'Actress again,' ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... Mrs. Minne, charming and a widow, stood with her pretty nun-like face inclined to the tall, black Mr. Biterolf, the basso of the opera. She had been sonnetted until her perfectly arched eyebrows were famous. Her air of well-bred and conventual calm never had been known to desert her; and her high, light, colorless soprano had something in it of the sexless timbre of the boy chorister. With her blond hair pressed meekly to her shapely head she ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... Middle Ages for widows to assume vows of chastity. The present topic might possibly have been reserved for the pages devoted to domestic customs, but the recognition accorded by the Church to a state which was neither conventual nor lay, but partook of both conditions in equal measure, decides its position in the economy of the work. We must deal ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... monastery, and often filled the office of secretary to my Lord Abbot. In the monasteries of course the services of the librarian were unrequited by any pecuniary remuneration, but in the cathedral libraries a certain salary was sometimes allowed them. Thus we learn that the amanuensis of the conventual church of Ely received in the year 1372 forty-three shillings and fourpence for his annual duties;[35] and Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, in the tenth century, gave considerable landed possessions to a monk of that church as a recompense for his services ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... was encumbered not only with settlements for his, children by previous marriages, but by debts contracted in the cause of his oppressed country. A convention of doctors and bishops of France; summoned by the Duc de Montpensier, afterwards confirmed the opinion that the conventual vows of the Princess Charlotte had been conformable neither to the laws of France nor to the canons of the Trent Council. She was conducted to Brill by Saint Aldegonde, where she was received by her bridegroom, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... who is such an earnest champion of 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. Not far away is Bosworth Field, and in another direction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... her former school friends, girls belonging to fine Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families, one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly. There were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of well-known artists. Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center around ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... architecture to study with accuracy the principles of the art, which has occasioned the restoration and preservation in such an admirable manner of so many of our finest cathedrals. colleges, and ancient Gothic and conventual buildings. This, it must be at least allowed, was the fortunate result of the rage for Gothic, which succeeded the building of Strawberry Hill. For a good many years after that event, every new building was pinnacled and turreted on all sides, however ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... 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

... the Breviary used in cloisters, he was first led into Protestant views. He had been for seventeen years resident in different cloisters of his order, as sick-nurse, alms gatherer, student, and physician, and knew the conventual life out and out. As he testifies: "There was little of the fear of God, so far as I could see, little of true piety; but abundance of hypocrisy, eye-service, deception, abuse of the poor sick people in the hospitals, ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson

... front, she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back—oh, no! always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain, and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor possessed by a steamboat ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King

... as sincerely in love as I was, the silence and simplicity of the life, the almost conventual regularity with which the same things are done daily at the same hours, only deepened and strengthened love. In that profound calm the interest attaching to the least action, word, or gesture became immense. I learned to know that, in the interchange ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... Simon, and scattered among other religious houses in all directions. The friends of the buried were bidden to exhume their dead, and all unclaimed bodies were flung into a neighbouring cemetery, where dogs fought for them as for carrion. The church was profaned, all the conventual buildings were razed and sold in lots, not one stone being left on another; the very ground was ploughed up and sown, "not, it is true with salt," adds St. Simon, and that was the ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... these two fires the eastern arm and transepts of Gundulf's fabric, and Ernulf's conventual buildings, must have been much injured if not reduced to ruins, and to the date of the second the outer part of the north choir aisle possibly belongs. Probably about 1190, Gilbert de Glanvill, who was Bishop of Rochester from 1185 to 1214, built a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer

... almost his whole life under its shadow, and knew the history of almost every stone or quarry of glass, was the best of lionisers, and gave her much attention when he perceived how intelligent and appreciative she was. He showed her the plan of the old conventual buildings, and she began to unravel the labyrinth through which she had been hurried. The Close and Deanery were modernised, but he valued the quaint old corner where he lived for its genuine age. The old house now divided between him ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the 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." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... beginning of the fifteenth century by Bertram de Rosmadec, who had so 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 kindly granting ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser

... up from garden to garden until we came to a large terrace full of flowers, which surrounded the conventual buildings and commanded a magnificent view of ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties

... cosmopolitan ways. Let the clergy marry in France, laicize all schools, alike for rich and poor, and what may be called the aesthetic side of domestic economy, to say nothing of hygiene, would soon spread to the remotest corners of the country. Will it be believed, at Nant, in that conventual establishment I have before described, there was absolutely no lavatory for the children at all? They were just taken to a fountain in the courtyard, there to be washed after the manner of ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... 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 going to his ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... devotions. Some of those benefactors, most generously, defrayed the expenses of a religious festival, from which resulted a considerable profit to the convent in which that festival was celebrated. Others repaired conventual edifices at their own expense, or enlarged them by making extensive wings or other additions, in which there was always a profuse display of marble, bronze, and other precious materials. But the principal source of the revenue of the mendicant orders was that ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... individuals of strong will and passion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him: the one turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly endeavoring by authority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel to subjection. The discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various



Words linked to "Conventual" :   cloistral, unworldly, convent



Copyright © 2024 e-Free Translation.com