Aconvent is an enclosed community ofmonks,nuns,friars orreligious sisters. Those residing in a convent are known asconventuals. Alternatively,convent means the building used by the community. The term is particularly used in theCatholic Church,Lutheran churches, and theAnglican Communion.[2]
The termconvent derives via Old French from Latinconventus, perfect participle of the verbconvenio, meaning "to convene, to come together". It was first used in this sense when the eremitical life began to be combined with the cenobitical. The original reference was to the gathering of mendicants who spent much of their time travelling. Technically, amonastery is a secluded community of monastics, whereas a friary or convent is a community ofmendicants (which, by contrast, might be located in a city), and acanonry is a community ofcanons regular. The termsabbey andpriory can be applied to both monasteries and canonries; an abbey is headed by anabbot, and a priory is a lesser dependent house headed by aprior. In theMiddle Ages, convents often provided to women a way to excel, as they were considered inferior to men.[3] In convents, women were educated and were able to write books and publish works on gardening or musicology[3] or on religion and philosophy. Theabbess of a convent was often also involved in decisions of secular life and interacted with politicians and businessmen.[3] Unlike anabbey, a convent is not placed under the responsibility of an abbot or an abbess, but of a superior or prior.
In modern English usage, since about the 19th century, the termconvent almost invariably refers to a community of women,[4] while monastery andfriary are used for communities of men. In historical usage they are often interchangeable, withconvent especially likely to be used for a friary. When applied to religious houses inEastern Orthodoxy andBuddhism, English refers to all houses of male religious as monasteries and of female religious as convents.
Themendicant orders appeared at the beginning of the 13th century with the growth of cities; they include in particular theDominicans, theFranciscans, theCarmelites, and theAugustinians. While theBenedictine monks and their various variants devoted themselves to their agricultural properties, themendicant friars settled from the start in the cities, or in the suburbs thereof, preferably in the poorer and more densely populated districts. They therefore had to adapt their buildings to these new constraints.
Finally, irrespective of religious beliefs, convents remained a possible model for women—Catholic as well as Protestant—to pursue. In Protestant Germany, forms of female religious associative life did not die out, but instead survived in the shape of Protestant convents. These could be governed by a Lutheran abbess, and inhabited by Lutheran nuns in religious habits who claimed membership of a monastic order, paradoxical though this may seem.
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