Convent
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the fraternity or sisterhood of an abbey or priory; a community of religious persons, whether monks or nuns. At first those who withdrew to the desert lived solitarily; the gathering together into a community of all those solitaries who could be brought to tolerate the restraint of a society regulated by rule was a later movement. In the United States, owing to religious upheavals going on in the Old World, a very large number of the religious consecrate of the Roman Catholic Church have found refuge. One of the oldest of our commonwealths, that of Maryland, was settled by the Catholics who at an early date laid the foundations of numerous convents and monasteries. As the settlements and centers of population pushed farther in every direction from the Atlantic coast, convents and nunneries were established in every large town. The term convent is here applied almost exclusively to an establishment containing a sodality of nuns, the male religiouses being denominated monks and their establishments monasteries. It is said that the first convent in England was erected by Eadbald at Folkestone in 630, and the first in Scotland at Coldingham in 670. They were numerous during the during the Middle Ages. Henry VIII. suppressed them, confiscating their revenues. By the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 their erection in the United Kingdom was prohibited, but the Act was from the first so much of a dead letter that they were established in various places. In 1875 one was opened at Bournemouth under the auspices of the Ritualist party in the Established Church.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 it described convents multiplying "in every large town" of the United States as immigration and European upheaval swelled the religious orders. That expansion peaked in 1965, when about 180,000 Catholic sisters served in the United States; today the figure is roughly 35,000, most of them over seventy, and hundreds of motherhouses have been sold, merged or converted into retirement centres, schools and retreat houses. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) also transformed daily life inside them, with many communities abandoning the traditional habit, enclosure and Latin office for work outside the convent walls. The legal picture in Britain changed too: the restrictions on religious orders carried in the 1829 Emancipation Act, which Collier's rightly called a dead letter, were repealed in the twentieth century, while Anglican communities of the kind founded at Bournemouth in 1875 have themselves dwindled to a handful.
Written for this edition, 2026.