monkeries

Noun

monkery (countable and uncountable, plural monkeries)

1. (dated, derogatory, often) The practices of monks; the way of life, behavior, etc. characteristic of monks; monastic life.
   • Even such monkery was confined entirely to the laity; the clergy having cures in villages or in towns, and being therefore precluded from monastic sequestrations. In time, however, monkery found its way among the clergy, […]1804, John Whitaker, The Ancient Cathedral of Cornwall Historically Surveyed, volume II, page 263
2. (dated, derogatory) Monasticism.
   • As the circumstances of their living on barley bread and herbs [...] existed nowhere, that we have seen, but in the monkish imaginations of Jerome and Bellarmine. As the circumstances on which the argument is founded, vanish upon inspection, so does the monkery of Elijah, Elisha, and the sons of...1850, Henry Ruffner, The Fathers of the Desert; or An Account of the Orgin and Practice of Monkery, page 194
3. (dated, derogatory, humorous, often) A monastery.
   • The sides resemble castellated piles and Gothic cathedrals, so fantastic are the shapes assumed by the natural rock; under St. Saba it became a monkery for all penitents who wished to live a hermit's life.1876, Lady Isabel Burton, The inner life of Syria, Palestine, and the Holy Land: from my private journal, volume 2, page 190
4. (collective, dated) Monks, considered as a group. (Compare clergy, laity.)
   • And furthermore, so long as they do entangle and bind themselves with so many and so perverse and wicked kinds of worshipping as the monkery now-a-days doth contain in it, I may well say that they are not consecrated unto God, […]???, John Borthwick, in an Answer to John Foxe, who wrote about The Persecution in Scotland, as published in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, volume V (Stephen Reed Cattley, editor), in 1838...