monkery

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
   • A different form of reaction was that of the monks, who aspired to resuscitate what they supposed to be the true Christian spirit in alliance with the Church. But monkery was after all only an intensified Church within the Church, exhibiting the peculiar vices as well as advantages of...1867, Robert Mackay, The Eternal Gospel; or, The Idea of Christian Perfectibility
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
   • You are not to suppose that I, as a good Catholic, am under any obligation to confound the active, intelligent, heroic, and fruitful monasticism of Columba with the systematic stupefaction of manhood in the monkery which came afterwards.1882, John Stuart Blackie, Altavona: Fact and Fiction from my Life in the Highlands, page 241
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
   • Polite society won't have the truth. You've got to feed it on lies, or go into a monkery — if that's what they call a masculine nunnery. Don't want to go into a monkery, so I lie. Reluctantly, delicately, frequently.February 1896, Ground-swells, by Jeannette H. Walworth, published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine; page 183
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...
   • Unquestionably the monkery of the middle ages was better ordered than that of the Nicene.1840, Isaac Taylor, Ancient Christianity, and the doctrines of the Oxford tracts, page 431