WOMEN'S PART ( 5). The Nuns.—In all ages women, hardly less than men, have played their part in monasticism. In the earliest Christian times the veiled virgins formed a grade or order apart, more formally separated from the community than were the male as cetics. There is reason for believing that there were organized convents for women before there were any for men; for when St. Anthony left the world in 27o to em brace the ascetic life, the Vita says he placed his sister in a nunnery (rapOu6o). We learn from Palladius that by the end of the 4th century nunneries were numer ous all over Egypt, and they existed also in Palestine, in Italy and in Africa—in fact throughout the Christian world. It is a curious coincidence that the sister of each of the three great cenobitical found ers, Pachomius, Basil and Benedict, was a nun and ruled a com munity of nuns according to an adaptation of her brother's rule for monks. In the West the Benedictine nuns played a great part in the Christian settlement of north-western Europe. As the various monastic and mendicant orders arose, a female branch was in most cases formed alongside of the order; and so we find the canonesses, and hermitesses and Dominicanesses, and Franciscan nuns, or Clares (q.v.). Then there were the "double orders" of Sempringham (see GILBERT OF,) and Fonte vrault, in which the nuns were the predominant, or even the dominant, element. Of the modern orders of men only a few in clude nuns. The great majority of these modern congregations of women follow the Augustinian rule, supplemented by special con stitutions or by-laws; such are the Brigittines, the Ursulines and the Visitation nuns: others follow the rule of the third order of the Franciscans or other mendicants (see TERTIARIES). In early
times nuns could go out of their enclosure on occasion ; but in the later middle ages, up to the Council of Trent, the tendency was to keep them more and more strictly confined within their con vent precincts. In 1609 an English lady, Mary Ward, founded at Munich the "Institute of Mary," the nuns of which were not bound to enclosure. St. Vincent de Paul soon followed; in 1633 he established the Sisters of Charity, bound only by yearly vows, and wholly given up to works of charity—chiefly nursing in hospitals and in the homes of the poor, and primary education in poor schools. The nuns belonging to the older orders tend to the contemplative idea, and they still find recruits in sufficient numbers, in spite of the modern rush to the active congregations. These latter exist in wondrous number and variety, exercising every imaginable form of good work—education, both primary and secondary; the care of hospitals, orphanages, penitentiaries, prisons ; of asylums for the blind, the deaf and dumb, the insane; of refuges for the aged poor and the destitute.
For monasticism generally see Helyot, Histoire des ordres religieux (1714, 2nd ed. 1792) ; Max Heimbucher, Orden and Kongregationen, 2nd ed. 1907, 3 vols. (good bibliography) ; Leclerc, art. "Cenobitisme" in Dictionnaire d'Archeologie et de Liturgie; and for first lc) sections, E. C. Butler, Benedictine Monachism. See also the works named at the end of the various articles referred to in the text.