Dictionary

conversus en · NOUN

Etymology

Borrowed from Ecclesiastical Latin conversus.

Meanings

1. (historical) A lay brother.
   • The Conversi were, in fact, the servants of the Monks; or, as the chronicler more mildly phrases it, the Monks were the head and the Conversi were the arms of the conventual body. 1874, Edmund Sharpe, The Architecture of the Cistercians, volume 2, page 9:
   • A story in the early thirteenth-century vita of Arnulf (d. 1228), a conversus who was Abundus’s confrere at Villers, offers us some insight into the kind of relationship Juette and Abundus may have had: […] 1995, Jennifer Carpenter, “Juette of Huy, Recluse and Mother […]”, in Jennifer Carpenter, Sally-Beth MacLean, editors, Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, →ISBN, page 74:
   • There were again the Novices, who were not all necessarily young, for a conversus passed through a noviciate; and even a monk of another order, or of another house of their own order, and even a monk from a cell of their own house, was reckoned among the novices. 1856, Edward L. Cutts, “The Monks of the Middle Ages”, in The Art-Journal, volume 2, pages 342–3:

Forms