From the earliest period it is evident that monastic life tended to develop insanity.

Such cases as that of St.Anthony are typical of its effects upon the strongest minds; but it was especially the convents for women that became the great breeding-beds of this disease.

Among the large numbers of women and girls thus assembled--many of them forced into monastic seclusion against their will, for the reason that their families could give them no dower--subjected to the unsatisfied longings, suspicions, bickerings, petty jealousies, envies, and hatreds, so inevitable in convent life--mental disease was not unlikely to be developed at any moment.
Hysterical excitement in nunneries took shapes sometimes comical, but more generally tragical.

Noteworthy is it that the last places where executions for witchcraft took place were mainly in the neighbourhood of great nunneries; and the last famous victim, of the myriads executed in Germany for this imaginary crime, was Sister Anna Renata Singer, sub-prioress of a nunnery near Wurzburg.( 372) (372) Among the multitude of authorities on this point, see Kirchhoff, as above, p.

337; and for a most striking picture of this dark side of convent life, drawn, indeed, by a devoted Roman Catholic, see Manzoni's Promessi Sposi.