A large percentage of well-born women, accustomed to luxury, and vitiated by bad examples in their homes, were thus thrown on a monastic life.

Signor Bonghi reckons that at the end of the sixteenth century, more than five hundred girls, who had become superfluous in noble families, crowded the convents in the single little town of Lucca.

At a later epoch there would have been no special peril in this circumstance.

But at the time with which we are now occupied, an objectionable license still survived from earlier ages.

The nunneries obtained evil notoriety as houses of licentious pleasure, to which soldiers and youths of dissolute habits resorted by preference.[186] There appears to have been a specific profligate fanaticism, a well-marked morbid partiality for these amours with cloistered virgins.
The young men who prosecuted them, obtained a nickname indicative of their absorbing passion.[187] The attraction of mystery and danger had something, no doubt, to do with this infatuation; and the fascination that sacrilege has for depraved natures, may also be reckoned into the account.