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.[[121b]]
The same thing was seen among young women exposed to sundry
fanatical Protestant preachers.
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