Definition
In legal and ecclesiastical contexts, a nun is a woman who has taken formal religious vows — typically poverty, chastity, and obedience — and lives within a recognized religious community, usually a convent or monastery. Historically, the legal significance of nuns arose primarily in areas of property law, civil capacity, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Upon taking solemn vows, a nun was treated in the law of England and the canon law tradition as civilly dead (see: civil death), meaning she lost the capacity to hold property in her own right, enter contracts, or inherit. Her property passed as if she had died naturally. This status had direct consequences in matters of dower, inheritance disputes, and the administration of monastic estates.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A woman who has taken religious vows and lives in a convent; also, the fourteenth letter of several Semitic abjads.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A woman devoted to a religious life, who lives in a convent, under the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience."
The common meaning is stable and intuitive, but the legal gap is significant: in ordinary usage, "nun" describes a vocation or religious identity. In historical legal usage, it described a formal civil status with concrete property and capacity consequences — consequences that could be litigated, contested, and reversed under specific circumstances. A researcher treating "nun" as merely descriptive in a historical legal document will miss the operative legal weight the word carried.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval English law, ecclesiastical records, or Chancery proceedings will encounter the legal status of nuns in contexts that are easy to misread. Several traps are worth flagging:
First, the doctrine of civil death as applied to professed nuns was not uniform across time or jurisdiction. In pre-Reformation England, it was well-established canonical and common law principle. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the legal framework collapsed almost entirely, and surviving nuns occupied an uncertain transitional status — relevant to property disputes that surface well into the sixteenth century.
Second, Burrill's fragmentary entry in the source material is not a definition of "nun" at all — it is a passage from the Magna Carta clause beginning Nec imprisonetur (No free man shall be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled, or in any way destroyed...). This is a misfiling in the source corpus. Researchers should treat it as a corpus artifact, not as any legal definition of the term NUN. The proximity of "NUN" as a header to that passage reflects either an alphabetical collision or a digitization error around the Latin particle nunc or similar.
Third, in chancery and probate records, the phrase "took the veil" or "entered religion" is the functional equivalent of a legal act — it triggers civil death consequences — and should be flagged the same way an explicit statement of vows would be.
Fourth, for researchers working in comparative ecclesiastical law or canon law sources, the distinction between solemn vows (which historically effected civil death) and simple vows (which did not) is critical. Simple vows, more common in later centuries and in many non-contemplative orders, did not carry the same civil consequences.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not contain a substantive entry for "nun" as a legal term. The text appearing under this heading in the source corpus is a fragment of the Latin text of Magna Carta — specifically the nec imprisonetur clause of Chapter 29 — and appears to be a digitization or indexing artifact. Burrill elsewhere treats related concepts under civil death and under entries pertaining to monasteries and religious houses.
Webster's 1913 captures the common meaning accurately and notes the three canonical vows, which have direct legal relevance to the civil death doctrine. It does not engage with the legal consequences of that status.
No historical law dictionary in the standard shelf — Burrill, Bouvier, Black's early editions — provides a dedicated, comprehensive entry for NUN as a legal status term. The legal treatment is instead distributed across entries for civil death, monastery, vow, and dower.
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Jurisdictional Note
The civil death consequences of religious vows applied most fully in pre-Reformation England and in civil law jurisdictions following canon law. In the United States, civil death statutes that survived into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries applied primarily to convicted felons, not to professed religious. A nun in contemporary American law has full civil capacity.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Religious Institutions; Magna Carta; Civil Death; Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction
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