{{Short description|Religious houses that are presided over by a prior or prioress}} {{Other uses}} [[Image:Prieuré de graville1.jpg|thumb|The Priory de Graville, France]] A '''priory''' is a monastery of men or women under religious vows that is headed by a prior or prioress.<ref name="d'Argis 2021">{{cite web |last1=d'Argis |first1=Antoine-Gaspard Boucher |title=Priory |url=https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0004.205/--priory?rgn=main;view=fulltext |publisher=Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert - Collaborative Translation Project |access-date=14 November 2025 |date=14 July 2021}}</ref> They are found in the Catholic Church, Lutheran Churches, and Anglican Communion.<ref name="Peters2013">{{cite book |last1=Peters |first1=Greg |title=Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life |date=12 November 2013 |publisher=Wipf and Stock Publishers |isbn=978-1-63087-045-4 |language=en |quote=Choosing to live according to the ''Rule of Benedict'', it was not until 1987that bishop Werner Leich, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Thuringia, approve their monastic way of life.}}</ref> Priories may be monastic houses of monks or nuns (such as the Benedictines, the Cistercians, or the Charterhouses). Houses of canons & canonesses regular also use this term, the alternative being '''canonry'''. Mendicant houses, of friars, nuns, or tertiary sisters (such as the Friars Preachers, Augustinian Hermits, and Carmelites) also exclusively use this term.
In pre-Reformation England, if an abbey church was raised to cathedral status, the abbey became a cathedral priory. The bishop, in effect, took the place of the abbot, and the monastery itself was headed by a prior.
==History== Priories first came to existence as subsidiaries to the Abbey of Cluny. Many new houses were formed that were all subservient to the abbey of Cluny and called Priories. As such, the priory came to represent the Benedictine ideals espoused by the Cluniac reforms as smaller, lesser houses of Benedictines of Cluny. There were likewise many conventual priories in Germany and Italy during the Middle Ages, and in England all monasteries attached to cathedral churches were known as cathedral priories.<ref name="ott">Ott, Michael. "Priory". ''The Catholic Encyclopedi''a. Vol. 12. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 4 May 2014.</ref>
[[File:Kloster St. Wigberti pan.jpg|thumb|upright=2|right|Priory of St. Wigbert, an Evangelical-Lutheran monastery in the Benedictine tradition (Germany)]] The Benedictines and their offshoots (Cistercians and Trappists among them), the Premonstratensians, and the military orders distinguish between '''conventual''' and simple or '''obedientiary''' priories.
*'''Conventual priories''' are those autonomous houses that have no abbots, either because the canonically required number of twelve monks has not yet been reached, or for some other reason. *'''Simple''' or '''obedientiary priories''' are dependencies of abbeys. Their superior, who is subject to the abbot in everything, is called a simple or obedientiary prior. These monasteries are satellites of the mother abbey. The Cluniac order is notable for being organised entirely on this obedientiary principle, with a single abbot at the Abbey of Cluny, and all other houses dependent priories.
Priory is also used to refer to the geographic headquarters of several commanderies of knights.
==References== {{Portal|Christianity}} {{Reflist}}
== External links == * {{Commons category-inline|Priories}}
{{RC consecrated life}} {{Lutheran orders}} {{Authority control}}
Category:Christian monasteries