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Publication Account
Date 1981
Event ID 1018061
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1018061
Edinburgh boasted only one nunnery, that of the Dominican order dedicated to St.Katherine of Siena, which was founded in 1517 (Cowan, 1976, 153). The allegation that there was an order dedicated to St.Mary of Placentia is wrong. Maitland alleged that a nunnery dedicated to St. Mary of Placentia stood in the Pleasance, but 'at what time or by whom the said monastery was founded, I cannot say' (1753, 176). The claim was perhaps strengthened by the donation to the newly-formed Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1781 of a 'representation of Our Saviour before the Jewish High Priests' which .was covered in alabaster and said to have been found .in the ruins of an old religious house in the Pleasance (Wilson, 1891, ii, 128). C.A. Malcolm convincingly showed that the nunnery was purely an invention of Maitland to account for the place-name Pleasance (1937, 2).
Information from ‘Historic Edinburgh, Canongate and Leith: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1981).
