The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cluniac \Clu"ni*ac\, n. (Eccl. Hist.) A monk of the reformed branch of the Benedictine Order, founded in 912 at Cluny (or Clugny) in France. -- Also used as a.
Usage examples of "cluniac".
To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places which had known no inhabitants since the Conqueror's ravages, or among the swamps of Lincolnshire.
Council of Whitby declared the Roman forms to be the only acceptable forms, and began the long struggle to bring the Cluniacs into line.
After a while, it seemed that the Cult of the Virgin and the Cluniacs were both extinct, but then, more than a thousand years after the Council of Ephesus, the Balderites burst upon the world.
Their creed was a mixture of Cluniac Christianity, Virgin Cult-Earth Mother paganism, Druidic Naturalism, and, at least in the Scottish Highlands, a strong streak of Celtic nationalism.