What is "flagellants"

Usage examples of "flagellants".

But the third member of the flagellants was poised behind him, by Judas's stall, a gun drilling a hole in the old man's back.

Her eyes were caught by a slight movement in the darkness of the sagebrush behind the staring flagellants, the daggers of the moon touching on what looked like living flame.

Jak said very quietly, shooting the leader of the flagellants through the lower stomach with the Python.

A letter, supposed to have fallen down from heaven, declaring that only Flagellants would be saved, was first published around 1260, but reappeared in 1343 in the Holy Land - it was supposed to have been delivered by an angel to the Church of St Peter in Jerusalem.

The Flagellants - mostly fairly respectable ‘pilgrims’ of both sexes - would arrive in a town and hold their ceremony in the main square: they would strip to the waist, then flog themselves into an increasing state of hysteria until blood ran down to their feet, staining the white linen which was the traditional dress on the lower half of the body.

It was best not to wait until the Flagellants were within a town to raise objections, for their own frenzy made them violent, and they were likely to attack the objectors - one Dominican friar in Tournai was stoned to death.

Human beings seem to be glad of an excuse to change their opinions, and only a year after they had been generally regarded with respect and admiration, the Flagellants were suddenly attacked as outcasts and cranks.

Oddly none of the other flagellants seemed at all bothered by their leader's attempts to save his life by pawning theirs.

As the mutie woman flourished her limp, draggled prize, the last of the flagellants gave the loudest scream that Ryan had ever heard in his life.

Never before, as in our days, amid processions of flagellants, were sacred lauds heard inspired by the sorrows of Christ and of the Virgin, never has there been such insistence as there is today on strengthening the faith of the simple through the depiction of infernal torments.

It flowed, on the one hand, into the movements of the flagellants, who endanger no one, or into the armed bands like Fra Dolcino’s, or into the witchcraft rituals of the monks of Montefalco that Ubertino was talking about.

The Flagellants arose in Hungary and created an order, complete with regulations and uniform, out of the formless and spontaneous wanderings of homeless people.

The punishment could be avoided if the example of the Flagellants was followed.