quadragene

English

Alternative forms

• Quadragene

Etymology

From Late Latin quadragēna (“40-day period, Lent”), from Latin quadrāgēnus (“40 each”), from quadrāgintā (“four tens, forty”). Doublet of carene and quarantine.

Noun

quadragene (plural quadragenes or quadragenae)

1. (Catholicism, historical) An indulgence from 40 days of fasting or similar abstinence, especially during Lent; (later) various equivalent indulgences against punishment in Purgatory.
   • 1664, Jeremy Taylor, A Disswasive from Popery to the People of Ireland‎^[1], page 93:

     You have with much labour, and some charge, purchased to your self so many Quadragenes or Lents of pardon; that is, you have bought off the penances of so many times forty dayes. It is well; but were you well advised, it may be your Quadragenes are not Carenes; that is, are not a quitting the severest penances of fasting so long in bread and water; for there is great difference in the manner of keeping a penitential Lent, and it may be you have purchased but some lighter thing; and then if your demerit arise to so many Carenes, and you purchased but mere Quadragenes, without a minute and table of particulars, you may stay longer in Purgatory than you expected... And they that read... will soon perceive that all this is but a handful of smoke, when you hold it, you hold it not.

   • 2016, Kathryn M. Rudy, Rubrics, Images, & Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts, pages 47–8:

     Careen (and its Latin source, quadragene) no longer made sense in the fifteenth century because priests no longer distributed punishments in forty-day parcels, the duration of Lent... the culture had shifted from brief punishments on earth to long punishments in the afterlife, in Purgatory. But the term was still in circulation, and people sought to make sense of it by inventing new definitions for it.

2. (Catholicism, historical) An indulgence provided by 40 days of fasting.
   • 2001, Erika Fischer-Lichte, translated by Jo Riley, History of European Drama and Theatre, page 47:

     Actors and spectators were often granted indulgences; generally^[sic] to the scale of one Quadragene (a forty-day fast on bread and water in return for divine grace).

Synonyms

• carene (in some cases)

References

• “quadragene, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.