RECUSANT • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Recusant

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noun

Recusant n.

One who is obstinate in refusal; one standing out stubbornly against general practice or opinion. "The last rebellious recusants among the European family of nations."

(Eng. Hist.) A person who refuses to acknowledge the supremacy of the king in matters of religion; as, a Roman Catholic recusant, who acknowledges the supremacy of the pope.

One who refuses communion with the Church of England; a nonconformist. "All that are recusants of holy rites."

adjective

Recusant adj. Obstinate in refusal; specifically, in English history, refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the king in the churc, or to conform to the established rites of the church; as, a recusant lord. "It stated him to have placed his son in the household of the Countess of Derby, a recusant papist."

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Etymology of 'Recusant'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Recusant" Quotes from Famous Books

... with his mother and Seth, and he noticed with surprise that Bartle Massey was absent too—all the more agreeable for Mr. Joshua Rann, who gave out his bass notes with unusual complacency and threw an extra ray of severity into the glances he sent over his spectacles at the recusant ...

— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... whether it is safe or prudent to imitate, in a fictitious narrative, and often with a view to a ludicrous effect, the scriptural style of the zealots of the seventeenth century; and secondly, whether the recusant presbyterians, collectively considered, do not carry too reverential and sacred a character to be treated by an unknown ...

— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... (slyly, as if addressing the damsel)— So now, Amaryllis the truth of your ill-disguised grief I discover! You pined for a favorite youth with cityfied damsels hobnobbing. And soon your surroundings partook of your grief for your recusant lover— The pine trees, the copse and the brook for Tityrus ever ...

— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field

... me; though they laughed more than was seemly at such grave times. They questioned me much as to my religion. Was I a papist? If they meant by that a Catholic, that I was, and thanked God for it every day—(those nicknames like me not). Was I then a recusant? If by that they meant, Did I go to their Genevan Hotch-Potch? That I did not nor never would. I thought to have said a word here about St. Cyprian his work De Unitate Ecclesiae, as F——r X. told me, but they would ...

— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... His palace was searched and his papers examined in his absence; and the result, though inconclusive, was unsatisfactory.[389] The religious orders again (especially the monks of such houses as had been implicated with the Nun of Kent) were openly recusant. At the convent at Sion, near Richmond, a certain Father Ricot preached as he was commanded, "but he made this addition, that he which commanded him to preach should discharge his conscience: and as soon," it was said, "as the said Ricot began ...

— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

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