Definition of "mendicancy" [men•di•can•cy]

• The act or state of being a mendicant (noun)

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• "To beg for votes, as if they were alms or broken victuals, is a form of mendicancy which is incompatible with common self-respect, and yet it is a self-abasement which thirty years ago custom imperatively demanded."
• "And into my face I strove to throw all the wan wistfulness of famished and ingenuous youth of mendicancy."
• "Additionally, in medieval society unaccompanied and unsupervised women were seen as dangerous, to both themselves and others; so Dominican women were also denied the mendicancy that the men of the Order practiced. 12 To have espoused any other attitude would have been viewed as unnatural."