conventus

Conventus, conventus, m., fourth declension, from convenio, "come together". The genitive singular and the nominative plural are both conventus, and nothing but the sentence tells them apart - the ablative conventu is the form that gives the game away.

Under the Republic and Empire it is administrative: an assize district in a province, the court sessions held there, and the body of Roman citizens resident in it. In the church it becomes the community of a religious house, and from that sense come convent, Spanish convento and the whole vocabulary of monastic life. The manuscript spelling conuentus, with u doing the work of v, is what this corpus shows throughout; it is a scribal convention, not a different word.