Cloister - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A cloister is a rectangular open space surrounded by covered walks or open galleries, with open arcades

Arcade (architecture)

An arcade is a succession of arches, each counterthrusting the next, supported by columns or piers or a covered walk enclosed by a line of such arches on one or both sides. In warmer or wet climates, exterior arcades provide shelter for pedestrians....

on the inner side, running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle

Quadrangle (architecture)

In architecture, a quadrangle is a space or courtyard, usually rectangular in plan, the sides of which are entirely or mainly occupied by parts of a large building. The word is probably most closely associated with college or university campus architecture, but quadrangles may be found in other...

or garth. The attachment of a cloister to a cathedral

Cathedral

A cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop...

or church, commonly against a warm southern flank, usually indicates that it is (or once was) part of a monastic foundation, "forming a continuous and solid architectural barrier... that effectively separates the world of the monk

Monk

A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

s from that of the serf

SERF

A spin exchange relaxation-free magnetometer is a type of magnetometer developed at Princeton University in the early 2000s. SERF magnetometers measure magnetic fields by using lasers to detect the interaction between alkali metal atoms in a vapor and the magnetic field.The name for the technique...

s and workmen, whose lives and works went on outside and around the cloister."

Cloistered (or claustral) life is also another name for the life of a monk

Monk

or nun

Nun

A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...

in the enclosed religious orders; the modern English term enclosure is used in contemporary Catholic church law to mean cloistered, and cloister is sometimes used as a metonymic synonym

Metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...

for monastery
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...

.

Historically, the early medieval cloister had several antecedents, the peristyle

Peristyle

In Hellenistic Greek and Roman architecture a peristyle is a columned porch or open colonnade in a building surrounding a court that may contain an internal garden. Tetrastoon is another name for this feature...

court of the Greco-Roman domus
Domus
In ancient Rome, the domus was the type of house occupied by the upper classes and some wealthy freedmen during the Republican and Imperial eras. They could be found in almost all the major cities throughout the Roman territories...

, the atrium

Atrium (architecture)

In modern architecture, an atrium is a large open space, often several stories high and having a glazed roof and/or large windows, often situated within a larger multistory building and often located immediately beyond the main entrance doors...

and its expanded version that served as forecourt to early Christian basilica

Basilica

The Latin word basilica , was originally used to describe a Roman public building, usually located in the forum of a Roman town. Public basilicas began to appear in Hellenistic cities in the 2nd century BC.The term was also applied to buildings used for religious purposes...

s, and certain semi-galleried courts attached to the flanks of early Syrian churches. Walter Horn suggests that the earliest coenobitic communities, which were established in Egypt by Saint Pachomius, did not result in cloister construction, as there were no lay serfs attached to the community of monks, thus no separation within the walled community was required; Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of Saints Sergios and Bacchos, at Umm-is-Surab (AD 489), and the colonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr, but nothing similar appeared in the semieremitic Irish monasteries' clustered roundhouse

Roundhouse (dwelling)

The roundhouse is a type of house with a circular plan, originally built in western Europe before the Roman occupation using walls made either of stone or of wooden posts joined by wattle-and-daub panels and a conical thatched roof. Roundhouses ranged in size from less than 5m in diameter to over 15m...

s nor in the earliest Benedictine collective communities of the West.

One of the earliest visual representations of the claustral plan is the Carolingian

Carolingian

The Carolingian dynasty was a Frankish noble family with origins in the Arnulfing and Pippinid clans of the 7th century AD. The name "Carolingian", Medieval Latin karolingi, an altered form of an unattested Old High German *karling, kerling The Carolingian dynasty (known variously as the...

plan of St. Gall, a copy made at Reichenau

Reichenau Island

Reichenau Island lies in Lake Constance in southern Germany, at approximately . It lies between Gnadensee and Untersee, two parts of Lake Constance, almost due west of the city of Konstanz. The island is connected to the mainland by a causeway that was completed in 1838...

of a scheme worked out at the two reforming synods held at Aachen

Aachen

Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...

, 816 and 817. Though cloisters served functions of quiet meditation or a study garden, the uses of the surrounding buildings in the St. Gall plan, each entered only through the covered porches, show how central the cloister was to the communal life: on the eastern side stood the calefactoria or warming room, the sole heated space, with above it the dormitory

Dormitory

A dormitory, often shortened to dorm, in the United States is a residence hall consisting of sleeping quarters or entire buildings primarily providing sleeping and residential quarters for large numbers of people, often boarding school, college or university students...

; on the south side the refectory

Refectory

A refectory is a dining room, especially in monasteries, boarding schools and academic institutions. One of the places the term is most often used today is in graduate seminaries...

, with above it the vestiarium ("vestiary"); on the west side the cellar for wines and beer with above it the larder.

In the time of Charlemagne

Charlemagne

Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800...

the requirements of a separate monastic community within an extended and scattered manorial estate

Manorialism

Manorialism, an essential element of feudal society, was the organizing principle of rural economy that originated in the villa system of the Late Roman Empire, was widely practiced in medieval western and parts of central Europe, and was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market...

created this "monastery within a monastery" in the form of the locked cloister, an architectural solution allowing the monks to perform their sacred tasks apart from the distractions of laymen and servants. Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's "Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765-74), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn; Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a Frankish nobleman's villa rustica
Roman villa
A Roman villa is a villa that was built or lived in during the Roman republic and the Roman Empire. A villa was originally a Roman country house built for the upper class...

, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times. Another early cloister, that of the abbey of Saint-Riquier

Saint-Riquier

Saint-Riquier is a commune in the Somme department in Picardie in northern France.-Geography:The commune is situated northeast of Abbeville, on the D925 and D32 crossroads.-Abbey:...

(790-99), took a triangular shape, with chapels at the corners, in conscious representation of the Trinity

Trinity

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity defines God as three divine persons : the Father, the Son , and the Holy Spirit. The three persons are distinct yet coexist in unity, and are co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial . Put another way, the three persons of the Trinity are of one being...

. A square cloister sited against the flank of the abbey church were built at Inden

Inden

Inden is a municipality in the district of Düren in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located on the river Inde, approx. 10 km north-west of Düren. In the area around Inden lignite is extracted in open-pit mines. Several hundreds of inhabitants have been resettled in the 1990s and...

(816) and the abbey of St. Wandrille at Fontenelle

Fontenelle Abbey

Fontenelle Abbey or the Abbey of St. Wandrille is a Benedictine monastery in the commune of Saint-Wandrille-Rançon near Caudebec-en-Caux in Seine-Maritime, Normandy, France.-First foundation:...

(823-33). At Fulda

Fulda

Fulda is a city in Hesse, Germany; it is located on the river Fulda and is the administrative seat of the Fulda district .- Early Middle Ages :...

, a new cloister (819) was sited to the liturgical west of the church "in the Roman manner" familiar from the forecourt of Old St. Peter's Basilica because it would be closer to the relics.

The hortus conclusus
Hortus conclusus
Hortus conclusus is a Latin term, meaning literally "enclosed garden". "The word 'garden' is at root the same as the word 'yard'. It means an enclosure", observed Derek Clifford, at the outset of a series of essays on garden design, in which he skirted the conventions of the hortus conclusus...

or "enclosed garden" of medieval times, whether secular or claustral, featured the essential well at the center, from which four paths divided the space into quadrants.

The largest cloister in the world (12000 m² (14,351.9 sq yd)) is at the Certosa di Padula

Certosa di Padula

Padula Charterhouse, in Italian Certosa di Padula , is a large Carthusian monastery, or charterhouse, located in the town of Padula, in the Cilento National Park in Southern Italy. It is a World Heritage site.The monastery is the second largest charterhouse in Italy after the one in Parma...

near Salerno

Salerno

Salerno is a city and comune in Campania and is the capital of the province of the same name. It is located on the Gulf of Salerno on the Tyrrhenian Sea....

in southern Italy.

External links

"Cloister" in the New Advent encyclopaedia

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See also

External links