Acloister (fromLatinclaustrum, "enclosure") is a covered walk, open gallery, or openarcade running along the walls of buildings and forming aquadrangle or garth. The attachment of a cloister to acathedral or church, commonly against a warm southern flank,[1] usually indicates that it is (or once was) part of amonastic foundation, "forming a continuous and solid architectural barrier... that effectively separates the world of themonks from that of theserfs and workmen, whose lives and works went forward outside and around the cloister."[1]
Cloistered (or claustral) life is also another name for the monastic life of amonk ornun. The English termenclosure is used in contemporaryCatholic church law translations[2] to mean cloistered, and some form of the Latin parent word "claustrum" is frequently used as ametonymic name formonastery in languages such as German.[3]Cloistered clergy refers to monastic orders that strictly separate themselves from the affairs of the external world.
Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional[6] late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of SaintsSergius and Bacchus, at Umm-is-Surab (AD 489), and thecolonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr,[7] but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clusteredroundhouses nor in the earliestBenedictine collective communities of the West.[5]
In the time ofCharlemagne (r. 768–814) the requirements of a separate monastic community within an extended and scatteredmanorial estate led to the development of a "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.[8] Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's"Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765–774), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn.[9] Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a Frankish nobleman'svilla rustica, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times.[10]
Another early cloister, in theabbey of Saint-Riquier (790–799), took a triangular shape, with chapels at the corners, in conscious representation of theTrinity.[11] A square cloister sited against the flank of the abbey church was built atInden (816) and theabbey of St. Wandrille at Fontenelle (823–833). AtFulda, a new cloister (819) was sited to the liturgical west of the church "in the Roman manner"[12] familiar from the forecourt ofOld St. Peter's Basilica because it would be closer to the relics. More recently,John D. Rockefeller Jr. commissioned the construction ofThe Cloisters museum and gardens in medieval style inManhattan in 1930–1938.
^When Lorsch was rebuilt on a neighboring site by Abbot Richbold (784–804) the cloister was made a perfect square, against the south flank of the new church, precisely as in the plan of the 8th-centuryAbbey of Saint Gall (Horn 1973:44, figs 43ab, 45).
^When Lorsch was rebuilt on a neighboring site by Abbot Richbold (784–804) the cloister was made a perfect square, against the south flank of the new church, precisely as in the plan of the 8th-centuryAbbey of Saint Gall (Horn 1973:44, figs 43ab, 45).
