cloister

File:The Cloisters at Gloucester Cathedral.jpg, UK]]

The early medieval cloister had several antecedents: the peristyle court of the Greco-Roman domus, the atrium and its expanded version that served as forecourt to early Christian basilicas, and certain semi-galleried courts attached to the flanks of early Syrian churches.Horn 1973 gives these sources. Walter Horn suggests that the earliest coenobitic communities, which were established in Egypt by Saint Pachomius {{circa | AD 320}}, did not result in cloister construction, as there were no lay serfs attached to the community of monks, and thus no need for separation within the walled community.{{sfn|Horn|1973|pp=39–40}}

Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptionalThe normal Syrian monastery plan was an open one, Horn observes. late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, at Umm-is-Surab (AD 489), and the colonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr,Horn 1973, plans, figs 9 and 10 but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clustered roundhouses nor in the earliest Benedictine collective communities of the West.{{sfn|Horn|1973|pp=39–40}}

In the time of Charlemagne ({{reign | 768 | 814}}) the requirements of a separate monastic community within an extended and scattered manorial 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.Horn pp 40ff. Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's "Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765–774), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn.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-century Abbey of Saint Gall (Horn 1973:44, figs 43ab, 45). Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a Frankish nobleman's villa rustica, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times.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-century Abbey of Saint Gall (Horn 1973:44, figs 43ab, 45).

Another early cloister, in the abbey of Saint-Riquier (790–799), took a triangular shape, with chapels at the corners, in conscious representation of the Trinity.Horn 1973:43 and fig 42ab. A square cloister sited against the flank of the abbey church was built at Inden (816) and the abbey of St. Wandrille at Fontenelle (823–833). At Fulda, a new cloister (819) was sited to the liturgical west of the church "in the Roman manner"Vita Eigili, the life of Abbot Eigil. familiar from the forecourt of Old St. Peter's Basilica because it would be closer to the relics. More recently, John D. Rockefeller Jr. commissioned the construction of The Cloisters museum and gardens in medieval style in Manhattan in 1930–1938.

File:The Cloisters from Garden.jpg|The Bonnefont medieval garden at The Cloisters in Manhattan

File:Claustro de Santo Domingo de Silos. Galería sur.jpg|The Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain

File:Cloitre_prieure_Saint-Michel_de_Grandmont.jpg|Cloister of Saint-Michel de Grandmont Priory (Languedoc-Roussillon, France)

File:Amalfi-Chiostro del paradiso.jpg|Chiostro del Paradiso, Amalfi Cathedral, Italy

File:Domhof, Dom, Kreuzgang Hildesheim 20171201 011.jpg|Cloister of Hildesheim Cathedral, Germany

File:Kreuzgang, Kloster Eberbach 20140903 1.jpg|Cloister of the former Cistercian Eberbach Abbey, Germany

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{{Reflist}}

• {{cite book |first=Thomas|last=Coomans|title=Life Inside the Cloister. Understanding Monastic Architecture: Tradition, Reformation, Adaptive Reuse|year=2018|publisher=Leuven University Press|isbn=9789462701434}}
• {{cite journal |first=Walter|last=Horn |title=On the Origins of the Medieval Cloister |journal=Gesta |volume=2 |issue=1/2 |year=1973|pages=13–52 |doi=10.2307/766633|jstor=766633|s2cid=192563869 }}

{{Wiktionary}}

• {{Commons category-inline}}
• [https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P28.HTM The Code of Canon Law, cf canons 667 ff.]
• [https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11164a.htm New Advent Encyclopaedia III ff. on "Nuns, properly so called"]
• [https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04060a.htm "Cloister" in the New Advent encyclopaedia]
• [https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12748b.htm New Advent Encyclopaedia on "Religious Life"]
• [http://www.marcuslink.com/travel/cloisters/ Photos and information on cloisters in France, Italy and Spain]
• {{cite EB9 |wstitle = Cloister |volume= VI | pages=35-36 |short=1}}

{{RC consecrated life}}

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Category:Church architecture

Category:Colonnades

Category:Christian monastic architecture

*Cloister