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A cloister (from Latin {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, "enclosure") is a covered walk, open gallery, or open arcade running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle or garth. The attachment of a cloister to a cathedral or church, commonly against a warm southern flank,Template:Sfn 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 monks from that of the serfs and workmen, whose lives and works went forward outside and around the cloister."Template:Sfn
Cloistered (or claustral) life is also another name for the monastic life of a monk or nun. The English term enclosure is used in contemporary Catholic church law translations<ref name="Code of Canon Law">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> to mean cloistered, and some form of the Latin parent word "claustrum" is frequently used as a metonymic name for monastery in languages such as German.<ref>Cf. German Kloster.</ref> Cloistered clergy refers to monastic orders that strictly separate themselves from the affairs of the external world.
History of the cloisterEdit
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.<ref>Horn 1973 gives these sources.</ref> Walter Horn suggests that the earliest coenobitic communities, which were established in Egypt by Saint Pachomius Template:Circa, 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.Template:Sfn
Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional<ref>The normal Syrian monastery plan was an open one, Horn observes.</ref> 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,<ref>Horn 1973, plans, figs 9 and 10</ref> but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clustered roundhouses nor in the earliest Benedictine collective communities of the West.Template:Sfn
In the time of Charlemagne (Template:Reign) 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.<ref>Horn pp 40ff.</ref> Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's "Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765–774), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn.<ref>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).</ref> Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a Frankish nobleman's villa rustica, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times.<ref>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).</ref>
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.<ref>Horn 1973:43 and fig 42ab.</ref> 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"<ref>Vita Eigili, the life of Abbot Eigil.</ref> 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.
GalleryEdit
- The Cloisters from Garden.jpg
The Bonnefont medieval garden at The Cloisters in Manhattan
- Claustro de Santo Domingo de Silos. Galería sur.jpg
The Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain
- Cloitre prieure Saint-Michel de Grandmont.jpg
Cloister of Saint-Michel de Grandmont Priory (Languedoc-Roussillon, France)
- Amalfi-Chiostro del paradiso.jpg
Chiostro del Paradiso, Amalfi Cathedral, Italy
- Domhof, Dom, Kreuzgang Hildesheim 20171201 011.jpg
Cloister of Hildesheim Cathedral, Germany
- Kreuzgang, Kloster Eberbach 20140903 1.jpg
Cloister of the former Cistercian Eberbach Abbey, Germany
See alsoEdit
NotesEdit
ReferencesEdit
External linksEdit
- Template:Commons category-inline
- The Code of Canon Law, cf canons 667 ff.
- New Advent Encyclopaedia III ff. on "Nuns, properly so called"
- "Cloister" in the New Advent encyclopaedia
- New Advent Encyclopaedia on "Religious Life"
- Photos and information on cloisters in France, Italy and Spain
- Template:Cite EB9