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A cloister (from Latin claustrum, "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, 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 from that of the and workmen, whose lives and works went forward outside and around the cloister."
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 Catholicism church law translations to mean cloistered, and some form of the Latin parent word "claustrum" is frequently used as a name for monastery in languages such as German.Cf. German Kloster. 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 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 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.
In the time of Charlemagne () the requirements of a separate monastic community within an extended and scattered manorialism 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 Roman villa, 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 monastery, 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.
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