Cloister at Moissac (ca. 1100 AD, southern France)
Where do cloisters come from?
Cloisters were a medieval kind of building that developed out of Greek and then Roman peristyles.
What is a peristyle?
More medieval architecture
All our medieval Europe articles
What is a cloister?
A cloister is a courtyard garden inside a building. Often people grew herbs or fruit or flowers in the garden. Around the sides of the courtyard there is a covered walkway, with a waist-high wall between you and the garden in the middle. On top of the waist-high wall, small columns hold up the roof of the walkway.
Growing an herb garden
Where do figs come from?
Oranges and lemons
The cloister at Fossa Nuova in southern Italy. Photo – Adrian Fletcher, www.paradoxplace.com
Christian monks built this cloister at Fossa Nuova in Italy in the time of Friedrich Barbarossa.
Monks and monasteries
Nuns and convents
What does “cloister” mean?
Cloister means a closed space, and some cloisters were enclosed so that nuns and monks could get some fresh air and have a garden without anyone seeing them or distracting them from their prayers. But other cloisters were just private courtyards, where people could hang out without danger of being attacked by enemies.
Reusing Roman columns
The first medieval cloisters, like early Islamic mosques, often re-used small columns from Roman buildings, to show how Christianity had beaten the Roman gods (and to save money).
Islamic mosques
Fatimid architecture
Delhi Sultanate mosque
A little later on, cloisters used Romanesque arches; later on people began to build Gothic style cloisters.
What is Romanesque?
How is Gothic different?
But by the time of the Renaissance, life in Europe wasn’t so dangerous anymore, and cloisters went out of fashion. Instead people designed bigger, more open, and less protected gardens.
Learn by doing: growing herbs
More about Medieval Architecture
Bibliography and further reading about medieval architecture:
I would probably tend to say that the Cloister is the open space which is formed by either covered walks or open galleries to either side. It usually, but not always, encloses a courtyard (which in itself is a different architecural typology). The courtyard in this case, acts as a ‘barrier’ of sorts around which a person would circulate.
Surely the word itself means a closed space, from Latin “claudere”, to close? I’m sorry, but a “courtyard” seems to me to be an open space inside walls – a yard?