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cloister
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300px|thumb|upright= 1.5|The cloister at Salisbury Cathedral, England
A cloister is a covered walkway with open arches that typically surrounds a courtyard in religious buildings like cathedrals and monasteries. These spaces were functionally important as sheltered passageways for monks and clergy moving between different parts of the complex, and they remain architecturally significant features of medieval religious structures.
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Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- History of the cloister
- Gallery
- See also
- Notes
- References
- External links
300px|thumb|upright= 1.5|The cloister at Salisbury Cathedral, England
A cloister () 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 monks from that of the serfs and workmen, whose lives and works went forward outside and around the cloister."
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “cloister” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.