cloister
CLOY-stuh
noun
A covered walkway around a square, usually as part of a monastery or cathedral
Some words just come to me as I’m mooching around going about my business, and ‘cloister’ is one such.
When I lived in Japan, the students I was working with had taken part in a project of sorts as part of their history class. They had to imagine what they’re life would be like if they had been born a hundred years earlier. Their work made for faintly depressing reading, since many of them described, essentially, the life they lived now. The age of samurai and ninja would have long since faded away, and the hypernationalism of the second-world war was only just on the horizon, so life in a quiet town in the countryside would have continued pretty much as it had done for hundreds of years.
The children asked me what I thought my life would have been like if I was born in 1893. I said that I would have worked in a big house for most of my life before dying in a trench in Belgium somewhere. I would not have had the aristocratic breeding or bearing to go to university and become a minor cog in the grinding machine of the Empire, and I may well have gone completely blind as a child. While Victorian attitudes to disability were changing, and I would have been less likely to be locked in an asylum somewhere, it wouldn’t have been fun.
All that got me to thinking about what life would be like if I had been born in other periods of history. The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, was nasty, brutish and short. For the majority of the middle ages a blind child would be nothing but an economic burden and, if I was lucky, I would probably have been sent to a monastery. In my case this would likely have been the magnificent Gloucester Cathedral, where I like to think I would have spent a quiet life shuffling around the cloisters before dying at the age of 30.
Anyway, cloisters. Monasteries were inspired by early Greek and Roman architecture in their adoption of cloisters, and they originally served as a sort of barrier between different areas of the monastic community. For large parts of the mediaeval period the Church was a large and powerful landowner, and people living in the land surrounding abbeys and cathedrals (often even at some distance) would work and pay their taxes to the cathedral. This would mean that, on any given day, the cathedral complex would likely be full of lots of different sorts of people milling about, conducting business, plying trade or praying for deliverance from the mysterious purple boils in their armpits.
The cloister was part of the cathedral that was locked and closed to the public. This area was reserved for the monks or nuns of the community, who had taken holy orders and needed a quiet place away from the hustle and bustle of the world outside the stone walls to perform their sacred duties of prayer, meditation, or whatever else mediaeval monks got up to. From this usage the adjective ‘cloistered’ came to refer to monastic life in general.
The word ‘cloister’ comes from the Latin ‘claustrum’ meaning ‘enclosure’. Savvy classicists will have spotted the similarity with the word ‘claustrophobia’ and the fancy Swiss skiing village of Klosters, both of which trace their etymologies back to the same Latin root.