Topic summary
Cloisters
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Cloister.
History of the cloister
Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, at Umm-is-Surab (489), and the colonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr, but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clustered roundhouses nor in the earliest Benedictine collective communities of the West.