For a variety of reasons, legal and technical, I have yet to scan-in and establish links to any of the illustrative material. Thus so far I have focused on making sections of my thesis available which have few or no illustrations.
When these structures mentioned in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century visitations were built and how they were arranged is not known. We can assume that if they were in states of serious disrepair at the middle of the fourteenth century, they must date well before that time. How much before is not certain. Except for the porch, the present church does not seem to have had to take in to account any pre-existing constructions. Thus, the buildings mentioned in the documents collected by Charvin most likely post-date the church. Could these buildings have been arranged around the standard rectangular cloister?
Corbels, clearly part of the original masonry, exist in the exterior south aisle wall of the church. Their height suggests that they may have served as the supports for the roof over a cloister walk. The Martellange plan of 1619 (Fig. 4) provides the only other evidence for a rectangular cloister dating before the present one, but Martellange is vague about the arrangement, since the only indication he provides for it is the shape he outlined in single lines and labeled "cloistre" just beyond the south aisle. The longest of the sides Martellenage records runs parallel to the south aisle. It begins roughly three meters from the west wall of the transept and continues just to the edge of the exterior of the west wall of the nave. Here, at a right angle to this first line, another line runs southwards. A line parallel to this line continues south from where the first line begin. Presumably, they mark the limits of the garth. Martellange makes no indications either of the southern limits of the garth or of the structures that stood beyond the church on the east, west, and south sides.
Using the seventeenth-century plan to establish a cloister dating to before the present eighteenth-century one is made even more difficult by Martellange not having labeled any of structures around the church's perimeter. Apparently interested only in the interior of the church, not only did he avoid depicting any of the claustral buildings, but he also chose not to include either the porch at the west or the exterior stair tower on the southwest corner of the transept, both of which we know existed at the time. These lacunae in the drawing regarding the exterior raise questions about the reliability of the plan for interpreting the exterior in general; nonetheless, Martellange's plan is all we have.
The plan shows that one could enter the church from two places along the north walk. At the west end of the walk, one door opens into the southwest corner of the south aisle. (Note 10) This entrance provided direct access to the stairs to the upper level of the porch without passing near the choir or having to negotiate one's way down the length of the aisle. At the east end of the walk, another entrance, almost on axis with the south transept chapel, opened on to the south cross arm.
One could also enter the south cross arm through the south portal. Where this led from is not at all certain. Martellange makes no indication on his plan (Fig. 4) for buildings south of the transept. The lines for the block labeled "cloistre" continue further south beyond the transept before they stop. Presuming that these lines represent the limits of the garth, we can see that the north walk adjacent to the south aisle of the church continues around on the east between the limits drawn by Martellange and the exterior wall of the south cross arm. The distance between this line and the cross arm is slightly less than that for the north walk and would be even further constricted at the southwest corner of the transept where the stair tower, not indicated on Martellange's plan, projected into it. Though still wide enough to be functional, the arrangement suggests an ad hoc scheme, attempting to accommodate the tower after the fact. Any structure along the east could not project any further west into the east walk without reducing the walk's width even more. Most probably, the claustral buildings projected only as far west as the west wall of the south cross arm. It seems unlikely that the eastern range of the claustral structure extended any further east than the eastern exterior buttress of the south cross arm's terminal wall, because Martellange shows a window and projecting buttresses along the south wall of the south transept chapel.
Thus, in Martellange's time the east range of the actual claustral buildings, as opposed to just the walk, must have abutted the south cross arm and have been just as wide. On the seventeenth- century plan, the buttresses on the terminal wall of the south transept appear to have been left more jagged than all the other exterior buttresses drawn by Martellange. We might expect this, because if the rising walls of this part of the cloister abutted the transept at the two buttresses, he simply could not have known exactly how far they projected; they would have been hidden by the east wing.
Traditionally, the chapter house stood immediately adjacent to the church on the ground floor of the east range of the cloister, and we would expect that to be the case at Paray. If this were so, the chapter house at Paray would have communicated directly with the south cross arm. At both Vézelay and Tournus, the chapter house stood adjacent to the south cross arm but no doorway connected them. Likewise, Fontenay has the chapter house on axis with the transept, but the sacristy stands between them. (Note 11) The cloisters of Cluny II and III were more complicated. (Note 12) In both cases, the cloister was somewhat later than the church. As reconstructed by Conant on the basis of the Farfa Customary and the topography of the site, the chapter house of the cloister for Cluny II apparently did not abut the church but stood somewhat to the south and east. Similarly, the cloister did not abut the later church at Cluny. Here, the problem was even more complicated as the east-end of Cluny II stood between Cluny III and the cloister as it was expanded under Abbot Pontius. (Note 13)
Usually, the dormitory stood on the second floor of the east range. This provided for easy access to the church for the office of matins in the dead of the night. Again, Martellange's plan is suggestive. He drew a stairwell in the southeast corner of the south cross arm. Most likely, it provided direct communication between church and dormitory just as there still appears to have been at the time of Millet's restorations in the 1850s.
Martellange makes no indication of how far the cloister extended to the south. By analogy with other cloisters, we can assume the garth would be nearly square. Presumably, the south range included the refectory mentioned in the visitations.
Martellange's indications at the west are as problematic as those he provides for the east. The line apparently marking the northern limit of the garth turns a right angle at the west such that the line continuing southwards is on line with the outer face of the nave's terminal wall. Presumably, the walk was at least as wide as the one Martellange indicated at the east. Exactly how the buildings along the west wing were arranged is unknown. Any arrangement would have been made complicated by the skewed axis between the porch and the church. The windows in the terminal wall of the south aisle and the south wall of the porch's upper story indicate that the southwest angle between porch and church was originally unoccupied. Whether or not the angle was built up and the adjacent openings blocked up at the time of Martellange's plan, we simply cannot determine. A continuous range of buildings running from the porch to the hypothetical southwest corner of the cloister might have eliminated any awkwardness in accommodating cloister, church and porch where they all intersected.
The date of the cloister indicated on the Martellange plan is uncertain. The plan, dated 1619, is relatively late and reflects any changes that might have occurred between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. (Note 14) For example, the abbacies of Jean de Bourbon (1456-1485) and Jacques d'Amboise (1485- 1510), which witnessed the new south cross arm chapel and the construction of the abbatial palace, were especially architecturally active, and it is not impossible that the cloister might have received attention at this time as well.
Aside from the corbels along the south aisle, the only other physical indication of early buildings adjacent to the church is a wall reused in the south wall of the Gothic chapel on the transept which can be seen in Millet's plan (Fig. 3). The wall rose to above the height of the chapel's windows. Corbels for supporting beams still project towards the south, indicating that an interior space once stood to the south of the chapel. The east face of the earlier wall is now a masonry scar of rubble, suggesting that the wall once continued and at some unknown date was torn down. It seems unlikely that this wall continued much further east. Immediately adjacent to the chapel window, one block has been beveled back to avoid hindering the entrance of light into the chapel's interior. Inserting beveled blocks like this would not make sense if the wall continued further to the east beyond the window; it seems unlikely that someone would build a window in one building which only opens into the interior of another. What we apparently have here is the southeast corner of the building standing immediately south of the church. The beveled block belongs to the very edge of the corner, trimmed back to permit the chapel window to receive light. The preponderance of blocks with brettelé finish point to a date later than the near-by parts of the south cross arm. How this wall and the building to which it belonged related to the transept and the presumed apsidiole just to the west is not known. If what we have here is really the corner of a building, it is possible that we have the northernmost structure of the east range of an earlier cloister. Nevertheless, this hypothetical construction is not easily associated with the claustral buildings, since it stands so far east of the transept (beyond the original chapel) and well north of the southeast corner of the south cross arm.
From the slender indications that remain, it is difficult to reconstruct the monastic topography at Paray during the early history of the present church. The only physical evidence still extant from this early date is the corbels along the exterior of the south aisle, suggesting some sort of roofed structure, perhaps for the northern walk of a cloister. The corbels also indicate that at least the south walk, if not the enire cloister, was unvaulted. The documents refer to the buildings one would expect in a cloister: the dormitory, the refectory and perhaps the infirmary, though not before the middle of the fourteenth century. The wall incorporated into the Gothic chapel indicates a pre-existing structure in that area sometime before the construction of the chapel around 1480. Possibly, though not certainly, it belonged to the cloister whose existence is suggested by the documents. Martellange's plan gives some tantalizing indications, but his reluctance to indicate structures aside from the church itself renders the plan unreliable for establishing the layout of the entire cloister. The information obtainable from the plan suggests a somewhat awkward disposition. Since the construction of the present claustral complex destroyed any physical indication of any earlier one, only further documentary evidence, examination of the original fabric between the eighteenth century buildings and the church (recently restored without making any documentation), and perhaps scattered below-ground remains can advance our knowledge of the medieval cloister at Paray.
Send any comments or suggestions to Minott Kerr at:
mkerr@reed.eduLast Modified: 21 May 1996