Charterhouse (monastery)

Grande Chartreuse

A charterhouse (French: chartreuse; German: Kartause; Italian: certosa; Portuguese: cartuxa; Spanish: cartuja) is a monastery of Carthusian monks. The English word is derived by phono-semantic matching from the French word chartreuse[1] and it is therefore sometimes misunderstood to indicate that the houses were created by charter, a grant of legal rights by a high authority.

The actual namesake is instead the first monastery of the order, the Grande Chartreuse, which St Bruno of Cologne established in a valley of the Chartreuse Mountains in 1084.[2]

The London Charterhouse was the first English site to which this English version of the word was applied.

See also

• Certosa (disambiguation), the Italian name for a Carthusian monastery
• Charterhouse (disambiguation)
• Chartreuse (disambiguation), the French name for a Carthusian monastery
• List of Carthusian monasteries

References

1. Wedgwood, Hensleigh (1855). "On False Etymologies". Transactions of the Philological Society (6): 66.
2. "The Origin". The Carthusian Order. The Carthusian Order. Archived from the original on 17 March 2019. Retrieved 9 March 2019.