Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World's Greatest Cathedrals

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Not only was Becket one of the most celebrated martyrs and saints in England, but Canterbury was also, in Emma’s words, a “veritable monastic theme park”. But if cathedrals were in some sense bounden to the affirmatory heft of secular authority, they were also a bulwark against it. Wells is an ecclesiastical and architectural historian, and in some passages the lure of architectural exposition impedes an otherwise lucid and absorbing narrative. Over a million people from across the globe are welcomed through the doors at Canterbury every year. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal wood as Walkelin’s carpenters could cut in three days.

There had been a cathedral on the site of Cologne cathedral in the fourth century when it was part of Roman Gaul. Dr Wells brings these buildings vividly to life, peopling them with their authors and sponsors, their triumphs and tribulations, and beautifully illustrated. Heaven On Earth – an illuminating narrative of the conception and legacies of sixteen of the world’s greatest cathedrals – is interwoven with an exploration of the lives, legends and scandals of the people who built them – both up on the pinnacles and down in the crypts. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. It has the sometimes supplicant, sometimes competitive, sometimes accommodating relationship with state power that was required to build something on this scale and at this expense.

Together, they reveal how 1000 years of cathedral-building shaped modern Europe, and influenced art, culture and society around the world. More than architectural biographies, these are human stories of triumph and tragedy that take the reader from the chaotic atmosphere of the mason's yard to the cloisters of power. In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern powerhouse” of York Minster. The story has, in Walkelin, someone to drive the construction with reckless audacity, cunning and determination. The emergence of the Gothic in twelfth-century France, an architectural style characterized by pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery, triggered an explosion of cathedral-building across western Europe.

Scene One: Canterbury cathedral, trinity chapel, the scene of St Thomas Becket’s elevation and translation into his new shrine. Finally, we cross the channel to visit Chartres Cathedral, a masterpiece of the French gothic style. He is the author of Impossible Journeys, There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of JRR Tolkien and The Favourite.Legend has it that a congregation of devout lay-people worked for free to help build this extraordinary cathedral, which had higher vaults and a longer and wider nave than seen anywhere else in Christendom. An epilogue will then explore the evolution of the role and influence of the cathedral across art, culture, and society from Coventry to California, and the changing styles in our midst. Prefacing her account with the construction in the sixth century of the Hagia Sophia, the remarkable Christian cathedral of the eastern Roman empire, she goes on to chart the construction of a glittering sequence of iconic structures, including Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame, Canterbury, Chartres, Salisbury, York Minster and Florence's Duomo. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. She describes their origins, the striking and unusual stories attached to them and the people central to their history.