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

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These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Wells, a historian, broadcaster and author of Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals.

He needed more wood for his new cathedral, being built on unpromisingly marshy ground a little way from the city’s two existing Saxon minsters. 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.She describes their origins, the striking and unusual stories attached to them and the people central to their history.

Santiago de Compostela was built on the site of the supposed tomb of St James, martyred in c44; Notre-Dame de Saint-Denis stands where the third-century missionary-martyr Saint Dionysius finally fell after his beheading on Montmartre. An astonishing 100,000 pilgrims came to Canterbury in 1171, inspired by the murder of Thomas Becket just the year before.

Walking around a cathedral today can be a solemn and an awe-inspiring experience, but what if we could stand inside the same building and travel back 800 years or so? 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, as with any marketing campaign, consumer enthusiasm wasn’t a given: in October 1247 Henry III walked barefoot from St Paul’s to Westminster to promote the latter’s acquisition of some holy blood from the wound of Christ, but neither the stunt nor the relic fired the public imagination. Walkelin, it is said, had pressed every last citizen of Winchester into service and stripped the woods bare. In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern powerhouse” of York Minster. Over a million people from across the globe are welcomed through the doors at Canterbury every year. Moreover, the intersection of pilgrims and relics also made cathedrals into engines of the divine: St James had produced just eight recognised miracles in his first thousand years.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. We visit Canterbury Cathedral the moment St Thomas Becket's shrine is moved to a new location after a fire nearly fifty years earlier destroyed much of the original cathedral. Transporting the reader from the chaotic atmosphere of the masons’ yard to the cloisters of power, each chapter is a journey of exploration through a different cathedral. Scene Three: Chartres, France, William me Breton described the growing cathedral’s vaults as bringing to ‘look like the shell of a tortoise’ referring to the higher vaults and a longer and wider nave than any other in Christendom.

Stunningly illustrated and endlessly illuminative, Wells’ authoritative yet accessible volume on the golden age of the cathedral leads the reader on a fascinating journey through 1000 years of striking ecclesiastical architecture. Thanks to meticulous planning and generous patronage, the new cathedral is built efficiently and incredibly quickly, and becomes one of the leading examples of the English gothic style.The glossary of technical terms provided is useful and the photography is wonderful; but some drawings to illustrate the more detailed descriptive passages would have been welcome.