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

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Wells, a historian, broadcaster and author of Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern powerhouse” of York Minster. But if cathedrals were in some sense bounden to the affirmatory heft of secular authority, they were also a bulwark against it.

Walkelin, it is said, had pressed every last citizen of Winchester into service and stripped the woods bare. Cathedral scribes were notoriously partisan and sometimes downright dishonest when it came to the history of their buildings. Dr Wells brings these buildings vividly to life, peopling them with their authors and sponsors, their triumphs and tribulations, and beautifully illustrated. It's to Wells's credit that she manages to make the history of these cathedrals as gripping as she does.

The emergence of the Gothic in twelfth-century France, an architectural style characterised by pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery, triggered an explosion of cathedral-building across western Europe. 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. Finally, we cross the channel to visit Chartres Cathedral, a masterpiece of the French gothic style.

He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the author of The Favourite, Impossible Journeys and There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of JRR Tolkien.The central focus of the book is, however, the zenith of cathedral building, spanning the millennium 500 to 1500 AD , sweeping from Byzantine grandeur to the more modern interpretations found in Milan and Moscow, when the architect – as we understand the profession today – began to emerge. He is the author of Impossible Journeys, There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of JRR Tolkien and The Favourite. 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. Scene Two: Salisbury, the ceremonial laying of the first five foundation stones of the new cathedral after its move from Old Sarum.