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

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Running battles at Santiago resulted in the cathedral precinct being stormed in 1116 and again in 1136. Next we head west to witness the building of Salisbury Cathedral, after it is moved from its original location in ‘Old Sarum’, where it was hidden away on top of a bleak and windy hill, inside a forbidding Norman fortress.

His poems have been published by Reliquiae, Bad Lilies, The Interpreter’s House, and Under the Radar, among others. There had been a cathedral on the site of Cologne cathedral in the fourth century when it was part of Roman Gaul. 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. 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.Combining scholarship and an eye for human stories, Heaven on Earth is a vivid, colourful and absorbing tour of the greatest buildings the medieval world produced. Scene Two: Salisbury, the ceremonial laying of the first five foundation stones of the new cathedral after its move from Old Sarum. Together, they reveal how 1000 years of cathedral-building shaped modern Europe, and influenced art, culture and society around the world. 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. 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.

And that’s just three of the many ecclesiastical building projects going up across England at more or less the same time. 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. Indeed, Wells was actually refounded in the midst of the 12th-century English civil war aptly known as The Anarchy. 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.

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. Shines scholarly light on the history of the great cathedrals of Europe and uncovers the wealth of human stories they hold. The rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral following the fire of 1174 is a project we can still experience today. Over a million people from across the globe are welcomed through the doors at Canterbury every year. They were built to embody the celestial city itself while also transporting the faithful towards it: it’s surely more than coincidence that the term ‘nave’ derives from the Latin navis, or ‘ship’.

As Emma tells us in this episode, her interest in cathedrals was sparked while she was studying history of art at university, where she became fascinated by “the elements of ecclesiastical buildings that you wouldn’t know were there unless you studied them”. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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. She describes their origins, the striking and unusual stories attached to them and the people central to their history.

He is the author of Impossible Journeys, There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of JRR Tolkien and The Favourite. Wells has written an accessible, authoritative and lavishly illustrated account of the building of 16 of ‘the world’s greatest cathedrals… The book gives full weight to the wealth of legends associated with cathedrals. In this beautifully illustrated book, Emma visits sixteen world-renowned cathedrals ranging from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, to the “northern powerhouse” of York Minster. 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”. 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.

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. An astonishing 100,000 pilgrims came to Canterbury in 1171, inspired by the murder of Thomas Becket just the year before. It is this remarkable flowering of ecclesiastical architecture that forms the central core of Emma Wells’s authoritative but accessible study of the golden age of the cathedral. Finally, we cross the channel to visit Chartres Cathedral, a masterpiece of the French gothic style. The story has, in Walkelin, someone to drive the construction with reckless audacity, cunning and determination.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. Pilgrims traveled from far and wide to visit Becket’s new “super-shrine” as well as several other shrines to saints' relics besides.