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

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A glorious history of sixteen of the world’s greatest cathedrals, interwoven with the extraordinary stories of the people who built them.

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. After almost a decade in academia teaching at University of York and University of Durham, in summer 2022, Emma decided to move back into the consultancy world and was appointed Principal Historic Buildings Consultant for SLR Consulting. Together, the stories reveal how these physical embodiments of Heaven helped shape modern Europe and changed the world – each a story more riveting than the next. Walkelin, it is said, had pressed every last citizen of Winchester into service and stripped the woods bare.Known today for its midsummer music festival, throughout the medieval era Glastonbury had been better known for having the largest monastic foundation in all England. The story has, in Walkelin, someone to drive the construction with reckless audacity, cunning and determination. 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.

Scene One: Canterbury cathedral, trinity chapel, the scene of St Thomas Becket’s elevation and translation into his new shrine. Over a million people from across the globe are welcomed through the doors at Canterbury every year. Taken as a whole, however, the book offers a luminous insight into the medieval mind and the worldview that made these achievements possible. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal wood as Walkelin’s carpenters could cut in three days.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.

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. 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. 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? The financing of both Salisbury and York, for instance, was aided by the sale of indulgences: the contributions of the penitent faithful were, in essence, offset against their sins.

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’.

A glorious illustrated history of sixteen of the world's greatest cathedrals, interwoven with the extraordinary stories of the people who built them. 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. And that’s just three of the many ecclesiastical building projects going up across England at more or less the same time. The rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral following the fire of 1174 is a project we can still experience today.Captures the particularity of these cathedrals, and…is filled with tales of local patrons, craftsmen and the wider politics of the kingdoms in which these cathedrals were built. The emergence of the Gothic style in twelfth-century France, characterized by pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses and large windows, forms the central core of Emma Wells’s authoritative but accessible study of the golden age of the cathedral. Abbot Suger, who led the 12th-century building of Notre-Dame de Saint-Denis – in many ways the template for every Gothic church that followed – understood it was more than daylight that his abbey’s great windows let in, it was the divine.