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

'An impeccable guide to the golden age of ecclesiastical architecture' The Times
'Vivid, colourful and absorbing' Dan Jones
'An epic ode to some of our most beautiful and beloved buildings' Helen Carr
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. 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. 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.