Heaven On Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals by Emma J Wells | 9781788541947. Wells’ selection runs from Istanbul’s sixth-century Hagia Sophia to Florence’s 15th-century Santa Maria del Fiore, but its primary focus is the pinnacle of the Age of Gothic – roughly from 1140 to 1280 – as manifested in England and France. William offered him as many trees from a nearby royal wood as Walkelin’s carpenters could cut in three days.

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”. 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 rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral following the fire of 1174 is a project we can still experience today.They embodied the eternal certainty of grace, each one its own ark of salvation, while transient political and dynastic chaos ebbed and flowed around them. 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.

Authorities were always alert to small tweaks to their offer that could grow their revenues: at Reims, the cranium of St Nicasius was translated to a new shrine simply to create an additional station at which pilgrims could make offerings.And it has the immense labour of unnamed men and women – not always willingly given – without which nothing could have been built at all. He has written or reviewed for a wide range of other publications including The Economist, The Quietus, Slightly Foxed, The Spectator, and The Times. An astonishing 100,000 pilgrims came to Canterbury in 1171, inspired by the murder of Thomas Becket just the year before.

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. 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”. It's to Wells's credit that she manages to make the history of these cathedrals as gripping as she does.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. 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.