Western Architecture: A Survey From Ancient Greece to the Present

“Preoccupied to the point of obsession with the fate of the soul after death, mediaeval men and women devoted a large part of their assets and energy to the glorification of God” Ian Sutton writes near the beginning of chapter 4 of this book, “The Gothic Centuries”.

In what came to be known (at first disparagingly) as a Gothic building “clearly articulated shafts rise from floor to ceiling, meeting and mingling in the pattern of vaults and traceried windows in a way that irresistibly suggests that this is how the building stands up”. I remember once standing in Notre Dame...