The history of the stained glass in Chester Cathedral features in a new book.
The Cathedral features in a book by author Janet Gough, Divine Light: The Stained Glass of England’s Cathedrals.
Chester Cathedral’s Cloisters were glazed in the 1920s at the Very Reverend Frank Bennett’s suggestion, Dean of Chester between 1920 and 1937.
There are 34 windows in the Cloister with 130 lights or sub-divisions of a window. Each window has at least one memorial and 147 local people are remembered in this way.
The design of the glazing represents the calendar of the English church in use at the time with a section for English post-Reformation ‘saints’.
Janet invited the deans of all the Church of England’s cathedrals, Westminster Abbey and St George’s Chapel in Windsor, to select and write up at least one exceptional window.
The book features glass from every century over the past 900 years beginning with the windows installed at Canterbury Cathedral following the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 and representing every subsequent century in the history of English stained glass.
It also includes new windows being installed and recent major conservation projects on glass such as the Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces in Birmingham cathedral.
Divine Light encompasses the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the hugely productive ‘long nineteenth century’, the Arts and Crafts movement, the creative commissions of the twentieth century.
It also establishes the connections between the artistic beauty of stained glass, its effectiveness as a narrative medium, and the various technical developments that have shaped the work of practitioners over the centuries. The refraction of light through coloured glass emerges as an early form of mass communication that retains its power to move and inspire today.
Janet, who advised Royal Mail on its Christmas 2024 stamps, which featured five cathedrals from across the UK, says: “The stained-glass windows of England’s cathedrals illuminate interior spaces, communicate religious, historical, and political messages, and – perhaps – offer us a glimpse of heaven. Divine Light tells the remarkable story of these much-loved works of art.”
Divine Light will be published on September 19th by Kulturalis
