The Armor of Light: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide mentions death by suicide.

Ever since 1989’s The Pillars of the Earth, set in the time of the cathedral’s construction in the 12th century, Kingsbridge Cathedral has played an important role in the Kingsbridge series. While the characters come and go, the cathedral endures. Once, the cathedral represented the new dawn of a bold architectural vision and was tied to the rise of Kingsbridge as a town. Now, however, the characters have grown so used to the cathedral that it has become a mundane part of existence. The cathedral that was once a symbol of the future is now a relic of the past; the statues inside commemorate people like Prior Peter who died many centuries earlier. Peter’s efforts to build the cathedral—which took up the entirety of The Pillars of the Earth—are reduced to a few lines of barely remembered history. In this sense, the cathedral represents societal change and collective forgetting. The cathedral remains physically the same, but its significance changes as the society around it changes.

In the industrializing world of The Armor of Light, the cathedral is an anachronism. Now, the mills occupy the cultural center that once belonged to the cathedral.