From the twelfth century through the present, commentators on English Gothic architecture have had to address the relationship of these buildings to their French counterparts. For the monk Gervase of Canterbury, reflecting on the reconstruction of his church after a devastating fire in 1174, the distinctions between the previous building and that created under Master William of Sens (and then his successor, William the Englishman) had to do less with imported versus local elements than with old versus new forms. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as French Gothic churches still trembled from the blows of Revolutionist mallets, English antiquarians extolled the finely preserved monuments on their own soil as representing both the origins and the culmination of the Gothic style. Although the view that granted priority to France ultimately won the day, leaving many English buildings to be dismissed as clumsy or misguided attempts to emulate French forerunners, exploring and explaining the “Englishness of English Gothic” (to adapt the title of Nikolaus Pevsner's famous book) continues to preoccupy scholars.

In the present volume, the eminent architecture historian Peter Draper leaps into this long tradition—but unlike so many of his early counterparts, he avoids the extremes of anachronistic nationalistic polemics on the one hand or ahistorical formalism on the other. Rather, he presents the buildings, with all their beauty and idiosyncrasies, as eloquent expressions of the needs, tastes, struggles, and affiliations of their clerical patrons and as strongly individual responses to the dual pressures to experiment with novelties and to preserve the past. In prose that is erudite yet accessible, Draper leads us through the grandiose architecture of the cathedrals at Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Wells (as well as more modest parish churches), bringing plans and elevations to life through both his crisp formal analyses and his sensitive accounts of patronage and construction practices. Draper's focus lies in the early campaigns of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which he reveals to be not a “transitional” period of groping toward the Decorated and Perpendicular styles but rather a vibrant period of experimentation and innovation whose exuberant progeny were not yet imaginable.

One of the strengths of Draper's volume is its seamless movement between close studies of individual monuments and broader views of regional trends, an approach that allows him to demonstrate the resonances of especially high-profile buildings on other ones whose patrons sought to emulate, rival, or criticize them. He begins with the eastern end of Canterbury Cathedral, an especially apt monument both because it falls early in his chronology and because its construction was documented by a contemporary observer, the aforementioned Gervase. Here the master masons faced an especially demanding clientele; their challenge was to provide for the brothers a usable liturgical space that would both retain reminders of the cherished earlier choir and proclaim the prestige of the community's greatest holding: the relics of the recently assassinated Thomas Becket, whose new cult the monks sought fervently to promote. Draper shows how these needs led to the peculiar juxtaposition of features associated with traditional Anglo-Norman architecture, such as a thick-wall construction with open passages and a highly sculptural treatment of mural surfaces, with others aligned with the most cutting-edge developments in northern France—soaring rib vaults and pointed arches, which put an often illusory emphasis on the building's structural elements, and punched-out walls that would fill the interior with light. One of the most enduring and distinctive features of English Gothic, initiated at Canterbury and employed in very different ways in the cathedrals at Salisbury, Lincoln, and Worcester, departed drastically from contemporary French architecture, harking back instead to the distant precedent of early Christian buildings: namely, the extensive, systematic incorporation of highly polished columnar shafts of Purbeck marble within the interior. Defying the principles of skeletal construction, verticality, and diaphanousness so dear to Continental designers, English masters used this stone to imbue the patterns of repeating elements in arcades and galleries with unexpected visual syncopations, drawing attention to the horizontal progress of arches and amplifying the plasticity of the walls. In a sense, this creative play with the materials—and, concurrently, with the lines and volumes—of architecture anticipates the play with vaulting systems and tracery forms that would characterize late Gothic architecture in England as well as Germany, but Draper is careful to avoid presenting his buildings as stepping-stones in a teleological progression. His story, though chronological, is more complex, as he demonstrates how the conjunction of old and new, local and imported features would be repeated and adapted variously in subsequent English buildings, whose patrons in turn wished to draw upon—or challenge—the prestige of a known monument while affirming their own institutional uniqueness.

Draper has long stood at the forefront of the important move in Gothic architecture studies to approach individual church buildings holistically; rather than presenting them as lofty shells of pure form, many scholars now celebrate the disjunctions in the architecture, attend to the spatial discontinuities imposed by partitions and furnishings, and chart the dynamics of ritual performance that once filled the spaces. Complementing the more sweeping account of architectural change that composes the bulk of the book, a separate chapter examines the various elements—from portals to piscinas—that shaped the public, liturgical life of these buildings. In keeping with another recent methodological shift toward investigating what institutionally and structurally modest buildings might reveal about contemporary tastes and needs, Draper devotes another chapter to the architecture of parish churches—an especially welcome contribution since these, after all, represented the class of ecclesiastical buildings most numerous and most familiar to people of the period. In keeping with his commitment to the human agents who designed, promoted, paid for, argued about, fabricated, and used Gothic buildings on various scales, Draper pulls the various strands of his inquiry together to make a powerful argument for decorum as a key determinant of Gothic design. Moving away from stylistic categories so often imposed by art historians retrospectively, categories often based on wholly modern notions of national identity, Draper argues that, more than “French versus English” or even “new versus old,” it was the question of what was a fitting architecture for a given space—a formal mode that asserted the comforts of stability, familiarity, and continuity, or one that sought to dazzle through novelty, experimentation, hugeness, and splendor—that engendered the peculiar combinations of features we find in early English Gothic. In the end, it is this argument, so painstakingly substantiated through the case studies, that gives this otherwise tightly focused book its relevance for investigators of the meanings of medieval architecture more broadly. Yale University Press must be commended for its own decorum, as the fine quality of the book's production matches that of its content. Large, crisp photographs of the architecture (251 in all, many in color), a map demarcating the bishoprics of medieval England, a glossary of specialized architectural terms, and an extensive bibliography and index ensure the book's usefulness—and sheer enjoyableness—to interested lay readers, students, and scholars alike. Unlike his nineteenth-century forebears, Draper makes no claims for the supremacy of English architecture. But, especially in tandem with Paul Binski's recent Becket's Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (likewise published by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press in 2004), this book places England at the forefront of some of the richest recent scholarship in medieval art history.