Salisbury Cathedral, together with its furnishings and its setting, has been the subject of several major studies in recent years, studies which have greatly increased knowledge of the building and its history and which have resulted in substantial revision of the traditional interpretation of the cathedral as a paradigm of early English Gothic architecture. Matthew Reeve's book is a useful addition to this literature, particularly in focusing attention upon the painted ‘decoration’ of the cathedral and in expanding the discussion of the historical circumstances, a period of major reform within the Church, in which the church and its decoration were conceived. Reeve situates his contribution as a holistic interpretation which treats Salisbury not as a building, ‘but rather as … an environment that was designed to be animated by the liturgy; the response to reform at Salisbury was to use architecture, imagery and liturgy as tools towards spiritual revival’. He sets out to explore the existing evidence for the historical and intellectual context in which the building was produced, and of the cast of mind of the men responsible for its conception, centring his discussion on the ceiling paintings of the eastern arm of the church, which were painted over by Wyatt and subsequently restored (not very accurately) by Clayton and Bell during Scott's restoration of the church in the 1870s. Fortunately, before the over-painting, the surviving traces of the original thirteenth-century paintings were recorded for the Society of Antiquaries by Jacob Schnebbelie. Reeve subjects these sketches, and the watercolours worked up from them, to close analysis, revealing the misleading inaccuracies in the nineteenth-century restorations and thus enabling us to get much closer to the original iconographic programme, which he relates to the adventus liturgy and sees as directed firmly at the clergy. He also draws attention to further evidence of both decorative and figurative painting in the church, including traces of a remarkably early painted reredos. He goes on to suggest, quite reasonably, that each chapel would have had such a reredos, which would have been integrated with the iconography of the stained glass windows above (only fragments of which survive), making the interior much richer than most previous interpretations have assumed. He rejects the stylistic interpretation of the church as ‘minimal’ (though without really accounting for the marked divergence from the contemporary elaboration of Worcester and Lincoln cathedrals) and emphasises instead that Salisbury was distinctive in the way ‘its designers approached reform as a highly sensory, multi-media experience; architecture, imagery, colour and interactive performance were the handmaidens to sensory enrichment and transcendence’. Following up on previous studies, Reeve argues for the close interrelationship of architecture and liturgy, both in the tangible sense that the architecture and its embellishment were designed to demarcate the liturgically significant parts of the building, providing a clear guide to its processional and devotional use; and in the wider sense that all aspects of the building and its figurative imagery reflected, in an exceptionally consistent and coherent manner, consciously modernist ideas of reform expressed in commentaries on the liturgy from the circle of Richard Poore.