The twenty-six Cistercian foundations of the northern counties that prevailed to the end present some of the best-preserved material culture of all monastic England. The unbroken history of most cathedral monasteries and some independent abbeys has meant that much of their original style and spatial arrangement has been supplanted; and the structures ancillary to the church have simply disappeared. Their furnishings, even books in all but a handful of cases, were removed early on. By contrast, at Fountains, Kirkstall and Rievaulx the churches still describe the distinctive pattern of monastic observance; at Furness, Roche and Whalley, it still possible to pass through the gateway into an identifiable precinct and from there to the monastic enclosure. Despite their own conspicuous discontinuity, a selection of their interior artistry does survive, both fixtures, carved and sculpted, and fittings such as service books and office vestments. Michael Carter's claim is that their remarkable material record has not attracted close and connected study before but in fact its presence now is a reflection of unstinting protective interest, from the gentry families that received the sites and their contents from Cromwell's commissioners to their present-day national heritage proprietors whose collective custody of them recovers something of their original status as a congregation. Carter's contribution is to catalogue their visible remains and to construct a narrative that can order and explain what we see. His description is of a monastic life far distant from Citeaux's early pioneers. These were churches configured for worship that conformed to the late medieval mainstream. Communitas perfecta, in the symmetry of the professed and the conversi, is scarcely perceptible. The spirit that shaped these landscapes was largely that of the superior, no longer a role model for a counter-culture but a public prelate as much as any other. Carter displays a sharp eye for the detail of architecture and artefacts – which he reinforces with a fine selection of photographs of subjects that are not all of them well-known – but in his hands the transformation which they inscribed is left somewhat unresolved.

He begins with a useful caveat in the face of such Romantic ruins. The standing stonework is less expressive of their history and more spoiled than it seems. Interest may have been constant, but not always careful. Roche suffered an arson attack as recently as 2006; of the stonework uncovered at Rievaulx, Carter advises that less than 5% is now available for study. The record of antiquarian encounters, verbal and visual, and the surveys and inventories made on behalf of the crown in 1536–40, are vital to understand these vestiges. Carter is not the first to pursue the plan of church and convent from these sources but the potential to determine typologies from a discrete assemblage (as it were) has not been realised before. From these sites he can describe a developmental trajectory for the components of the Cistercian church, nave, crossing, choir, belltower and for (some of) the space beyond comprising convent, court(s) and gatehouse. The relatively rich deposit of associated artefacts raises the prospect of animating these structures with reflections on the quality of observant and domestic life. Yet Carter retains a certain diffidence: perhaps because he has already described some of them in published papers, he downplays their significance in his review of the available evidence. When he turns to them under each of his themes, his treatment is comparatively cursory.

The principal agents of architectural and artistic change were the superiors. The enlargement and elaboration of the churches were their commissions, at once both institutional and individual, to increase the spiritual capacity of the foundation and to identify its status with their own name. Carter provides a persuasive description of their distinctive profile as patrons. They were not well-born – there was none of them to match the armigerous Abbot Litlyngton of Westminster – and their schemes aimed directly at the articulation of a personal identity, conspicuously in the tombs that they constructed in central church positions, but also in the towers that named them as their builders. With no means of their own, they depended upon conventual income, an unsteady footing for conspicuous consumption that Carter recognises but does not interrogate. Their prodigality strained the grange economies of the great abbeys; among the priories of the women, whose materiality Carter considers as best he can, it was untenable from the outset: their structures were sustained by their secular patrons. The development of the abbeys’ fabric reflected a very different relationship with the outside world: they were not without donors, and certain dynasties continued to acknowledge an attachment, but hardly any initiated new building or furnishing for themselves. At Fountains and Rievaulx lay patrons were less likely to be the source of a scheme than its subject, their arms reproduced in mouldings and windows to amplify their regional status.

Such historicism was, Carter argues, a signal feature of the style of these Cistercians. The abbots made personal memorials, and positioned them, like (m)any other prelates, but he maintains that they were inflected with a recollection of the original ideals of their code since they eschewed costly and modish materials for unadorned stone. This is surely a selective reading of the (very) visible evidence, for, as he describes well, their inscribed effigies also incorporated universal symbols of clerical identity: monogram, rebus and the elevated mitre of the prelate also qualified as scholastic magister. Carter's reluctance to confront the collision of references here is one instance of a general evasion of the question of how these visible expressions of later Cistercianism are to be interpreted. There are contexts here of post-1300 reform of the monastic congregations, which he observes in passing but never satisfactorily links to the material culture that he describes. Carter's stated aim for the book is to proceed from the material remains to the vitality of their monasticism (p. xlvi), yet in the event the dynamics of life behind these forms, changing and conflicting as they evidently were, are kept largely out of view.