The building of Salisbury Cathedral was part of a project, unique in thirteenth-century England, to establish not just a new cathedral but a whole new episcopal city. Not surprisingly, it has proved irresistible to scholars. Matthew Reeve argues that, of all Gothic cathedral churches, Salisbury demands study as an integrated project, because it was built quickly (1220–66) and furnished at once, in a coherent and integrated scheme conceived within the circle of the reforming bishop Richard Poore (1217–28). Yet, in spite of the publication of many studies of Salisbury Cathedral and its furnishings during the last two decades, the significance of the cathedral's monumental painted decoration has been neglected. It is a declared aim of this study to “re-position Salisbury's polychromy as a central and integral component of the cathedral church” (127), and in this it is very successful.

The first two chapters set out the stall for a contextualized approach to the interpretation of such buildings, as part of a program of liturgical and pastoral reform in the time of Bishop Poore. In relation to the first, the deployment of the visual arts is interpreted as part of a new awareness of color, symbolism, and spectacle in the liturgy. In relation to the second, it shares an aim to “communicate simplified concepts through images and architecture … with a common edificatory thrust,” in an up-to-date statement of Christian fundamentals (24). The imagery in the choir was undoubtedly simplified, both in extent and content, by comparison with such contemporary choirs as that at Canterbury. Yet the primary audience for the paintings in the choir must be the clergy, as Reeve argues—so the clerical designers were presenting these simplified concepts to themselves. As demonstrated in later chapters, the vault paintings also presuppose a relatively high level of theological, cosmological, and liturgical understanding. Presumably, reform begins at home.

The third chapter presents the evidence for monumental painting in the cathedral, especially the vault paintings, as they were recorded before they were whitewashed in the late eighteenth century and restored by the firm of Clayton and Bell in the second half of the nineteenth—but also elsewhere in the east end. Attention is drawn to the neglected evidence for a painted altar retable in the northeastern transept, for example, as evidence for integration with liturgical functions. It is fundamental to the argument that this and the other paintings were planned and executed as part of an integrated project, involving painters, sculptors, and glaziers, contemporary with completion of the building. The execution of the vault paintings is pinned down very closely, to between 1236 and 1244. While the argument for coherence is attractive, it is difficult to assess the style, and therefore date, of the original paintings through the intermediary visual evidence of Jacob Schnebbelie's sketches and watercolors. The less subjective formal comparisons, and iconographical analogies with the Wilton Psalter, seem more reliable. As regards agency, Reeve stresses Poore's overall initiative but is reluctant to put much weight on the presence at Salisbury of Elias of Dereham, who has been proposed previously as a leading figure in the cathedral project.

The two final chapters argue that the vault paintings constitute a cognitive map for the interpretation of the liturgical functions and allegorical meanings of the spaces below them, as part of a programmatic scheme of great clarity. The range of the argument is fruitfully extended by the application of liturgical commentary to an interpretation of the figures painted on the ceiling, so that the relationship between the liturgical choir and the prophets above is explained, for example, in relation to the introit. This has been loosely interpreted by the designer in relation to liturgical drama, the ordo prophetarum. The relationship between the celebration of Mass at the high altar and the images of Christ in Majesty, evangelists, apostles, and angels is convincing, although the exact location of the high altar remains unresolved. In the three eastern bays of the central vessel, it is argued, the labors of the months represented the cycle of the liturgical year, in relation to the shrine of Saint Osmund. Like the west front at Wells, the overall program set out the history of Salvation. Just as the west front at Salisbury (and Wells) was designed with liturgical performance in mind, as has long been recognized, the author demonstrates that the architecture and decoration of the choir were similarly conceived.

This book claims to set up a new methodology for the contextualized and integrated study of Salisbury Cathedral, in response to a British tradition of compartmentalized and empirical scholarship. It certainly argues successfully that a painted cathedral can and should be interpreted differently from an unpainted one and for the value of a fuller understanding of liturgical reform and liturgical interpretation. This could usefully be applied to consideration of other media, such as the stained glass, which is relatively neglected here. The ideas underlying the present study are not new, however. It owes much to those who have gone before, especially Peter Draper, on architecture and liturgy; and Paul Binski, on the aesthetics and visual rhetoric of reform in this period. Throughout, there is fruitful engagement with a wide recent literature on medieval art and architecture in context, written by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, and appropriately so, as the author has worked on both.

There are some slips in proofreading, but the production quality is high, with good color and black-and-white illustrations, well integrated with the text. Given the value that is rightly attached to Schnebbelie's sketches of the vault roundels, it would perhaps have been useful to show more of these.