This handsome book results from a 2008 conference entitled ‘An Enigma Explored’, and its collection of essays by ten knowledgeable authors provides the most valuable contribution in modern scholarship to the history of the medieval abbey of St Augustine (Bristol Cathedral). It constitutes the second volume in ‘Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures’, and Bristol University's Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts is to be congratulated for its support for this interdisciplinary series. So too is the Boydell Press for the quality of layout and the sharpness of the illustrations. However, there are some quibbles. The gathering of colour plates around the middle of the book makes it difficult to locate quickly for reference, especially as it includes the master-plan of the abbey (R Paul, 1912), so much more useful than the 2007 digital plan opposite page 1. Also the illustrating of papers is uneven, so that some significant features lack photographs; for example, the crossing and south transept vaults, the north aisle reredos, and the general interior of the chapter house. In contrast, one paper's text is permitted to consume more than a quarter of the whole book, with sixty-three illustrations.

The ten papers range from Roger Leech's investigation of the early landscape setting of St Augustine's, including new evidence for the adjacent chapel of St Jordan, to Catherine Oakes's discussion of the imagery in a collection of late Elizabethan wall paintings from the Old Deanery. This reviewer was particularly impressed by John McNeill's identification of a ‘rhythmic deployment of architectural ornament’ in the 1160s works in the conventual buildings, a mark of architectural invention which leads nicely to the one work of real distinction – the fourteenth-century eastern arm of the abbey church (traditionally dated 1298–1332). For the editors, this is ‘the enigma of enigmas’, and it forms the primary focus of the book, with three large chapters devoted to it: those of Christopher Wilson, Jon Cannon and Paul Crossley. There are numerous issues within this ‘enigma’, but at its heart is the question as to whether the new east arm was designed by a single architect in 1298, as argued by Wilson, or was an accretive process of design mainly in the 1320s and 1330s, as proposed by this reviewer in 1997 (Morris 1997). The scene was set by Nikolaus Pevsner in the 1950s when he categorized Bristol (with Albi Cathedral) as ‘the architecturally most brilliant building’ in Europe around 1300, and that all its seemingly precocious features were designed by a ‘Bristol Master’ in 1298. Pevsner's approach to English later Gothic is engagingly examined in Crossley's chapter, which reviews the interpretations of Bristol by Pevsner and subsequent commentators, concluding that Pevsner's ‘exalted vision of Bristol’ cannot be dismantled. Amongst the commentators, Crossley kindly highlights this reviewer's article of 1997 as ‘the really radical critique of Pevsner’; though I should add the qualifications that the critique was not of the man, nor his insight into Bristol's undoubted architectural ingenuity, but of his interpretation of the building's history.

Wilson's essay not only revives Pevsner's conception of the Bristol Master but re-invents the latter as an architect of incredible knowledge and imagination, inspired by the royal master mason, Michael of Canterbury, and his St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster (begun 1292). To this end, Wilson can brook no other interpretations and he disagrees (pp 72–86) with virtually everything in my article. He dismisses my presentation of the mouldings as ‘so selective as to be misleading’, but my stated purpose was to illustrate local sources not previously considered. Of course I was familiar with the Westminster mouldings parallels in Wilson (fig 4.8), but his choice is equally selective. He argues that my discussion of the mouldings ‘does not furnish a secure basis’ for regarding works on the new east arm as slowly executed, but my analysis was informed by the implications of the documentary evidence (albeit circumstantial), revisited by Wilson without finding anything of substance to alter my interpretation, except to propose Thomas ii de Berkeley (1281–1321) as a significant patron – but this evidence is equally circumstantial. Cannon, in his thoughtful essay on Berkeley patronage, places more emphasis on the role of Thomas iii (1326–61) and, though apparently disposed towards Wilson's thesis, he struggles to reconcile Wilson's earlier dating with his own evidence (pp 166, 176–7).

Regarding the archaeology of the fabric, Wilson comments that the masonry is remarkably consistent and rejects two of my observations that suggested changes of plan. First, he argues that the vestibule of the Berkeley Chapel is primary, whereas I continue to maintain that it was an afterthought added between the aisle buttresses. Second, and more critical to my proposed chronological sequence, he brings forward evidence from the roof space over the south aisle (fig 4.6) to prove ‘conclusively’ that the intention was to vault the west bay in the same distinctive pattern as the rest of the aisle (fig 4.1). However, it seems to me that this observation need not deny my contention that the west bay was the first experimental aisle vault constructed, and indicates only that it was never replaced. Wilson's invention of the character and sources of the Bristol Master – ‘his mastery of the art that conceals art’ – carries this type of painstaking reconstruction to new levels in medieval architectural history, creating a story of which a Hilary Mantel would be proud. No review can do justice to Wilson's fascinating account and it should be read in full, but the sheer quantity of circumstantial evidence assembled there need not make it the correct or only interpretation, and I urge readers to revisit my article as well. Fundamentally, we have a clash between two different approaches to English Gothic architecture, well summarized in the editor's Introduction (p 10): the one rooted in an architect’s world of unlimited access to collections of drawings (since lost), the other stressing the practical know-how of the master mason and an ability to ‘design as you build’.