This is a well-researched book on an important topic. The author surveys architects' responses to ritual from the ceremonial of the palaeo-Christian house-church to that of great Gothic churches such as St Denis and Salisbury. Chapters on the Constantinian era, the Byzantine Rite (unfortunately spelled ‘Right’ in the running title headings), the Gallacian Rite, Carolingian architecture and the pilgrimage churches of the monastic west during the Romanesque period fill in the space between these points. What is conveyed is a sense of the functional earnestness and vitality of buildings; the life within the stones. Functional earnestness does not, of course, exclude the impact of magnificence or aesthetics on ritual. For example, the concept of ‘the church as sacrament’, analysed in chapter iii with reference to surviving descriptions of Constantinopolitan buildings, indicates a connection between the intellectually and emotionally engulfing effect of Hagia Sophia and its satellites and the magnificence of orthodox rites. (‘Even those who are accustomed to exercise their ingenuity on everything are unable to comprehend this work of art but always depart from there perplexed at the shortcomings of eye and mind’: so wrote Procopius of the church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus, as though to enter the building were to experience the recondite mysteries of Heaven itself.) Doig's scholarship is heavily or exclusively based on material objects and printed secondary sources, and traditional in approach. Thus, for the early period, much of what is said about ritual is extrapolated from excavated or standing buildings. The information about the later period relies more heavily on mapping the liturgy codified in surviving written sources onto existing structures (there are extensive quotations from secondary sources, as in the section on the west front of Wells Cathedral in chapter vii). Important works of art are also discussed for the evidence that they supply about liturgical furnishings and architectural mise-en-scène: the door panels from Santa Sabina in Rome; the peerless furnishings of San Clemente in the same city; the mosaics of Ravenna and Hagia Sophia; the treasure bindings of the Drogo Sacramentary; and the ivory throne of the Archbishop Maximian, also from Ravenna. In such a wide-ranging study there are bound to be lacunae, as well as evidence of the use of sources which would not occur in the work of a specialist in a narrower period. However, Doig's study appears in all major regards to be a thoughtful and helpful introduction to its subject.