Salisbury's place in the canon of literature on great English cathedrals is ambivalent; on the one hand a chilly, efficient-looking, yet maverick building whose role as an exemplification of an ‘episcopal style’ has been much debated; and on the other, a triumph of moral, aesthetic and liturgical idealism created on a virgin site with plenty on money, and along with a carefully-planned city. Its creators, notably Bishop Richard Poore and (perhaps) Elias of Dereham, have been regarded as ecclesiastical reformers in the age of Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council, and forgers of a new relation of regnum and sacerdotium which saw the canons of Salisbury blissfully liberated from the castle mound at Old Sarum, and let loose on the verdant plain below. Neither view of Salisbury can be set aside lightly. The evidence suggests that the cathedral church itself has the po-faced and regulated character it does less because of high moral ideas than because of efficient planning and control at committee and building-site level. Major decisions, such as the proportional relationship of the new church to the old, based on the common ratio of the square root of two, reflected less high-mindedness than procedural norms deeply embedded in the planning and building industry. We can see these decisions as practical or, if we wish, as more fundamentally symbolic. In his accessible and beautifully-illustrated text, Tim Tatton-Brown takes the former line. His book is a general history of the cathedral church and its context understood broadly, arranged chronologically and with meticulous attention to documentary sources, human agency and the facts of the building itself, which are allowed to speak freely and without shouldering too much by way of speculation. The book is not footnoted and its bibliography is aimed only at non-specialists, but it provides a useful digest of the present state of archaeological knowledge of the construction. Christian Frost's book, on the other hand, argues that both the cathedral and its city were planned and understood according to underlying structures of geometry, movement and time. Frost is right to remind us that the cathedral is both a City of God and part of a city, an approach found also in the work of Erlande-Brandenburg. What will remain an issue is whether (given their level of generality) we can disprove the contention that such buildings have a deeper symbolic order, platonic, biblical and metaphorical in character, which is of greater importance than the apparent surfaces. In such interpretative approaches, the aesthetic order is necessarily displaced, or understood only generally at the level of metaphor, so little new is to be found here on the ‘look’ of the building. In fact the cathedral and its context become one and the same, a critical strategy common in writing in the last years of the twentieth century, but one which raises fundamental points about method and evidence. Which context, after all, is the correct one for Salisbury? Confidence in this book is shaken by the lack of responses to recent cited literature (for example, Matthew Reeve's study of art and liturgy at Salisbury), and by inaccurate citations.