Roland Recht's book on Gothic cathedrals was first published in 1999 as Le Croire et le voir. According to it, seeing becomes believing in late medieval sensibility, and the arts were ‘progressively affected by a discernible change, namely an enhancement of their visual value’ (p. 1). Recht's study can now be seen as part of a trend towards the study of visuality which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and which entailed a broader enquiry into the hierarchy of the senses and epistemology. As an hypothesis about actual historical change it raises several questions: the visual arts necessarily have an ostensive form apparent to a beholder, but it does not follow that because some (Gothic) art forms tickle modern visual sensibilites, their forerunners were not also conceived in terms of visual value. The issue is surely relative. Aside from a possibly objectionable teleology, we must ask too about all the senses: medieval aesthetics were interested not in the separation, but mixture, of sense perceptions. Recht does not discuss the hierarchy of senses and the important roles of hearing and taste, or something key to belief, namely persuasion, rhetoric, the building of confidence or fides. If seeing was believing, tasting (via the Latin sapere) was also to know. The strength of Recht's book is its practical engagement with art and architecture especially. It has useful, if rather distended, opening sections on the history of the modern reception and interpretation of Gothic cathedrals. But so much time is spent positioning this spectacular art in relation to modern sensibilities that the book's grounding in medieval aesthetics seems, in contrast, underdeveloped; and in such an ambitious book this is a real drawback. Its first part provides a quick-moving astute overview of criticism starting with Viollet-le-Duc's rationalism, and makes many valuable points, noting the strong neoplatonic leanings in the modern reception of ‘Gothic’ aesthetics propounded by De Bruyne, Von Simson and others. Recht is not always attentive to the unintended consequences of neoplatonism for accounts of ‘official’ culture of the sort advanced by Bahktin, cited with uncritical approval (p. 78). The risk of this kind of orientation towards critical history is that the account as a whole tends to digress from the master hypothesis about visuality. We quickly realise that this book has a mixed agenda. Its part ii turns to artefacts, starting where Belting and others have started with the ‘need to see’ in the art of the sacraments, the mass especially. There is always a tendency to a theoretical turn, as in the account (from p. 99) of the physics and metaphysics of seeing; how did Baconian physics stand in relation to actual artistic practice? But throughout the book there is also ambivalence about the causal character of ideas. Recht (p. 106) does not think that there was ‘a direct connection between the question of optics’ and the ‘new conceptions of space to which the art of Giotto in Assisi bears witness’; again (p. 119) he states that ‘concepts contribute nothing to architecture’. If so, why conceptualise at all? Recht is at his best in his account of architecture and the ‘connoisseurs’ (ch. iv). He steers us towards questions of self-perception on the part of architects and patrons via the reuse of materials, especially columns, from older buildings in their newer replacements, as at Suger's Saint-Denis: Saint-Denis is advanced as the product of a dialectic between ‘architectural relics’ and formal innovation. This is certainly one way of understanding spolia or medieval recycling, although Recht appears not to consider the role of the reuse of marbles and columns especially within an older and eloquent, ultimately Roman, literary and aesthetic tradition of heroic improvement. But important insights are provided in passing: when, in 1231, the new masters of Saint-Denis replaced much of the east end of Suger's church they retained his ambulatory of around 1140 because they recognised in it a founding monument of the style that they themselves were using. This points to the possibility that the first connoisseurs of Gothic were its architects, self-consciously reflecting on their own traditions. Recht's discussion of rational innovations in building techniques and in the understanding of art and authorship in this section is valuable, and he is right (pace Hans Belting) to insist that this period had a concept both of art and of the artist. His final chapters, given over to sculpture and image-making more generally, are brisker and for the present reviewer less distinctive in the sense that their view of subject-object relations, or the cathedral as a theatre of memory, is not as compelling or fully thought-through as those offered by Hans Belting or Mary Carruthers. In keeping with trends of the 1990s Recht cites with approval the work of Eric Auerbach on sermo humilis as a means of accessing later medieval religious aesthetics, without pondering its disadvantages. Thus Gothic art re-evaluates old hierarchies of style and places the ugly on a par with the beautiful. But because there is no more fully developed account of medieval aesthetics in this book, terms such as ugly and beautiful, or for that matter believing and seeing, can only be understood in terms familiar to modernity.