Salisbury Cathedral has long been celebrated as amongst the “purest” examples of English Gothic architecture. Built from scratch in a single campaign (ca. 1220–1258) and thus stylistically homogeneous—itself a rarity—the church is renowned for the clean, hard lines of its white-and-black, seemingly imageless interior. This vision of Salisbury as an exemplar of an austere, Cistercian-influenced, even “anti-ocular” aesthetic is one that Matthew Reeve, in his impressive book on the cathedral's now-hidden vault paintings, sets out to refute—a task at which he largely succeeds. The considerable value of this study hinges on two further arguments that Reeve makes persuasively: first, that the cathedral's architecture, painting, and liturgy functioned together as a planned and integrated whole; second, that the evidence for this medieval gesamtkunstwerk has its own history, a history that must be carefully unpacked and assessed before that evidence can be effectively employed in the effort of historical understanding.

The book is arranged in five logically structured chapters. To help forge the argument that the vault paintings were part of a larger program of church reform, Reeve dedicates the first chapter to explaining that intellectual and ecclesiastical context. He discusses the rebuilding of the cathedral on a virgin site as itself an act of reform—designed to wrestle the church from royal control—and then outlines the reform program of Bishop Richard Poore and his circle. Their aim was to implement locally the reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), an effort that Reeve characterizes compellingly as modernist in sensibility that was centered on the development of a new liturgy, the “Use of Sarum,” and new pastoral literature. Key also to this reformist enterprise, Reeve argues, was the architecture and imagery of the cathedral itself. To further this claim, the author concentrates, in the second chapter, on the physical fabric of the building. He examines the evidence for the chronology of its construction, discusses the formal influences on its interior design, and surveys the Art History literature on the monument—a literature he criticizes for focusing on the church's architecture, and so on the cathedral's ostensible minimalism, at the expense of its decoration.

In the third chapter, Reeve hones in on that decoration and especially on the vault paintings of the eastern arm. He begins by describing the program of vault imagery which, moving from west to east, featured medallions of Old Testament “prophets” in the choir, a Christ in Majesty surrounded by evangelists and apostles in the crossing, medallions of angels in the transept arms, and Labors of the Month in the presbytery. Reeves suggests that wall paintings and stained glass windows above altars in all thirteen chapels in the eastern arm were also part of the original scheme of decoration. In one of the most illuminating sections of the book, the author then builds on the work of Horlbeck to reconstruct the post-thirteenth-century history of the vault paintings: their whitewashing by Wyatt in 1789, Schnebbelie's rapid sketching of the imagery in the weeks preceding the whitewash (sketches that were subsequently turned into finished drawings), and the repainting of the vaults by Clayton and Bell in 1872, work that was only loosely based on the original both stylistically and iconographically. By chronicling this complicated history, Reeve succeeds in highlighting both what can and what cannot be gleaned from the surviving evidence. He follows with a convincing dating of the vault paintings to the 1230s and 1240s—a date contemporary with the cathedral's construction that suggests that the building and decoration were conceived together. Reeve concludes the chapter with a less persuasive attempt—given the paucity of reliable stylistic evidence that he himself has revealed—to identify the hands involved in producing the paintings.

In the fourth chapter, Reeve elaborates upon his claim that architecture and decoration were planned together by arguing that the imagery of the east-end vaults would have resonated with the liturgical activities conducted below. He posits that the choir's prophet cycle—with its emphasis on the advent of Christ—complemented the liturgy of the cathedral's canons, performed from the stalls directly beneath the vaults. The crossing imagery of Christ in Majesty, in turn, spoke of the Mass celebrated at the high altar. The transept vault cycle of angels holding instruments, mostly liturgical, complemented the various liturgies held in these spaces and in the crossing, while the presbytery cycle of the Labors of the Month promoted the burgeoning cult of St. Osmond. In this respect, Reeve reasons, the cycle served as an allegory of the people's annual round of liturgical service.

In the fifth chapter, Reeve attempts to make fuller sense of his findings by exploring the deeper meanings of the east-end vault program for its original intended audience, the cathedral's canons. He suggests that the imagery, considered as a whole, functioned as an allegory of salvation history, progressing west-to-east from the Old Testament to the New Testament to the present and possibly to the Last Judgment (if this subject was once depicted in the east-end windows). The aim of the scheme, Reeve explains—calling on the history of liturgical commentaries to make his point—was to elucidate the meaning of the liturgy for its celebrants, to stress the value of the cathedral's reform initiatives, but also to metaphorize the entire cathedral as a vision of the individual believer's edified soul. The goal thereby was to transform the experience of moving through the church's interior into one rich in meditational possibilities—to produce a kind of liturgical and ecclesiological commentary in three dimensions.

The non-narrative, repetitive, diagrammatic quality of the vault paintings at Salisbury means that they never would have had the dazzle of the Cappella Palatina's mosaics, for example. Nonetheless, Reeve has managed, by way of his well-researched, tightly argued, and conceptually ambitious analysis, to reinvest the imagery with much of its intended intellectual and devotional complexity and power. As such, the book contributes substantially to our understanding of the myriad ways religious art in a public setting could function in the Middle Ages.