It is sometimes said that the sure sign that an institution is in decline is when it publishes its own history. In terms of Westminster Abbey's growth from Anglo-Saxon monastery to mother church of empire, David Cannadine's edited collection, Westminster Abbey: A Church in History, appears to confirm this observation, given the uncertainty that must surely surround such a church in an increasingly secular postimperial society. But as the contributed chapters collectively (and ably) show, for all its connotations of continuity, Westminster Abbey's history has always been riddled with uncertainty. Architecturally impressive, a national mausoleum, located next to Parliament at the very center of government, and the venue for all but two coronations since 1066, Westminster Abbey is unique among ecclesiastical buildings. Iconic and charismatic, no other cathedral or church has such eminence, not even St. Peter's in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, or St. Paul's in London. This is quite a claim, but one that is forcibly demonstrated throughout the nine chapters of this beautifully illustrated volume.

Tracing the abbey's origins between the seventh and twelfth centuries, Henry Summerson takes us carefully through its Saxon beginnings to its expansion under Edward the Confessor, before Paul Binski and James G. Clark examine Henry III's thirteenth-century redevelopment of the building. Embracing the latest French Gothic, with its slender buttresses and tall narrow chapels, Henry took inspiration from the cathedrals of Reims, Amiens, and Notre-Dame, and especially Louis IX's royal chapel, Sainte-Chapelle. The result was a transformation of Westminster from Saxon monastery to something nearing what we know today. And as quintessentially English as the building seems, its aesthetics owe much to Henry's architect, Henry of Reyns, and his great knowledge of Sainte-Chapelle. Binski and Clark here make one of the volume's most remarkable observations. The cross-benched debating chambers of Britain's parliamentary tradition originated in the ecclesiastical architecture of St. Stephen's Chapel, where the House of Commons sat between 1549 and 1834. But in the fourteenth century, the Commons met in Westminster Abbey's circular Chapter House. Had this practice continued, Binski and Clark speculate, the shape of British politics might now be very different. It is these sorts of insights that really give a sense of the abbey's agency in broader British history.

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the abbey's fortunes fluctuated under varying degrees of royal patronage, as shown in Clark and Binski's second contribution, exploring the building's transition from seat of Plantagenet power to Tudor symbol of legitimacy. But it is Diarmaid MacCulloch who takes us through the turbulence of the mid-sixteenth century and England's break with Rome. Here it is Thomas Cromwell's vision of the abbey as one of a series of new cathedrals for Henry VIII's reformed church that dominates the story. In 1540, Westminster Abbey not only became a cathedral, but the king's cathedral. It remained so until Mary I returned it to its monastic character, before it reverted to a Royal Peculiar in 1560. This redefining of the abbey reflected the religious and political uncertainty of mid-sixteenth-century England: its dalliance with cathedral status had been a short one. Julia Merritt continues this theme through the reigns of the Stuart kings and Oliver Cromwell. For both James I and Cromwell, the abbey was crucial to legitimizing their fledgling regimes: the reburial of Mary Queen of Scots in the abbey opposite Elizabeth in 1612 was as powerful propaganda as any state pageantry in the post–Civil War Commonwealth of the 1650s.Westminster Abbey was increasingly mobilized as a powerful political resource.

William Whyte's portrait of the eighteenth-century abbey charts the escalation of Hanoverian and Georgian ritual, culminating in the grotesque extravaganza of George IV's five-hour ceremony, complete with new crown and 27-foot robe train. This period marked the musical zenith of the abbey, with Handel's coronation anthems debuting, notably Zadok the Priest for George II's crowning. Along with the nation's largest musical ensembles, Hawksmoor's twin west towers completed the medieval silhouette so iconic today.

After J. Mordaunt Crook's treatment of the abbey during Victoria's reign, where George Gilbert Scott's renovations take center stage, Cannadine's concluding chapter sees Westminster's escalation to mother church of empire and, eventually, postimperial commonwealth. Readers will be left stupefied at John Seddon and Edward Lamb's 1904 proposed addition of an “Imperial Monumental Halls and Tower” to celebrate the abbey's central place in the British Empire. This freestanding 550-foot Gothic tower, more than 200 feet taller than Elizabeth Tower (the clock tower housing the large bell named “Big Ben”), was intended as an imperial mausoleum, and it would surely have been the most emphatic statement of empire. For an empire on which the sun supposedly never set, this construction would have ensured that for much of London the sun would never have risen. In the end though, it was not a giant imperial tower, but the body of the Unknown Soldier that most aptly encapsulates what the abbey means. This single grave, as might be found in any English parish church, embodies the shared sacrifice of a nation and empire far more powerfully than any ostentatious architectural vanity.

This volume testifies to the abbey's constant struggle to survive, subject as it has been to the whims of royal patronage, religious controversy, social upheaval, and political intrigue. The key argument here is that the abbey's fortunes have been inseparable from those of England and the United Kingdom: for all its appearance of permanence, it seems that there has rarely been a period in which the abbey's future has been completely stable. The authors have produced an institutional and architectural study of a single building that is also a social and political history of a nation. This really is the edited collection's great strength: the abbey's fortunes and character have been inseparable from Britain's place in the world. What that might be in the twenty-first century is uncertain, but if this work tells us anything, it is that the history of Westminster Abbey is a survival story. Well researched, combining brilliant anecdotes with broad social, architectural, political, and religious analysis, this is a wonderful book that provides an all-embracing narrative of the life of a Gothic icon.