The modest title of Matthew Reeve’s book Thirteenth-Century Wall Painting of Salisbury Cathedral: Art, Liturgy and Reform only hints at the rich investigation contained therein. Salisbury Cathedral furnishes an unusual instance in which the building itself was constructed on a virgin site in one long campaign (ca. 1220–58), and where there is extensive evidence of the structure’s painted program. Moreover, the details of the celebration of the liturgy within this space are known since it was made to house the newly minted Sarum Rite, written at Salisbury perhaps by the bishop who inaugurated the cathedral-building program, Richard Poore (r. 1217–28). Drawing upon all of this related evidence, Reeve makes good on scholarly appeals of the past fifteen years or so that call for analyses of premodern spaces as integrated arenas where architecture, adornment, and ritual collectively shaped viewer experience. He moreover places at the heart of his study eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarian material, the kinds of resources often relegated to the footnotes of art-historical analyses of medieval sites. In five well-paced chapters Reeve assesses the reformist spiritual climate in which Salisbury Cathedral was created, reviews the history of the construction and adornment of the building, introduces the antiquarian evidence for the polychromy in the vaults of the cathedral’s east end, analyzes the iconography of the painted cycle in relation to liturgical functions of the spaces adorned, and finally relates the architectural, pictorial, and liturgical components of Salisbury’s east end to broad theological and pastoral currents of the first half of the thirteenth century.

Reeve’s first two chapters set the stage by identifying a reformist and forward-looking drive informing both the new liturgy and the fabric of the cathedral at Salisbury. Chapter 1 examines the intellectual world of Poore. Poore was educated in Paris under Stephen Langton. Through Langton the future Salisbury bishop was immersed in the moral and ethical school of theology that sought to train clerics to meet head on the challenges of the present era with its expanding cities and their secular temptations. Clerics, it was understood, should be well-versed in the basics of scripture and be adept at preaching so as to reach the urban flock. Poore’s training shaped his work as a leading writer of guides on pastoral care (pastoralia), as well as his formulation of the Sarum Rite that incorporated spectacles of dress and gesture into the performance of the liturgy. For Reeve, the reformist movement in which Poore participated was insistently modernist. Unlike the Carolingian and Gregorian reforms that had retrospectively turned to the early church for models, theological and pastoral trends of the decades around 1200 were emphatically grounded in the contemporary age. This modern ecclesiological agenda, so goes Reeve’s argument, in turn found material expression in the structure and adornment of the new cathedral of Salisbury, the subject of the book’s second chapter.

Reeve’s interpretation of Salisbury’s fabric and painted cycle draws upon Marvin Trachtenberg’s paradigm-shifting arguments on the nature of the Gothic. Trachtenberg proposes that scholars abandon the old terminology of “Romanesque” and “Gothic” in favor, respectively, of “historicist” and “modernist,” recognizing the traditional character of the former mode and the radical, progressive quality of the latter (Marvin Trachtenberg, “Suger’s Miracles, Branner’s Bourges: Reflections on ‘Gothic Architecture’ as Medieval Modernism,” Gesta 39, no. 2 (2000): 183–205). Reeve’s embrace of Trachtenberg’s vocabulary underscores his assertion that at Salisbury material and ecclesiological initiatives were coordinated to create a dazzling arena for the celebration of Christianity in the modern age. Characterizations of Salisbury as “dazzling” may be unexpected. The cathedral is often hailed as a pure, even sterile exemplar of English Gothic, perhaps evincing a Cistercian aesthetic. But such characterizations betray a lack of knowledge or dismissal of the structure’s expansive ornamental program. Reeve suggests that by exploiting the attention-grabbing potential of paint, stained glass, and luxury church plate, Salisbury Cathedral, with its new dramatic liturgy, exhibited a kind of modern know-how in the ways of spectacle to instruct and minister. Though the parameters of Reeve’s study do not allow for the full exploration of these insights, his work paves the way for further investigation in this vein.

Reeve’s third chapter introduces material that may surprise some readers, but which is most welcome in an analysis of medieval architecture and adornment—a straightforward discussion of the antiquarians and restorers who documented and altered the cathedral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Reeve must rely on the modern archival material provided by such enthusiasts to recover the rich painted cycle that once adorned vaults of the cathedral’s east end. In studies of Gothic buildings, typically material supplied by pre-twentieth-century amateurs is mined for evidence considered reliable but little addressed on its own terms. In contrast, Reeve’s chapter offers a fascinating, if brief, account of the fluctuations in attitudes toward the Gothic in the post-medieval period. We learn of the eighteenth-century campaign to whitewash the church interior in an effort to unify the space and make it accord with neo-Classical tastes, as well as the contemporaneous project spearheaded by London’s Society of Antiquaries to record the soon-to-be lost paintings. In the subsequent century, when neo-Gothic was all the rage, artists from George Gilbert Scott’s London firm repainted portions of the ceiling in a pseudo-medieval mode, ignoring the stylistic and iconographic specifics of their models. The eighteenth-century Society of Antiquaries materials are thus the current source for understanding the decorative program in Salisbury’s eastern vaults. Jacob Schnebbelie had been commissioned by the society to record the cycle, and this artist’s finished drawings and sketches form the centerpiece of Reeve’s quire of color and black-and-white plates. Moreover, Reeve publishes in an appendix the descriptions of the Salisbury cycle written by the society’s president, Richard Gough. In bringing this antiquarian material to light Reeve does a great service to the field, offering a model for how others might unapologetically treat similar evidence from other sites. Indeed, Reeve reveals his appreciation for earlier enthusiasts of the Gothic not only in the narrative offered in this chapter but also throughout the book in epigraphs from and footnote references to neo-Gothic architect and theorist A. W. N. Pugin.

Reeve does recognize the challenges of using secondhand materials in analysis of the original program. In the iconographic realm, there are, for instance, discrepancies among the antiquarian sources on the arrangement of the prophets in the vaults, and stylistically Schnebbelie’s sketches display a vivacity lost in the finished drawings of the cycle, making plain the intervention of the artist. Given these dangers it is surprising that Reeve so determinedly uses the eighteenth-century drawings to date the decorative cycle to the 1230s and 1240s, positing that the Salisbury vaults exemplify the early work of an illuminator associated with the site, the so-called Sarum Master. Dating the paintings to the decades of the building’s inception bolsters Reeve’s case that the pictorial program was an inherent part of Salisbury’s original plan, an integral element of the multi-media spectacle at the cathedral. But for some readers, he may push too hard given the mediated character of the evidence. Reeve’s assertions about the way that the decorative program works within the space stand on their own merits without the definitive claims of an early date for the paintings.

The strengths of Reeve’s contentions are evident in the book’s final two chapters where iconographic analysis of the painted program is coordinated with discussion of liturgy and the intellectual climate of the day. In chapter 4, he argues that the painted ceiling in the rarified clerical space of Salisbury’s east end creates a kind of “spatial and pictorial map” (82) that corresponds to the key regions in the performance of the liturgy and to the rite’s allegorical meanings. In brief, above the choir were depicted twenty-four prophets and prophetic types. These painted figures hold scrolls inscribed with textual snippets from the Hebrew Bible understood by Christians to be prophecies of the Incarnation, textual excerpts, indeed, which had been integrated within a pseudo-Augustinian text, Contra Judaeos, Paganos et Arianos, and in turn replicated within the Mass for the Advent season in the Sarum Rite. Above the eastern crossing were the painted images of Christ in Majesty, apostles, and evangelists, figures that hovered over the putative site of the high altar; and painted in the transept arms were angels holding liturgical implements—devices referred to in the Sarum Rite as gifts “to be borne by the hands of the holy angels” (97). Finally, in the vaults above the presbytery were scenes of the Labors of the Months. Reeve contends that in this setting these images referred metaphorically to the regular performance of Christian devotion and that they anticipated a cult of Saint Osmund (Bishop of Salisbury, 1078–99) to be celebrated in the cathedral’s eastern region, echoing the devotion to Thomas Becket in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral.

Once the iconographic elements of the program and their relation to Salisbury’s celebration of the Mass have been spelled out, Reeve, in his final chapter, turns to the multiple ways that the entire cycle would have been understood by its primary audience, the cathedral canons. He demonstrates that through knowledge of liturgical commentaries these clerical viewers would have understood the program—invoking the era of the law, the age of grace, and the contemporary period—in allegorical terms as a reference variously to salvation history, the cycle of the liturgical year, and the daily celebration of the Mass. Perhaps less expected are the connections Reeve draws between the program and medieval mnemonic techniques, taking a cue from scholars Mary Carruthers and Conrad Rudolph. While the program may not replicate any particular such map, Reeve maintains that the vaults were “structured as a theatre for memory” (124), adopting the same kind of spatial approach to the organization of information that one sees in contemporary memory diagrams. Ultimately, the varying, though interrelated, allegorical resonances of the program for Reeve had a didactic function. As he sees it, the whole painted cycle was designed to boil down the key tenets of the high medieval understanding of history, salvation, and the liturgy for easy consumption by the Salisbury clerics. The images thus were one element within Bishop Poore’s reformist drive to educate his chapter in the basics of the faith so that these clerics could meet the pastoral demands of the modern age.

Reeve’s explication of the painted cycle at Salisbury is thoroughly convincing if not always provocative. In the world Reeve conjures there is no conflict. The bishop has a spiritual charge, and the cathedral’s decorative program is one tool through which he seeks to meet it. One wonders, however, if elements of contemporary power struggles might also have left an imprint on the program. There is only passing mention, for instance, of the political tensions that impelled the Salisbury episcopacy to move the cathedral from the precinct of the royal castle to its present site. But might local clashes have affected the cathedral’s adornment? Consideration of the expansion of the mendicant orders as an impetus to better train the cathedral clergy likewise might yield insights on the program. Such issues, however, are not Reeve’s interest; and within the bounds that the author lays out, this elegant book makes important contributions to the study of Gothic architecture and liturgical space in general.