The last thing we are ever told about anything is who made it. Naturally, for what do makers matter in a world of ‘minders’?

The author of The Gothic World advances a half-hearted plea that a like technical indifference may explain medieval anonymity. He persuaded us more when in his former volume Gothic England he set out to deny the allegation altogether and to rid ‘le miracle occidental’ itself of ‘the plague of anonymity’. (Will no one rid us of the plague of notoriety?) In sober fact ‘from the period 1250-1550 a vast number of names survive. It would be no exaggeration to say that the men responsible for all the major developments of art in this period are already known to us by name.’

Mr John Harvey sets himself to answer four questions: ‘What, How, Where and When was Gothic Art?’ He has especially enthralling things to tell us about the ‘How’ and not least about medieval craftsmen, trassours and devysours, their lodges and guilds, their gear and skill. Coming pat at the moment when the swinging pendulum of controversy has come to rest at a point of equilibrium, his researches should greatly help to establish once and for all a true idea of the master-builders and of the vivid world of medieval craftsmen.

For Mr Harvey the master-mason is neither, according to the extreme folk-art view, just one of the lads’, nor, according to the opposite extreme, the irresponsible ‘artist’ he has been since the Renaissance.