The title of the book expresses exactly what this book intends to accomplish: telling a history of the Church through its churches. Allan Doig, an Anglican priest with a Ph.D. in architecture from King’s College, Cambridge, has published extensively on church architecture and has served in several church bodies connected with the care of church buildings.

In this book, Doig provides a history of the Church through a narrative of the events and persons surrounding the construction of twelve churches. This ecclesiastical history is possible because, as Doing puts it, “buildings are about people, the people who conceive, design, finance, and use them… the architecture becomes the standing history of the passing waves of humanity” (1). Doig’s history covers almost sixteen centuries of the history of Christianity, beginning with The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, dubbed “The World’s Most Miraculous Place,” built by Emperor Constantine in 335 and ending with the St. Michael’s Cathedral, popularly known as the  Coventry Cathedral, designed by the architect Basil Spencer and built by John Laing, next to the old St. Micheal’s, which was destroyed during the Second World War on the night of 14-15 November 1940 by the German Luftwaffe.

Sandwiched between these two churches are ten other churches selected for study: Old St Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican Hill built by Emperor Constantine in 319 in the time of Pope Sylvester I; the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul built by Emperor Justinian in 532-537; the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin built by Emperor Ivan III in 1479; Charlemagne’s Church of the Holy Mother of God in Aachen, consecrated in 804; the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis built by Pepin and completed by his son Charlemagne in 775; the Foundation of God’s House established in the tiny village of Ewelme in Oxfordshire in 1437 by Alice Chaucer and Willaim de la Pole; the cathedral of Cordoba, which was a former mosque converted into Christian use after the Reconquista by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492; the current St Peter’s Basilica built by Pope Julius II and the architect Bramante and completed with the construction of the dome by Michelangelo in 1593; the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, also known as Il Gesù, the Church of Sant’Ignazio, and the Mother Churh of the Jesuits, begun in 1626 and completed in 1650; and the Crimean Memorial Church in Istanbul.

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction in italics to the church under review, accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of it.  (There are also 14 color photographs.) There follows a detailed narrative of the historical, political, and religious events that led to the building of the church. In the building of the first six churches, the role of the emperor was shown to be central, whereas in the last six the role of the papacy became more dominant.

Doig claims that “in this history of the Church in twelve buildings, the aim is to provide [a] tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history” (10). If by “the people involved in some of the key moments and movements” he means the powerful actors, secular and ecclesiastical, as well as the architects and artists, then he might have succeeded. But it would be misleading to think that “a history of the Church” has been offered through a study of these twelve churches. Though the churches that are studied here span some sixteen centuries of Christianity, Doig’s historical accounts can hardly be said to offer “a history of the Church.” Of course, an author has the right to make a selection of churches for investigation according to his or her expertise and interests but if the intention is to offer “a history of the Church through its buildings,” then the question may be raised as to why other churches, let’s say, Notre Dame de Paris or the Duomo of Florence or the Cathedral of Milan, have not made the cut. More importantly, since all of these churches are located in the West in the Global North, “church” here runs the risk of eliminating the Churches located in the Global South, where two-thirds of the Christian population are now living. There is a reference to Latin America and Asia in Doig’s account of Il Gesù, but not much more than a reference. It would be exceedingly fascinating to consider some churches in Asia, for example, the cathedral of the Phat Diem diocese in Vietnam, which was built in 1891 by the Catholic priest Cu Sau, and the architecture of which has lots of interesting things to say about the history of the Church.

None of these remarks, which intend to enlarge the notions of “church” and church architecture, lessen the merits of Doig’s book. It is a well-written work, replete with insightful information, and should be required reading in a course on ecclesiology.