The Vita of Christina of Markyate has been celebrated as ‘perhaps the twelfth century's most effective and revealing personal history of a woman’. Indeed, the Vita's account of Christina's early career is vivid and remarkably detailed: one can read at length of Christina's saintly childhood, her efforts to escape an unwanted marriage, her ascetic hardships living with the hermit Roger and her intimate spiritual friendship with Abbot Geoffrey of St Albans. But while we know a great deal about Christina's early career, more than for almost any other contemporary woman, we know almost nothing about her later life. Her Vita is incomplete, its text known only from a single fire-damaged fourteenth-century manuscript, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius E i. Christina's Vita is the very last item in the Tiberius manuscript. On the final folio, as Christina is reproving Geoffrey for incorrect behaviour, the text breaks off at the bottom line in the middle of a word: ‘que minus recte videbatur gerere sapienter increpando, sa…’. As the last datable reference in the Vita is to 1139, and Abbot Geoffrey died in 1146, the existing text of the Vita appears to cover events no later than the early 1140s.

Scholars have tended to ignore Elizabeth's letters as a potential source for evidence of her religious beliefs, and have turned elsewhere to find a ‘window into her soul’. A few fixed on her personal Book of devotions as the most valuable route into her inner life, since it was generally assumed that she had composed the prayers within it herself. From this kind of evidence, the queen emerged as a deeply pious princess, far different from the politique figure who dominated the writings of A. J. Pollard, J. E. Neale and J. B. Black. J. P. Hodges, for example, thought these private prayers revealed both ‘a spiritual perception’ and ‘a deep personal faith which has every token of sincerity’, while William P. Haugaard, likewise, detected a ‘spiritual depth and unity to her character’. As the prayers also manifested a belief in solifidianism, Haugaard identified Elizabeth's piety as unmistakably Protestant, a view which Christopher Haigh endorsed. More recently, however, Patrick Collinson has questioned the historical value of the Book of devotions. He first speculated that the prayers within it might well have been written for Elizabeth by others, and in a clever piece of deconstruction, went on to suggest that, in any event, the book itself (together with one or two other small devotional books) was probably a fashion accessory rather than an object encouraging personal piety. To find clues to her religion, Collinson preferred to rely on the queen's actions and private behaviour. There he saw so many illustrations of religious conservatism, including her dislike of married clergy, hostility to the destruction of crosses and church monuments, her use of Catholic oaths and her ‘unusually negative prejudice against the preaching ministry’ that he dismissed the queen as ‘an odd sort of Protestant’, arguing that her conservative policies probably reflected her religious preferences rather than simply political expediency. Collinson has not been alone in playing down Elizabeth's Protestantism, although only a small minority of historians today describe the queen as a Henrician Catholic, who would have been content in 1558 ‘to return to the Church of her father’.

On Whit Sunday 1569, after evening service, William and Geoffrey Soden went to see their vicar. They expected a difficult encounter, and took along three of their neighbours of Swalcliffe near Banbury for moral support. The Sodens had been wrangling between themselves and with their mother, and there was also some dispute with the vicar, Richard Crowley. William now told the vicar that they wished to receive communion next day, and asked ‘to know if he would admit them thereunto’. Crowley replied ‘I will not’, and said it was ‘because they came not penitently’. He explained in court later that ‘the said William and Geoffrey Soden did not come to this respondent Anno 1569 penitently or in brotherly reconciliation, but obstinately, with vehement words, as is known to the whole company then present’. Crowley had shown the Sodens the Book of Common Prayer, ‘and exhorted them in the presence of those men according to the rule of the said Book, but the said William and Geoffrey Soden regarded it not but continued still in their obstinacies’. There was more: the vicar declared ‘I have to examine you on your belief, the articles of your faith and the Ten Commandments, and do not know how you could answer.’ The brothers were furious: ‘Yea, Master Vicar, that ye go about to shame us before the whole people’, declared Geoffrey, and they stomped off ‘uncharitably and obstinately, with great threatening words’.

The Swalcliffe rows simmered on.

Inscribed on the wall of the expiatory Basilica of Sacré Coeur, at Montmartre, the 1873 ‘national vow’ of France interprets the nation's recent misfortunes as divine chastisement of an errant and irreligious people. Since it was Napoleon III's withdrawal of French troops from Rome that had made it possible for the Italian forces to capture the papal city in September 1870, the ‘national vow’ reflects a strong sense of French responsibility for the pope's loss of his temporal power. The Catholic Right interpreted France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and her subsequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine, as God's punishment on ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ for her desertion of the Vicar of Christ, and the ‘national vow’ pledged prayer for the Roman pontiff's deliverance from his enemies. This study analyses the devotion of French Catholics to ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’ during the Third Republic through an exploration of some of the religious and political meanings of pilgrimage to visit ‘Peter in chains’. It also charts the process by which promotion in the Catholic press, rapid train transportation and cheaper package fares opened an era of mass pilgrimage to Rome and paved the way for a new popular papal style.

Nationaler Protestantismus und Ökumenische Bewegung. Kirchliches Handeln im Kalten Krieg (1945–1990). By Gerhard Besier, Armin Boyens and Gerhard Lindemann (postscript by Horst-Klaus Hofmann). (Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungen, 3.) Pp. vi+1074. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999. DM 86. 3 428 10032 8; 1438 2326

This is indeed a formidable offering – three and a half books by three and a half authors, all for the price of one and a half – and it must be admitted to those whose stamina or German quail at the prospect that some of the viewpoints and a little of the material by two and a half of the contributors has been made available in English in Gerhard Besier (ed.), The Churches, southern Africa and the political context (London 1999) at £9.99. The soft option is, however, no substitute for the real thing, which, like that other blockbuster, the late Eberhard Bethge's Bonhoeffer, is a contribution both to scholarship and to a struggle inside the German Churches. This, readers in the Anglo-Saxon world need to assess as best they can. It is not often that attempts are made by both the World Council of Churches and their principal paymasters in the German Churches to stop the publication of a work of scholarship, to be foiled (in best nineteenth-century style) by the liberalism of the German Ministry of the Interior; but that has happened here. And the rest of the world has the more reason to be grateful to the ministry for the authors have exploited the archives of the Stasi and the KGB, access to the latter of which has now been closed under pressure from the Russian Orthodox Church, which appears to have more to hide than anyone.

The link between all this and Besier's inquiries in America is provided by the sad fate of the Protestant Churches of the Ost-Block during the Cold War.