A close reading of sources documenting the Vandal conquest (429–39 ce) reveals that contemporary authors did not present the event as a persecution. To be sure, they insisted on the devastation that the Vandals caused, the typical woes of war, but not on its religious motivation. The article argues that it was Augustine who, in his ep. ccxxviii, first presented a theological interpretation of the event that allowed later sources writing within the Augustinian tradition to frame the conquest retroactively as a persecution.

The authorship of the Life of the twelfth-century English holy woman, Christina of Markyate (c. 1096–after 1155), has inspired considerable scholarly speculation. Though the writer never once positively identifies himself in extant versions of the text, oblique references locate his activity at the Benedictine monastery of St Albans in Hertfordshire during the 1130s under the patronage of the reigning abbot, Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46), and intimate the close connections that he enjoyed with his narrative's subjects. Building on these references, and incorporating clues from related sources from St Albans and Markyate, this article reconstructs the likeliest candidate for authorship – Robert de Gorron (d. 1166), Geoffrey's nephew, appointed sacristan and later abbatial successor – and assesses his eligibility.

Scholarship by Barbara Harris, James Daybell and others has recently highlighted the role played by elite women as custodians of dynastic memory in early modern England. The Dissolution of the Monasteries interrupted the commemorative process and constituted a threat to the mausoleums of the elite. Moving or rebuilding tombs represented, to some extent, a decision to remake or even to rewrite the family's history, a process which it is often assumed was at this time controlled by men. This article, however, through the example of the Howard family, demonstrates that women were equally involved; it investigates why this was so and the mechanics of the processs.

Before the early nineteenth century pew-renting was comparatively rare in Anglican churches, and where it existed the practice was generally administered as a less serious means of fund-raising. But just before 1800 or so, methods of administering the letting of sittings became more businesslike and impersonal. The frequency of pew-renting grew exponentially with the advent of the Church Building Acts beginning in 1818, but the profits realised were usually less than is assumed. The often offensive and sometimes dishonest administration of pew-rent schemes, when later combined with waning churchgoing and a consequent surfeit of rentable sittings, marked the system's decline.

The article focuses on an episode concerning the photographs of the famous Belgian stigmatic, Louise Lateau. Examining the events leading up to the bishop's decision to restrict the circulation of her portrait, it becomes clear that the ‘affair’ of 1877 was as much about creating her public saintly image as it was about controlling it. Studying the ecclesiastical response to grassroots initiatives adds a more religious perspective to the young field of celebrity studies and offers a more complex view on sanctity, and the role of the media and modern techniques in its creation, use and misuse.

In 1976, shortly after leaving the Soviet Union with his wife and daughter, the Leningrad native and Dostoevsky scholar Evgenii Aleksandrovich Vagin reflected on Russia's past and its possible future. He emphasised the central role that he believed the provinces would play. ‘Unquestionably’, he said, ‘the future of Russia depends a great deal on the extent to which the provinces will awaken, the extent to which all the processes of democratisation and spiritual rebirth will touch their depths.’