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.’

A distinction is often made between magisterial and radical reformers in the early modern period, Luther and Thomas Müntzer being frequently taken as representatives of two quite different reformations, especially in regard to the understanding of Scripture and of the political realm. It can, however, be argued that the Reformation as a whole was radical, and that it is misleading to characterise one aspect of it as mainstream, another peripheral. The comparison between Müntzer and the Scottish reformer, John Knox, appears to support the contention that the chasm between the two camps is not unbridgeable.

The experience of young male Dinka refugees during Sudan's second civil war (1983–2005) illustrates the connections between religious change, violence and displacement. Many of the ‘unaccompanied minors’ who fled to camps in Ethiopia and then Kenya moved decisively towards Christianity in the years during which they were displaced. Key variables were the connection between education and Christianity, the need for new structures of community, and the way in which the Church offered a way to make sense of the destruction of civil war. As the war ended, many former refugees returned to their home regions as Christian evangelists, leading to further religious change. Their case parallels other mass conversion movements in African Christian history but takes place in a post-colonial context of civil war.

Collected essays are a popular and useful way of throwing light on their proclaimed subject matter or period, and of bringing recent research to a more general audience. They are, of course, inevitably limited in their scope, although this does not necessarily imply that they are at all parochial. ‘Europe’ is a frequent and obvious geographical limitation imposed upon matter dealing with magic and witchcraft, and ‘early modern’ a common chronological set of termini. Thus, the recent Oxford handbook of witchcraft (2013) declares itself confined – a very broad confinement – to early modern Europe and Colonial America. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark's earlier Athlone history of witchcraft and magic in Europe (1999–2002) again takes Europe as its principal theatre, although its spread over six volumes allows the editors to begin with the ancient Middle East and extend chronologically to the twentieth century. By adding ‘in the West’ to the title of his collection, Collins therefore appears to be confining himself geographically (although ‘the West’ is remarkably large), while ‘from antiquity to the present’ extends to his contributors a brave allowance of time in a single volume. This volume, then, more or less follows an established pattern for this kind of scholarly work. How far does it succeed in matching the endeavours and achievements of its predecessors?

The history of a sect can scarcely avoid dancing with sectarianism. Even if the sect has vanished from the earth, it is difficult not to become either a defender or a critic, and when there are controversies still living, history cannot help but feed them and feed off them. The only certain way to avoid this is to retreat inside the sect entirely, becoming part of a world where it is the only and obvious subject of interest. And so the histories of religious minorities easily become self-referential ghettoes, where formidable expertise is built up while basic questions about how the subject is framed are left unasked.

This article explores interactions between Baptist lay theologians and ordained clergy during the first English civil war. Despite their marginalised position outside the national Church, Baptists employed a variety of innovative techniques to coerce ordained ministers into debates which the latter would have preferred to avoid. Though Baptists during the period did not achieve intellectual parity with the members of the Westminster Assembly and others whom they sought to influence, their efforts contributed to an ongoing transition within the early modern English Atlantic whereby religious culture was made more participatory and theological authority democratised.

Leo Tolstoy was one of the most prolific religious figures of his time. Yet his religious thought and its influence have seldom been explored by church historians. Drawing upon themes within his literature, non-fiction and previously unconsidered primary sources, this paper considers Tolstoy's religious position in relation to other similar nineteenth-century religious movements. It exposes Tolstoy's links with British Unitarians and also considers Tolstoy's influence upon the founder of Britain's first interfaith organisation, the World Congress of Faiths. It is argued that Tolstoy provides a paradigmatic example by which to examine the relationship between the legacy of the Enlightenment and changing attitudes towards non-Christian religions.

The taunting question posed in the 1820s by the English critic Sidney Smith, ‘Who reads an American book?’, has long since tumbled into the dustbin of literary history. Yet it continues to reverberate in how Americanists describe the workings of Puritanism in their own country, its presence felt in two respects. One of these is resentment at the indifference to their own work of historians of the Puritan movement in Britain. Another is the assumption among Americanists that the Puritanism of the colonists who arrived in the early seventeenth century was singular in certain respects, be it their sense of ‘errand’, their modifications of Reformed orthodoxy, or perhaps their daring experiment with a congregation-centred polity, the ‘New England Way’. Whenever historians turn to the larger project of Church and State in colonial and modern America, assertions of singularity dominate the telling of our religious history. Do these endeavours warrant returning to Sidney Smith's question and rephrasing it to ask whether Americanists are making the most of European studies of Reformed theology, Puritanism in Britain, and conformity or dissent?