Chapter 1 focuses on the social groups, the communicative constellations, and the media in which intentional history took shape. Texts in which the first-person plural, the collective ‘we’, was used, were particularly characteristic of this. In this way, they brought the historical events into a direct connection with the current audience. It is identical, as it were, with the past actors. These were his ancestors. The Greeks had countless poems and chants of this kind, which were found primarily in the epics of Homer and Hesiod. Especially among the elites who enjoyed such chants at their symposia, the idea prevailed that in this way their achievements would also be known in the future. As a result, the Greeks did not differentiate between mythical and (in our sense) historical events, and remembrance was also directed towards posterity. At the same time, the texts were firmly anchored in social and religious communication and thus part of life. This went so far that many citizens took part in performances of poetic works themselves (in choirs, for example), thus being themselves involved in the creation of intentional history.

The similarities in the way that the ubiquitous cult of saints was expressed in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany form a major body of evidence for contact among these regions. Overtly ecclesiastical place-names, containing such elements as *lann, are unusually common in all three regions. The implications of these for similarities and differences in church-organisation are discussed. The significance of the appearance of the same personal names compounded in ecclesiastical place-names in different British-speaking regions is explored. These seem likely in most cases to reflect movements of the devotees of particular saints between Wales, Cornwall and Brittany from the sixth to the ninth centuries and particularly the reliance of Bretons on the educational and spiritual resources of important Welsh churches. Contact between Brittany and Cornwall was more sustained and more intimate: a tenth-century list reveals a number of Breton saints established at permanent cult-sites in Cornwall by the tenth century and more were to follow by the central Middle Ages; Cornish and Breton authors also drew on each other’s work in composing saints’ Lives throughout the medieval period. By contrast the relative rarity of Irish saints’ cults in Brittany and the absence of Breton saints from Ireland implies a more distant relationship.

The first section of this article was inspired by the publication of two new books on Scientology: Janet Reitman’s Inside Scientology and Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology. After the publication of these works the floodgates were opened, with Tony Ortega’s The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, all exposing the abuses of the church in graphic detail. These were followed by insider tell-alls by Jenna Miscavige Hill, Beyond Belief, and by Ron Miscavige, Ruthless – the niece and father of the current head of Scientology, David Miscavige. Most revealing was the 2016 memoir by ex-Scientologist and Hollywood star Leah Remini, Troublemaker, followed by her A&E series, Scientology and the Aftermath. The second section was originally published as an opinion editorial in the Los Angeles Times in February of 2008, when Scientology was under public attack by a group calling itself Anonymous, which I found to be problematic, imagining what would have happened if a similar anonymous group attacked Jews, and why most of us would find that offensive. The third section is my brief response to the critics of the LA Times op-ed, primarily a historian of religion who upbraided me for using the pejorative term “cult” instead of the scholarly descriptor “New Religious Movement.” I think the shorter lemma fits.