The History of the Church in Carpathian Rus.

The first three of these books are collections of essays which contain work by no less than thirty-five authors, so no composite review can do them justice. However, the overall level of scholarship is high and they may all be safely used as reference works, which is surely their primary purpose. The editing of the first, by Charles E. Timberlake, and of the next two, by Sabrina Petra Ramet, is of the highest standard, as is the production by three different university presses. Together they illustrate the considerable progress in scholarship on the Church in Eastern Europe over recent years. One hopes that before long more work by scholars in Eastern Europe itself, using new sources gleaned from the KGB and similar archives, may be included in such volumes.

There has been a gap in our knowledge of the Church in Russia in the years before the 1917 Revolution too. Medieval history is reasonably well represented on the library shelves, but not the nineteenth century. Therefore Religious and secular forces in late Tsarist Russia is to be warmly welcomed. This is a …