The splendid new series of books on Russian religious culture, edited by Deacon Vladimir Tsurikov and published at the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, continues with this important volume. There are twelve contributors, eight from the USA, three from Russia, one from the UK, an indication of the strong recent revival of scholarship on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. The early chapters underline the significance of the Holy Trinity Monastery, Sergiev Posad (in communist times, Zagorsk) throughout Russian history, though rather strangely the first chapter is on the 500th anniversary (1892) of the death of St Sergius, whose relics reside in the monastery, while the second chapter reverts to the sixteenth century. Perhaps an introductory conspectus of the last 600 years, including an account of the devastation of the communist period, might have been more reader-friendly. There is a huge amount of new information here, not least in the three chapters devoted to Andrei Rublev and his icon of the Trinity, the monastery's most precious possession before its removal to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The second and longer part of the book is more problematical, containing three chapters printed in Russian (without an abstract in English) and therefore restricting readership to the specialist. Further, Predrag Matejic's long chapter on ‘Rediscovered texts from the Life of St Sergius of Radonezh’ depends entirely on a knowledge of Church Slavonic. Perhaps there are two books nestling here between one set of covers, one for the reader broadly interested in Russian religious history, the other for the specialist researcher. For the former there are riches indeed. Anyone paying a visit longer than the standard tourist half-day to the now gloriously restored monastery itself would find throughout the early chapters of this book a wealth of stimulating information and cause for reflection. The specialist will admire the wealth of new information uncovered by the authors. The addition of a conclusion and an index would also have been good.