The remarkable tendency for the cult of the medieval saint to spread, take root and, in the process, split into new saintly manifestations is exemplified by St Ninian/Finnian/Uinniau. This book on St Ninian is likewise divided into parts. The first (pp. 1–87) is a series of twelve short essays by John MacQueen on the historical Ninian, his mission and the origins and growth of Christianity in the region associated with him, that is, present-day south-west Scotland. It is a careful consideration of the genealogical and, especially, onomastic and toponymic evidence. However, this is at the expense of any extended consideration of the ‘dossier’ on St Ninian found in the second part of the book. This (pp. 88–124) provides the first English translation of the Latin epyllion Miracula Nynie episcopi, edited in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica; and a translation of the Vita Niniani from the Latin edited by A. P. Forbes in The historians of Scotland, V: St Ninian and St Kentigern. Both translations are by Winifred MacQueen who here brings together in English the earliest extensive documents devoted solely to the saint. We are told (p. 11) that the dossier developed from a sixth- or seventh-century Life of Ninian written at Whithorn to which an appendix of miracles was added during the period of Anglian supremacy in the mid-eighth century. An abstract of this composite work was sent to Bede who included the details in the Historia ecclesiastica iii.iv, and it was used later in the same century by a monk of Whithorn to produce the Miracula. This hypothetical Whithorn Life was lost, but an Anglo-Saxon version survived to be rendered into Latin by Ailred after 1160, the Life also translated in this book. Although there is a valiant effort to recover whatever can be recovered from these documents as they relate to the fifth century or whenever Ninian was supposed to be active, the sense that they tell us more about the aims of eighth-century ecclesiastics is, for this writer, inescapable. For example, ch. 2 of the Miracula records Ninian's arrival in Rome: ‘Cuius in aduentu gaudet Clementia Rome’ (‘At his coming the Clemency of Rome rejoiced’). We are told (p. 6) that this is either a pun on Clemens Romanus, that is pope Clement i, or that it is a reference to the titulus Clementis, the basilica of San Clemente in Rome, also associated with the first-century pope. What the writers do not say, however, is that this is a line taken from a praise poem, De basilica edificata a Bugge filia regis Anglia, by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, honouring Bugga, daughter of King Centwine of Wessex, and her efforts in church-building. She too journeyed to Rome ‘Cujus in adventu gaudet clementia Romae’ (‘At her coming the clemency of Rome rejoiced’) (PL lxxxix. 289). Aldhelm's account of Rome recalls the account in the Life of Ninian. This is part of a dominant theme in the dossier which seeks to emphasise Ninian's orthodoxy by associating him with Rome and this must be why the saint appealed to Bede who could now claim Roman origins for the Irish Church through Palladius, for the Anglo-Saxon Church through Augustine, and for the Pictish Church through Ninian. For that reason, in the very chapter of the Historia ecclesiastica where he tells of Columba's conversion of the Picts, he brings in the other mission to the Picts, that of Ninian, who got there first. This volume, in making the Ninian dossier accessible in English, is very much to be welcomed; the preliminary essays will provide food for thought for even the gamest toponymist.