This wonderfully complex book throws light on the evolution of the image of St Catherine of Alexandria in Muscovite Russia from a marginally important saint in the late medieval period to a key element in highly involved, faith-based political discourses characteristic of Russia's imperial project. Having drawn on the same sources as the veneration of St Catherine in western Christendom, the Russian cult subsequently assumed a ‘statist focus’ as a patron saint for the royal Romanov women. Some of them, notably starting with Peter i's non-Russian, low-born mistress and later wife Catherine, succeeded in installing and propagating themselves as legitimate female rulers between 1725 and 1796. From the sixteenth century through to the eighteenth the cult displayed a protean quality: it was used to connect the spirituality of the royal family with the ideology of the Possessors and to exploit the concept of Russia as Christendom's eastern protector from ‘heathens’, a legitimate heir to its Byzantine predecessor. It was also applied to reinvent Marta Skavronska as the Empress Catherine i through numerous public representations and to uphold her daughter Elizabeth's status as a sacred ruler, who could derive her legitimacy from both of her parents rather than from the peerless figure of Peter the Great alone. The Petrine discourses contributing to this process combined Byzantine and Muscovite continuity with innovation and modernity and evoked the idea of St Catherine's mystic marriage to Christ boldly juxtaposed with the union between Catherine and Peter. The Russian Orthodox clergy, notably learned immigrants from the newly incorporated Ukrainian lands, such as Dimitry Tuptalo and Feofan Prokopovich, steeped as they were in the arts of western hagiography and baroque homiletics, became instrumental in the process of naturalisation of female rule, albeit not always willingly so. The book's fascinating panoply is created through the use of a rich variety of sources: contemporary chronicles, state papers, memoirs of foreign visitors, liturgical books, vitae, sermons, emblematic poetry, icons, royal portraits and broadsheets. Apart from the more obvious issues, the topics discussed include ‘Moscow the Third Rome’, outward-looking church reforms versus the Old Belief, Orthodox monasteries, book production, court theatre, the establishment of honorary knightly orders and many more. Gary Marker's remarkable skill in bringing together multiple narrative and analytic threads creates a kaleidoscopic effect that leaves one wishing for more.