This volume contains eight papers (plus an introduction) arising from a conference in Cambridge in 2011. Most focus on English material, although Iona McCleery deals with the more unfamiliar terrain of late medieval Portugal. As is always the case with such undertakings, the contributions vary greatly in quality and approach, some being more in the nature of musings, others more empirical. Of the latter, one might mention the careful discussion of the twelfth-century collections of Marian miracles by Kati Ihnat, who notes the way in which the miracle accounts gave a special prominence to Mary's liturgy at a time when it was both taking on new forms and being contested. She argues that, in this case, ‘miracles come across as apologiae for novel liturgical practice’. Iona McCleery illustrates her succinct and perceptive remark, ‘there is something inherently countable about miracles’, by analysing three Portuguese cults. She notes both the general and the particular: ‘plague miracles are very unusual in miracles collections’, but, in one of these cults, cases of possession ‘involved ghosts of the deceased, a rare phenomenon in other parts of Europe’. Not all the assumptions underlying the individual papers are equally convincing. Irina Metzler advances quite broad explanations for a supposed decline in the proportion of healing miracles in the later Middle Ages, but this ‘decline’ seems to be supported only by Vauchez's conclusion that healing miracles form 90 per cent of miracles in canonisation processes of the thirteenth century and 80 per cent in those of the fourteenth; a decline, it is true, but a modest one. Rebecca Pinner becomes rather entangled in attempting to find a context for the solitary example of a childbirth miracle by Edmund King and Martyr, although inhabitants of Norfolk and Suffolk will be interested to know that ‘East Anglia is like the penetrable female body’. Louise Wilson looks at the miracle collection of Edmund of Abingdon in an Auxerre manuscript, a collection that has never been published in its entirety, while Fiona Kao seeks for the influence of the ‘motifs, topoi and rhetoric’ of medieval hagiography in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Although there are the customary declarations in the introduction to this volume that the essays will ‘present new approaches’, what is striking throughout is the continued dominance of the classic studies of thirty-five years ago (Sigal, Vauchez, Brown, Finucane, Schmitt) and the equally vintage nature of the anthropology cited (Victor Turner, Mauss on the gift). It is still apparently necessary to decry the spurious distinction between elite and popular religion – perhaps this is a battle that has to be refought each generation. There is no index or bibliography.