The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.

The past year, 2019, was the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria. Since 2001, the centenary of her death, much has changed in the scholarship about the British queen. Her own journals and correspondence are more available for researchers. European monarchies are now being taken seriously as historical topics. There is also less agreement about the Victorian era as a distinct period of study, leaving Victoria's own relationship with the era she eponymizes less certain. With these changing perspectives in mind, this article looks at six recent books about Victoria (four biographies, one study of royal matchmaking, and one edited volume) in order to reassess her reign. The article is focused on three themes: Queen Victoria as a female monarch, her role in building a dynastic empire, and her prerogative—how she influenced the politics of church and state. The article concludes by warning that biography is not the medium best suited for taking advantage of all the new historical contexts for understanding Queen Victoria's life.

The focus on the rise and stall of English Presbyterianism has obscured other attempts by politically active puritans to address the problems that bedeviled the Elizabethan church—in particular, how to reconcile a promiscuously international reform movement with the reality of a national church, and the desire for parish-level autonomy with royal supremacy and statutorily mandated uniformity of practice. This article takes as its subject one such attempt, the remarkable “Bill Concerning Rites and Ceremonies” introduced in the 1572 Parliament, which leveraged the episcopal structure of the church to the advantage of the godly, empowering bishops to grant individual priests the right to diverge from the Book of Common Prayer liturgy and to adopt elements of the rituals used by the French and Dutch “stranger churches” then worshipping in London. The bill's emergence at a very specific juncture, after the statutory confirmation of the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571, illustrates how godly Protestants sought to use newly ratified regulatory powers to their advantage and to establish that only theological, not liturgical, uniformity mattered for a functional and true national church. Moreover, the bill was legally innovative, proposing to use episcopal power in disaggregated ways, thus institutionalizing the exceptions in worship that individual bishops had informally granted to the ministers under their supervision. It offered a remarkable vision of a national church that contained within it ad hoc and multinational liturgies and that was defined not by its adherence to one form of worship but by the supervision of an enlightened bishopric.