Appreciations are less painful to write than obituaries, yet in the case of a departing co-Editor, there is still a funereal note to strike. Martin has given nearly twelve years of devoted service to the Journal, and the entreaties of all around him in the Journal office were not sufficient emotional blackmail to extend this period. I could not have wished for a better, more meticulous, more reliably supportive or more entertaining colleague in the last seven years. As I was entering courtship with the Journal and judging whether this might become a promising union, Martin's excellent post-prandial armagnac was a strong indication that we could do business together, and so it has proved.

The rite of confession is generally recognised by scholars to have been an essential feature of medieval Christianity. However, there is no scholarly consensus regarding the frequency or character of confession by lay people before the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Since it is important to understand the background to these matters, this study examines confession both as it was supposed to be practised and as it was reported in practice among soldiers in western Europe prior to 1215. By focusing on the fighting men of Western Europe, a particular but not insignificant segment of lay society, this knotty problem is addressed from a new angle.

Studies of sixteenth-century Calvinist churches lay great emphasis upon the importance and coherence of discipline and congregational organisation. They do less justice to the wide variety of practice that existed between and even within the new national Churches. This was true even of France, the first Reformed Church to be organised on a national level according to Calvinist precepts, and the one most clearly controlled by Geneva. Despite the influence of Geneva, exercised remotely by Calvin and more immediately by his lieutenants within France, French congregations cultivated a wide range of organisational practices on critical issues, stubbornly maintaining a number of practices of which the Genevan leadership definitely disapproved.

The Charity Organisation Society is conventionally assumed to have emerged as a natural response to chronic problems of urban poverty relief which, by 1869, had become acute. While accepting that such an approach identifies a necessary dimension of explanation, the argument presented here contends that no sufficient explanation of the emergence of the COS can be given without taking into account the ecclesiastical dimension of events, in particular, the key role played by Whig Broad Churchmen determined to ‘hold the line’ against ideals of religious voluntarism in the aftermath of the shock of Gladstone's 1868 disestablishment of the Church of Ireland.

The Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) was founded in 1877 and split from the wider body, the Student Christian Movement, in 1910. Although CICCU's prospects were bleak, it survived the interwar period and in the late 1930s began to grow. After 1945 CICCU developed into a highly effective force within Cambridge University. It sustained its membership in the 1960s, when many other student Christian groups were in decline. CICCU's growth was the product of a matrix of factors, including attachment to evangelical doctrine and adaptation to cultural change. Its survival and growth has significantly influenced Christianity in Britain and beyond.

By the conclusion of the twentieth century, the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer wore a venerable aspect. The words of the provocative young Lutheran theologian, who had participated eagerly in the German Church Struggle and had then become fatally embroiled in political resistance against the National Socialist state, were read, it seemed, the world over. His legacy had been loudly adopted, even paraded, by a new generation of theologians in his own Germany, in England, in the United States and later in South Africa. He was one of the very few Christian theologians whose books persisted beyond first editions, in a variety of popular and more sober guises, turning up time and again on the shelves of bookshops and in personal libraries. It was not exactly a cult, rather a fascination, an enthusiasm.