This collection of eight contributions belongs to a declining tradition in academic publishing that the Institute of Historical Research should be praised for supporting. Its success, and those of tributes like it, arises from the love and esteem in which the honorand is held, and from the unexpected and organic links that grow out of its diverse content, rather than the constraints of commercial considerations, thematic straitjacketing or the consideration of formal assessment processes. Giles Constable offers a lifetime's reflection on the changes in the field that he has shared with Christopher Brooke, noting the marginal and parochial place of religious history in the Academy of the fifties, and its current re-emergence in relation to political and social history under the influence of anthropology and sociology. Paul Binski eschews the parochialisms of empiricism, formalism and specialisation in his meditation on the importance of generic expansiveness in the study of art and architectural history and material culture, reflecting on the methods and assumptions revealed in recent treatments in books and exhibitions of the Gothic Age. The principle of generic expansiveness is adeptly applied in John Arnold's paper, which cautions against our instincts to trace the history of singular emotions beyond discourse, and offers a case study of late medieval commentaries on confession and penance to show how the study of emotional regimes, imbricated in broader discursive strategies, might help us to critique unilinear notions of the civilising process. The culture of the monastic choir is explored in Susan Boynton's richly illustrated discussion of the cosmic drama of the divine office, in which visions of devils and angels in the liturgy provided opportunities in rules, liturgical commentaries and miracula for the articulation of another kind of emotional, or at least social, regime – the ‘sonic community’. William Purkis continues to explore the thick seam of religious culture that opened up in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries across the lay/religious divide, and usefully reminds us to consider crusading spirituality in the context of contemporary religious developments. Janet Nelson shows how elite male monastic retirement in the ninth century might be seen (in the light of contemporary widowhood, for which there was no male equivalent) as the continuation in a new form of honourable service to the king, and a means of attenuating the tensions inherent in episodes of aristocratic succession. Virginia Davis traces the stratospheric trajectory of William Wykeham during his early years in the Church, rising from acolyte in 1361 to bishop of Winchester within seven years, and building his own ecclesiastical empire thanks to his links at court. The final paper, by Caroline Barron, surveys church dedications in late medieval London, and revives the obscure cult of St Zita, a fourteenth-century Italian servant girl whose absent-mindedness and habits of small-scale wealth redistribution cannot have endeared her to her employers but nevertheless did so to her devotees, among whom numbered the people of London, probably thanks to the introduction of her cult by Lucchese silk merchants to Cheapside not long after her death.