Readers of this Journal will enjoy Stella Fletcher's short history of the learned society with which it shares a name, but (for reasons explained in the book) no direct institutional connection, commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the society's foundation in 1961. Fletcher, current secretary of the Ecclesiastical History Society, makes good use of a (patchy) official archive of committee minutes and papers, as well as extensive correspondence and interviews undertaken with leading members. She wittily patterns her account on the four main periods covered at the annual EHS conference, tracing the society's patristic era (1962–73), its medieval age of faith (1973–86), its (partial) Reformation (1986–98) and the struggles of its modern age (1998–2011). In the early days effectively a private fiefdom of its founder, the resolutely High Anglican Clifford Dugmore, the EHS has over the years broadened its denominational, chronological and geographical remit, while never quite becoming ‘post-confessional’ in character, and seeing off occasional suggestions that it might change into a society for the study of ‘religious’ history. There are real achievements to celebrate: a well-regarded series of peer-reviewed conference proceedings, a proud record of encouraging participation by graduate students, and a pioneering use of the ‘short communication’ format at the annual conference. Gossipy, and wonderfully arch, but never spiteful or malicious, Fletcher's story is a gallery of academic eccentricity, but manages at the same time to be a short primer in how the discipline of ecclesiastical history has developed in Britain, and, in the main, preserved its integrity, over a half-century of dramatic social and intellectual change.