The Military Orders Volume III

Book excerpt: In the last twenty years there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the Military Orders. With a history stretching from the early twelfth century to the present day, they were among the richest and most powerful orders of the church in medieval Europe. They founded their own states in Prussia and on the Mediterranean islands of Rhodes and Malta. They are of concern to historians of the Church, art and architecture, government, agriculture, estate management, banking, medicine and warfare, and of the expansion of Europe overseas. The conferences on their history, which have been organized in London every four years, have attracted leading scholars from all over the world. The present volume records the proceedings of the Third Conference in 2000 and is essential reading for those interested in the progress of research on these extraordinary institutions. Of the thirty papers published in this collection, two deal with the orders in general, while eighteen concentrate on the Hospital of St John, six on the Temple, and three on the Teutonic Order, together with another on the Order of the Sword Brothers which it absorbed. The preponderance of works on the Hospitallers is perhaps a particular characteristic of this volume, but the fact that most of the papers relate to provincial life, rather than to the headquarters in the east, Prussia, or Malta, accurately reflects modern concerns, as do the contributions on historiography, the papacy, cultural history, and religious life. Examples of new research interests are the paper on bioarchaeology and the two on liturgy.