Brief Notices

Bush, William. To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiegne Guillotined July 17, 1794. (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies. 1999. Pp. xxiv, 243. $11.95 paperback.)

In To Quell the Terror, William Bush describes the impact of the French Revolution on the sixteen Carmelite nuns of Compiègne. Under the leadership of the prioress, Madame Lidoine, the nuns confronted the Terror and their execution with an inner fortitude based on their unshakable Christian faith. Bush details the nuns' final days and puts a human face on the Terror that statistical and socio-economic analysis lacks.

However admirable this contribution may be, Bush's thesis is untenable. He argues that the nuns became aware of the inevitability of their execution in 1792. The nuns interpreted their impending deaths as a sacrifice to preserve France and the French Church from further persecution at the hands of the Revolution. He concludes that the immolation of the nuns on July 17, 1794, caused the end of the Terror ten days later. The real significance of the nuns' martyrdom is that it was a divine act, a manifestation of God himself. No serious historian could accept these conclusions.

The book also suffers from factual errors. The artist David never served on the Committee of Public Safety, which Bush sneeringly calls the Committee of Public Salvation. The Paris festival of Reason was held in 1793, not 1792. Moreover, Bush insists that the Revolution was anticlerical and antireligious from the beginning, an interpretation that historians discarded long ago. To illustrate his points, Bush quotes frequently from the Bible, and he invents dialogue for the people in his book, practices that violate the methods of historical scholarship.

In short, the author misunderstands the French Revolution, the Terror, and the religious history of the period. KENNETH R. FENSTER (Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston, Georgia)

Riley-Smith, Jonathan. Hospitallers: The History of the Order of St. John. (Rio Grande: Hambledon Press. 1999. Pp. vii, 152. $40.00.)

The opening sections of this brief book, which is lavishly and excellently illustrated in color, cover the Hospital's origins as a hospitaller order and its subsequent militarization in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Although the work is presented in didactic format destined for general readership, these pages include important new observations. The passages on the Rhodian and Maltese periods from 1306 to 1798 are comparatively short; they are preceded by a special ten-page section on the Priory of England. The final twenty-seven pages covering the story subsequent to the fall of Malta in 1798 also make it clear that the book is primarily intended as a history of the British branch of the Order of Saint John, as revived by royal charter in 1888, and of the Saint John's Ambulance Brigade. The post-1798 history of the Catholic Order of Malta, with its long and continuous history, is largely ignored; those interested in that subject should consult H. Sire, The Knights of Malta (Yale, 1994). What had originated as a hospitaller institution and then became predominantly, though never exclusively, a military-religious order, reverted after some seven centuries to its original charitable activities. The British institution, which is known as the Venerable Order and is under royal or monarchical patronage, now occupies the Hospitallers' medieval priory buildings at Clerkenwell in London as its headquarters; it has no other direct continuity with the English province of the Order which was suppressed by Henry VIII in 1540, but its valuable modern activities are, as the book emphasizes, very genuinely inspired by the history and medical traditions of the early Hospitallers. The book contains a few slips; for example, the Hospital did not pay the French crown a huge indemnity for the Templars' lands in 1317 (p. 94) and the Hospitaller castle at Bodrum is not on the site of the ancient Mausoleum but some way from it (p. 100). So brief a treatment inevitably leaves room for further debate...