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Reviews 225 largely from the evidence of a non-female hegemonic discourse. What is the truth-value of the narrative of a Jewish husband, relating the story of delicate negotiations with a Christian bishop over his wife's planned conversion to bis own male religious leaders? What significance for women's lives can be attributed to the Menagier of Paris' handbook, supposedly written for his own wife, which Amt uses as the epilogue to her volume? She warns us that the writer's genre is idealistic, yet seems reluctant to believe that the female figures in it might be similarly fictionalized. Undoubtedly prescriptive literature, like any fiction, can be an important historical source. One deduction legitimately to be drawn from it, as from the anthology as a whole, is that the experience of being written about was fundamental to medieval womanhood. But to claim implicitly that the document is straightforwardly 'historical' seems to leave us in shark-infested methodological waters without a lifeboat. Similar historiographical vagueness infects some other selections. Why, for instance, quote a manorial survey of 1279 listing some women among its male villeins and cotters? Beyond proving that medieval Englishwomen held bond land, which is surely not a disputed matter, what conclusions does it enable us to draw? Does it conduce to a history, an analysis of the processes of change in the past, or merely to a series of snapshots of an unchanging phenomenon entitled 'women's lives'? Clearly we need more, and more sophisticated, anthologies. Amt's work is a welcome advance in scope and detail on O'Faolain and Martines's pioneering Not in God's image. Yet it highlights, in poignant form, the chasms remaining in the provision of wide-ranging, thought-provoking, collections of source material on medieval women's history. Philippa C. Maddern Department of History University of Western Australia. Barber, Malcolm, ed., The Military Orders: fighting for the faith and car for the sick, Aldershot, Variorum, 1994; cloth; pp. xxviii, 399; 2 tables, 45 illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00. The papers collected in this Variorum volume are from a conference held on 3-6 September 1992 by the London Centre for the Study of the Crusades under the auspices of Professor Jonathon Riley-Smith. It contains forty one papers, including one by Anne Gilmour-Bryson on the 'Testimony of non- 226 Reviews Templar witnesses in Cyprus' which discusses the trial of the Templars in Cyprus in 1310 or 1311, and which is interesting for the evidence i t presents from non-Templar witnesses who attested to the innocence of the members of the Order of the charges brought against it, even though in some cases the witnesses might be considered to have extraneous reasons to be hostile to the Order. This paper is complemented by Peter Edbury's on 'The Templars in Cyprus', which argues that Templar relations with the Crown in the thirteenth century were poor as a result oftensionbetween the Order's aspirations to play the kind of political role in Cyprus that it had in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the desire of the Lusignan monarchy to control it. Yet at the trial of the Order in Cyprus, the testimony of nobles closely allied to the Crown was almost entirely favourable to the Order. The collection is divided into five parts: 'The Hospital of St John', 'The Order of the Temple', 'The Teutonic Order', 'The Spanish Orders', and 'The perceptions and role of the Military Orders'. The majority of the volume is in fact comprised of investigations of the establishments of the Military Orders in the West; however, here attention is paid to a few of the papers of most interest to the military and political activities of the Orders in the Latin East Marcus Bull returns to the much debated idea that confraternities of laymen defending ecclesiastical properties in the late eleventh century lay at the roots of the idea of the Military Orders, in particular of the Templars, in his "The confraternity of La Sauve-Majeure: a foreshadowing of the Military Order?'. He surveys the foundation of the abbey by St Gerard of Corbie and the emergence of its group of noble defensores and...

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