The Military Orders. Vol. 2: Welfare and Warfare (review)

reviews 245 exercise towards their fellow man, concluding: ' i f you see a Jew in need, you must help him...with an authentic and just, holy and active love; if you neglect to do so, hell awaits you' (p. 172). Nevertheless, it is debatable whether such equivocation m a y be seen as 'tolerance', any more than Papal bulls of 1419 and following, warning Mendicant preachers not to inflame anti-Semitic sentiment, indicate a better general climate for the economically useful Jews (Leon Poliakov, Jewish Bankers and the Holy See, \977; and Mormando, pp. 213-15). Mormando, an Italianist at Boston College, is very strong on textual analysis throughout, and writes engagingly. H e refrains from drawing contemporary parallels, but they do spring to mind continually and suggestively. John Gregory School of Literary, Visual and Cultural Studi Monash University Nicholson, Helen, ed., The Military Orders. Vol. 2: Welfare and Warfare, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998; cloth; pp. xxviii, 412; 4 tables, 40 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £59.50. This volume consists of papers from the second conference on the mil orders, held at the M u s e u m of St John, St John's Gate, Clerkenwell, London on 5-8 September 1996, under the auspices of the London Centre for the study of the Crusades. A first volume from the first conference held at the same venue on 3-6 September 1992 was edited by Malcolm Barber and published by Variorum (now Ashgate) in 1994 as The Military Orders: Fightingfor the Faith and Caringfor the Sick. The Centre will h i t s third conference on the theme "The Military Orders; Their History and Heritage' on 7-10 September 2000. A n ideal excuse to flee Australia to escape the mania of the Olympic games! The volume contains 33 articles in addition to an Introduction by Jonathon Riley-Smith and a print of the opening address to the conference by father Bernhard Demel, Teutonic Order—delivered in Latin, can one believe? What pretentious nonsense in this day and age! Merely to catalogue all the papers would exhaust the word allowance for a review 246 Reviews so this one has been limited to discussion of a few papers of more interest to the reviewer, mainly from Part I of the volume on 'Welfare'. However, the volume is divided into four parts and some of the papers not discussed here m a y interest others. Part II is on 'Warfare', Part III on 'Life within the military orders', and Part IV on 'Relations with the outside world'. Fifteen papers are concerned with the orders in the East or in general, thirteen with the orders in the West, mainly in Spain in Germany, and four with the post-medieval history of the orders. T w o papers by Benjamin Kedar and Susan Edgington quite properly open the volume. Kedar has a happy knack for rediscovering half forgotten primary sources whose importance has become overlooked. Iruthis case it is a text in a manuscript which came from the monastery of Benediktbeuern, n o w in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. Monac. Lat. 4620, fols 132v-139v. The text is a copy, unfortunately a very bad one, of a description of the Hospital in Jerusalem, probably written by a German m o n k w h o had stayed there c.1180-87. Kedar provides a provisional transcription by himself, with the assistance of Edgington, Robert Huygens, and Giinter Glauche. The text is highly important, providing information in particular about the architecture of the Hospital, its care of foundlings, its admission of all sick, including Jews and Muslims, and data on patientstaff and patienndoctor ratios. Edgington also contributes to the discussion of this text but adds further discussion of Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, M S . Vat. Lat. 4852, fols 89r-105r, a version in Old French of the Hospitaller statutes of Roger des Moulins, Master of the order 1177-87. These statutes contain provisions for two doctors' oaths, of which the second, a simple vow, was apparently intended for Jewish and other oriental doctors. The various therapies used in the Hospital are also discussed. The argument reinforces the now established view that the Hospital...