Jonathan Riley-Smith's Conway Lectures, which amount to seventy pages of text together with detailed notes and a considerable bibliography, advance a number of timely and significant proposals. The author is concerned to emphasise differences between the two major international military orders whose members were technically fully-professed religious. Some of his arguments may find only reluctant acceptance even though they seem well founded. For example, he proposes that, despite the fact that much evidence in their trials was secured by torture, the Templars were not in the end as innocent as it has become fashionable to maintain, and furthermore that the fundamental problem lay in the Temple's constitution and in its failure to provide effective controls over an unsatisfactory Master. Riley-Smith points to the charitable and medical side of the Hospital's varying functions, elements which were lacking among the Templars. These are questions about which it is not so much a matter of accepting or rejecting such interpretations as one of deciding how far to press them. It is difficult to establish to what extent the Hospitallers' hospitable activities differentiated them from the more militaristic and single-minded Templars or how far that was a factor in the dramatic and brutal suppression of the Temple, a disaster which contrasted with the way in which the Hospital survived with relatively little criticism. It is true that the Hospital's rule, dating to the mid-twelfth century, spoke of the poor and the sick while making no mention of military activities or of noble, or even knightly, qualifications for membership, yet when in 1312 Pope Clement v assigned the Temple's goods to the Hospital he did so claiming that it was the only order capable of using them to conduct an effective holy war. The Templars' constitutional and governmental arrangements, and the nature of the senior leadership, certainly require more systematic scholarly attention, and it is arguable that the Hospital's regulations produced a more balanced oligarchy and permitted greater restraint of its Master. Further analysis of the differences between the two orders will surely repay this kind of examination, a process in which this book gives an admirable lead.