The subject of the military orders has become extraordinarily popular. Regular conferences, such as those organised in Britain, Poland, Portugal and Italy, each of which are attended by upwards of one hundred participants, would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. I do not suppose that there were more than twenty scholars seriously at work in 1960, whereas 238 have contributed to the Dictionnaire, although not all of them are specialists. The Iberian peninsula has been a particularly active centre of research, reflecting, of course, the importance of the orders to its history, and forty of the contributors come from Spain and Portugal. The modern historiography of the subject is considered by Alain Demurger in an opening essay.

The Dictionnaire is beautifully printed and is provided with many illustrations, maps and plans. Each article concludes with a bibliography of sources and secondary works. Most of the articles are first class. Some, such as those on ‘Hôpital, ordre de l’' and ‘Mort’, are outstanding and others, like that on ‘Cinéma’ are great fun. It is useful to have biographical sketches of so many individuals included and to have coverage of significant, but often ignored, topics such as ‘Liturgie’, ‘Offices mineurs’ and ‘Repas’. There are indices of persons and places, but it is a pity that a subject index was not compiled, given that a system of cross-referencing has been adopted that signals (with asterisks) other entries only when the words used in their headings correspond exactly to those appearing in the article concerned.

This is a pioneering work, marking the moment when a field of study begins to come of age, but the subject faces more problems than most, because its historians have to confront not only the past but also a very confusing present. Two of the old military orders, the Hospital of St John and the Teutonic Order, survive, although with different personalities, since the Teutonic Order has become an order of priests and the Hospital of St John (now known as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta) devotes itself entirely to the care of the sick poor. Both have generated non-Catholic offshoots in Holland, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The Iberian military orders were secularised in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but whereas in Portugal they are now state orders of merit, in Spain they retain religious functions. In their semi-secularised state the Iberian orders influenced the creation of other hybrid orders in the Italian peninsula, four of which are still in existence. And then there is a crowd of unrecognised orders, mostly adopting the history of the Hospital of St John and coincidentally appearing on the scene in large numbers only in the last fifty years. So many orders and their proponents – amateur as well as professional – competing for attention has led to historiographical chaos.

A natural reaction to such a situation would be to avoid controversy as much as possible. This may be why so many entries deliver simply the consensus – or even the opinion of the author concerned – without reference to alternative interpretations. It would be hard to discover from reading the article ‘Procès des Templiers’ (which is not cross-referenced with ‘Temple, ordre de’ and is therefore more elusive than it should be) that the orthodox view of the dissolution of the Templars is debatable. In the article on ‘Saint-Lazare de Jérusalem’ the controversial nature of the claims of the modern orders of St Lazarus is not discussed. And a mistaken belief that all conventual sergeants-at-service could be equated with frères de métier – which was absolutely not the case in the Hospital of St John and was probably not the case in the Temple – must be the reason why there are entries covering ‘Sergents d'armes’ and ‘Frères de métier’ (both signalled in a general article on ‘Frères’) but no general article on ‘Sergents’.

No attempt is made to deal with the issue of definition, which is important because it is hard to generalise about the orders if one cannot distinguish them clearly from others, secular as well as religious, and because many historians of better-known forms of medieval religious life have not been inclined to take them seriously and will not do so until they can be related convincingly to other institutions of the Church. Of course it is better to be inclusive in an encyclopedia of this kind, but although orders of chivalry that were unquestionably secular are omitted from the Dictionnaire, many that were not strictly military or religious are included and the hybrids that appeared after 1450 are given the same treatment as the military orders proper. The scholars who planned the Dictionnaire have allowed the authors of many entries to stray into early modern and even modern times and have commissioned articles such as that on the sixteenth-century order of Santo Stefano. There is a lot to be said, of course, for following the history of the orders as far as it can be taken and it would be misleading to confine to the Middle Ages the histories of the Iberian orders or that of the order of the Holy Sepulchre, which is given good treatment here, abandoning them just when they become most interesting, but with so many different military-religious orders crowding the stage the issue of categorisation is raised in an acute form, while at the same time the editors open themselves to the charge of not knowing in their own minds the subject that they are dealing with.

The Dictionnaire is exceptionally informative and prepares the ground for all future research. It will be an essential work of reference and one hopes that the questions it raises will encourage other historians to provide the intellectual underpinning that the subject needs.