Much recent research has been directed at integrating crusading and its associated institutions into wider understanding of the religious culture of medieval western Christendom. Traditionally regarded as a somewhat separate, even eccentric manifestation of spiritual enthusiasm, now its theology, liturgy, preaching, and patterns of response and involvement are increasingly placed within the mainstream of contemporary experience. At the same time, and as part of this process, study of the military orders has tended toward a double revision, regarding them on the one hand as less aberrant as professed religious orders and, on the other, as fully complementary with wider crusading engagement. Jochen Schenk's book, based on his doctoral thesis, extends these insights. In a close examination of the transactions with and patronage bestowed on the Order of the Temple by landowning families in Burgundy, Champagne, and Languedoc west of the Rhone, Schenk argues that support for the military order was closely linked to concurrent commitment to the Cistercians and to fighting on crusade. The sort of people who gave property to the Templars were also likely to be donors to the order of Cîteaux and to have gone on crusade or to be related to those who had. Furthermore, he equates the Cistercians, whose role in promoting the crusade is well known, and the Templars almost as surrogates for each other as spiritual and temporal milites Christi, although the absence of Cistercian houses in the Holy Land or St. Bernard's equation of Clairvaux with Jerusalem are not discussed. The general conclusion seeks to identify in these activities an associated spiritual mentality, comprising an attraction to puritanical religious reform; a desire for active spiritual self-help, though crusading or patronage of, and in some cases, formal association with or entry into a monastic or military order; and an openness to the physical and transcendent pull of the Holy Land.

Although, famously, the Templars' central archives have not survived, many cartularies generated from their holdings in the west have. These provide Schenk's evidence. He is careful throughout to note the pitfalls in relying on charters, formal, often formulaic, records of property deals drawn up by the beneficiaries, and therefore, in their own manner, as prone to distortion or wishful thinking, as any literary composition. This is especially true for any attempt to extract information on motive. However, Schenk reduces this difficulty by approaching the problem of intention through a compellingly detailed prosopography of donors, establishing intricate familial networks of patrons, often pivoting on woman and marriages, and frequently continuing across many generations between the early twelfth and early fourteenth centuries. The very different social settings of Burgundy/Champagne and Languedoc provide another controlling device: the former a heartland of enthusiasm for the Cistercians and Templar recruitment, dominated both ideologically and even dynastically by the figure of Bernard of Clairvaux; the latter removed from the early penetration of organized Cistercianism, peppered instead with what Schenk calls “proto-Cistercians,” where aristocratic and religious traditions were challenged and shattered by the Albigensian crusades of the early thirteenth century.

This is not centrally a book about the Templar order as such. The focus is from outside looking in rather than an institutional study. The Templars are viewed as one feature in a varied landscape of ecclesiastical engagement, familial self-image and property deals. Nevertheless, there are interesting tangential discussions on the changing nature of confraternity with and within the order. Inevitably, the weight and nature of patronage indicate ebbs and flows of popularity, as well as the availability of surplus property and the economic and social status of potential donors. Yet there is nothing in this evidence to support the public debates on Templar suitability that appeared loudly in official church-sponsored literature towards the end of the thirteenth century. It is equally improbable that such an array of respectable and reputation-conscious aristocratic families would have had much truck with an order that was suspected of engaging in arcane, dubiously esoteric or unorthodox practices. From Schenk's material, the Templars appear locally highly transparent and open to the scrutiny of their neighbours whose kin they attracted as members and whose relatives they buried. However, this provokes a supplementary not touched upon here. Why, if there was so much longstanding family commitment in the order, did its demise fail to arouse much apparent secular public disquiet? Perhaps this form of after-life insurance was less vital, a smaller element in larger portfolios of such investments, than the Templar's records suggest. As Schenk notes, we are looking at a minority concern. While it is admitted that the act of donating may cover a range of motives, from passionate conviction to indifferent conventional habit, in the nature of this research there cannot be a calculation of proportionately how many locals did not deal with the Templars at all. Equally when Schenk—and he is not alone—talks of the crusade movement, he is in fact describing only the free, property owning elements not the majority of those involved who followed the donors and patrons as paid soldiers and servants.

However, despite the inevitable and conceded arbitrariness of privileging certain patterns in family networks over others, as a study of Templar patronage, this is exemplary. On the broader plane of social history, Schenk is to be congratulated on this highly impressive, meticulous, clear and sensible recreation of the cat's cradles of family ties with the Templars. The accounts of how families arranged, negotiated, disposed, perceived, and memorialized this example of ecclesiastical patronage possess wide relevance. Here, the question of sincerity may be thought a sideshow. Maps and genealogies usefully support the text and as an appendix. It is of enormous help to the reader, whose stomach for names and detail needs to be of the stronger variety, that the publishers of this fine, and finely produced, series continue to print the notes at the foot of the page.