The multi-faceted nature of the Order of the Hospitallers defies pithy characterisation, while the voluminous yet scattered archival materials relating to them pose practical obstacles to assessing their overall impact. Anthony Luttrell's contribution towards elucidation of the sources, archaeological as well as archival, receives appropriate recognition from these twenty-two studies; a bibliography lists the honorand's books and 230 published articles. J. Riley-Smith's suggestive ‘Towards a history of military-religious orders’ remarks on their proliferation in the central Middle Ages and on the fact that only the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order survive as orders of the Church. He raises the question of why the Templars failed similarly to endure and underscores the Hospitallers' ability to adapt to new circumstances. The obloquy that the Templars incurred among prelates, clergy and copyists of the French translation of William of Tyre features in the chapters of B. Hamilton and P. W. Edbury, who deal – from different angles – with the killing of an Assassin envoy to the king of Jerusalem in 1173/74. The scattered nature of the Hospitallers' rights and properties in the west and their exposure to local dynasts and interest-groups is illustrated by several chapters, including P. Herde, ‘The dispute between the Hospitallers and the bishop of Worcester about the church of Down Ampney’; Z. Hunyadi, ‘The military activity of the Hospitallers in the medieval kingdom of Hungary’; L. García-Guijarro Ramos, ‘The Valencian bailiwick of Cervera in Hospitaller and early Montesian times’; and C. Barquero Goñi, ‘Los Hospitalarios y los últimos reyes de Navarra’. The institutional cogs and the human sinews which helped to keep the Hospitallers together also receive attention. The interpersonal skills of Boniface of Calamandrana are analysed by J. Burgtorf (‘A Mediterranean career in the late thirteenth century’). Boniface's blood-ties with the Aragonese ruling house may have cost him the topmost job, of Master of the Order, but he exemplifies the calibre, managerial and diplomatic, of personnel still at the Order's disposal when the Levant was lost. The procedure for determining seniority and making appointments under the Master's ultimate oversight is discussed by P. Bonneaud in relation to two priories dependent on the Crown of Aragon (‘La Règle de l’ancianitas dans l'ordre de l'Hôpital'). Individuals' ambitions and length of service, and loyalties of Langue and kinship, played their part, but the Master's right to make appointments to a commandery through ‘grâce magistrale’ entailed ‘un vaste champ d'intervention’. More direct methods of applying sanctions and maintaining discipline among the Hospitallers and Templars feature in A. Forey's discussion of ‘The use of imprisonment and chaining’. The extent to which the Hospitallers resorted to non-members for the writing of deeds receives statistical analysis from M. Gervers and N. Hamonic, ‘Scribes and notaries in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Hospitaller charters from England’. They tentatively conclude that scribes and notaries were seldom if ever Hospitallers, and seemingly they drafted documents ad hoc, possibly with the help of formularies. Such ‘out-sourcing’ is in key with the observations of D. Jacoby about ‘Hospitaller ships and transportation across the Mediterranean’. Important as sea communications were for the Hospitallers, they do not seem to have maintained a sizeable fleet of their own before 1291. Instead they relied on individual boats, hiring or buying them, commissioning their construction or simply reserving places on a commercial sailing. Once ensconced in Rhodes from the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Hospitallers showed their organisational mettle, as several studies devoted to Rhodes illustrate. Of particular importance is J. Sarnowsky's survey of the visitations carried out in the western houses during the fifteenth century under the auspices of the distant central administration. Also of note is A.-M. Kasdagli's survey of the epigraphic evidence – western European, Greek and heraldic – of Hospitaller Rhodes. The Hospitallers' resilience was due partly to the ambivalence of their calling, which involved strenuous warfare as well as self-denial and care for the poor and sick, once the Latin East came under heavy Saracen pressure. J. Bronstein raises the question of why, from the later twelfth century, Hospitallers should have sometimes sought crusading indulgences even though already committed to the Order for life and apparently assured of salvation through fulfilment of their monastic vows (‘Caring for the sick or dying for the cross?’). The multiple strands in the Hospitallers' vocation were eventually enshrined in Frà Sabba da Castiglione's book of Ricordi, which added humanist ‘letters’ to the more traditional prerequisites of the ideal Knight. That this work has been unjustly eclipsed by the courtier's manual penned by Sabba's famous cousin, Baldassare, is demonstrated by D. F. Allen (‘The Hospitaller Castiglione's Catholic synthesis of warfare, learning and lay piety on the eve of the Council of Trent’). This, like many of the other chapters, offers enlightenment to the general historian as well as to students of the Hospitallers.