Historiography and History: Medieval Studies on the Military Orders in Spain since 1975

One of the most negative intellectual consequences of Francoism in Spanish medieval historiography has been the prevailing suspicion of anything related to Church history, which was deemed an unworthy and reactionary intellectual pursuit by most historians. One of the most famous 'trade marks' of post-war history-book collections, La Nouvelle Clio, based the structure of each volume on it, and like many other French intellectual products, it has been successfully exported. Carlos Barquero Goni, a scholar who has worked extensively on the history of the Hospitallers, has devoted one of the few general surveys on the military orders in medieval Spain to the Order of St. John. Before 1975, Spain exported raw material in the form of making archives accessible to foreign scholars; Spanish historians tend to process much of the sources themselves, but they still rely to a great extent on foreign guidance to do it.