ABSTRACT
The history of the Knights of St. John and the Templars was available to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reader in a variety of forms, from monographs to articles in periodicals and encyclopaedias and editions of primary sources, not only in English but also in French, German and Italian. The hitherto underutilised sources of book reviews, library catalogues and references in contemporary diaries and letters provide a further insight into knowledge and interest in the subject. In addition, travellers to Rhodes and Malta would have seen sites associated with the Order of St. John at firsthand and local antiquarians, often clergymen, were intrigued by the history of their area and presented papers on the subject to their local history societies. The revival of the Order in Britain was a further stimulus to research and publication and the trial and fate of the Templars sparked the interest of their legal successors and custodians of the Temple church in London. All these strands and motivations created a corpus of material which shaped the way in which the Orders were remembered in Britain.
