There is so much err­on­eous inform­at­ion about the Knights Temp­lar that a fact­ual encyclo­pædia is an excell­ent idea. Unfort­un­ately this one, though a brave att­empt, is far better in its con­cept­ion than in its exec­ut­ion; it needed better org­an­is­at­ion and far stronger edit­ing.

As it is clearly aimed at the gen­e­ral reader, it would have bene­fited greatly from an intro­duct­ory scene-sett­ing chap­ter briefly tell­ing the story of the Templ­ars, their found­ing, heyday and down­fall, and per­haps high­light­ing some of the more sign­if­i­cant ent­ries in the book: a road­map for the reader.
Throughout the book, Karen Ralls use­fully count­ers some of the assert­ions of spec­ul­at­ive “hist­ori­ans”. For example, she emphas­ises that the bel­iefs and pract­ices of the Knights Templar were straight­forwardly ortho­dox, not hetero­dox. Like most medi­æval Christ­ians, they ven­er­ated the Blessed Virgin Mary, not Mary Mag­dal­ene, and both their relics and their sym­bols were perf­ectly ord­in­ary. But unfort­un­ately her refut­at­ions of per­sist­ent fables, such as the Templars saving the day at Bann­ock­burn, are all too often hidden away in the middle of com­pletely unrel­ated ent­ries.

Her writing is rather repet­iti­ous, some­times even within a single entry. Over and over again she tells us that the Knights Templar are not the same as the Free­mas­ons or King Arth­ur’s Knights of the Round Table, and in seem­ingly every other entry we’re told that “fur­ther re­search needs to be done” or “Let us hope that in the future more hist­or­i­cal docu­ments and arch­ives will be dis­cov­ered or trans­lated”. It’s easily done, espec­ially when you’re writ­ing lots of dis­crete ent­ries rather than a con­tinu­ous text. But that’s what edit­ors are for – and to get rid of point­less sen­tences like “Matthew Paris… died at St Albans in 1259, so he never knew of the later 1307 arr­ests and trial of the Knights Templar”.

Let’s hope that if the author does a UK edit­ion of this book, she’ll give it a thor­ough over­haul and get herself a decent editor. Then it would become the worth­while add­it­ion to pop­u­lar Templar schol­ar­ship that it clearly aims to be.