Conclusion

Abstract

“The purpose of this work is to retrieve the female Hospitallers from the oblivion into which they have fallen—compared to their much more famous brothers—and to retrace the essential steps of their history,” wrote Joseph Delaville Le Roulx in 1894.¹ This study has done more than merely retrieve the sisters from oblivion: It has compared the Hospitaller sisters with women in other military orders and has placed them in the context of female monasticism. The application of gender analysis to the study of military orders as introduced in the previous pages has allowed an understanding of the military orders’ attitudes toward women and has sharpened our understanding of the issues concerning women in religious life during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Two important new insights are the result. The first concerns the study of female monasticism: while generally speaking, women in religious life were gradually marginalized over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the study of the Order of Saint John shows that not all orders behaved similarly and that segregation did not automatically mean marginalization. The second insight concerns the study of the religious military orders: historians have categorized the military orders as one group, based on their involvement with military action. However, the military orders did not behave as one when it comes to their attitude toward female membership.