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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture On Friday, October 12, 2007, at 2:58 pm, Henk 't Jong wrote: > Hi Marjorie, > > You wrote: > >I offer the following: > > >There are many accounts of Jacques DeMolay's dying > words, but one of the foremost Templar scholars > records them as follows: > > What John [Briggs] means by lack of references is: who is this 'foremost' scholar, > what book or article did he write this quote in (article/magazine/booktitle, > place, year, pages) and where did he get it. It is very hard to > believe a > quote if it's put like this. > > Henk Indeed. Marjorie's source may be this webpage from jacquesdemolay.org, which offers the whole passage from "There are many accounts onward" without identifying the "foremost Templar scholar" to whom the reported text of curse is attributed: http://www.jacquesdemolay.org/ But this page from www.templarhistory.com, which has precisely the same quotation, identifies the source (also called "one of the foremost Templar scholars") as "the 19th century historian, Charles Addison": http://www.templarhistory.com/demolay.html That is, this person, an early nineteenth-century travel writer and legal scholar: http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101000153/ To judge from the way it is referred to in the ODNB article, Addison's _History of the Knights Templars_ (1842; 3d ed., 1852) was a popular success. To judge from its more recent reprints by non-scholarly publishers, it still is that. But that it is now authoritative in any scholarly way seems, er, implausible. Best, John Dillon PS: I've found the same text (unsourced) of the alleged curse in a work by another early nineteenth-century popularizer, Charles Keightley. See (p. 325 of a reprint of K.'s 1837 _Secret Societies of the Middle Ages_): http://tinyurl.com/2c8yus ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html