Stephen Mossman and Abi Cornick discuss why lay women and men made donations – of money, of land, and sometimes of themselves – to the Order of St John. How far can we know what was in the minds of individuals in the far distant past? What can a cache of ancient documents in the Museum’s collection tell us about the lives of French farmers and their relationship to the Order nearly eight hundred years ago?

We would love to hear from our listeners! We will be recording a special podcast at the end of the series to answer your questions. If you want to ask anything about the history of the Order, the books themselves, the Museum or anything else – or you have any other feedback for us – then please write to us at museum@sja.org.uk. We’ll do our best to answer!

Stephen Mossman and Abi Cornick discuss the problems of achieving uniformity in behaviour and in ways of life in an international organization before the advent of modern communication – a problem especially acute for the Order of St John, with its institutional centre out on the Mediterranean margins, far distant from the European centres of power on which it relied. How did printing change that dynamic, not always in the ‘right’ direction?

We would love to hear from our listeners! We will be recording a special podcast at the end of the series to answer your questions. If you want to ask anything about the history of the Order, the books themselves, the Museum or anything else – or you have any other feedback for us – then please write to us at museum@sja.org.uk. We’ll do our best to answer!

Stephen Mossman and Anna Mason discuss one of the most extraordinary works from the first generation of European printing: the account of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken by two Germans, the writer Bernhard von Breydenbach and the artist Erhard Reuwich, in 1483-84. But what was pilgrimage in the medieval Christian imagination actually for, and why did Hospitaller Rhodes come to play such an important part in it?

We would love to hear from our listeners! We will be recording a special podcast at the end of the series to answer your questions. If you want to ask anything about the history of the Order, the books themselves, the Museum or anything else – or you have any other feedback for us – then please write to us at museum@sja.org.uk. We’ll do our best to answer!