Andrew Jotischky, The Carmelites in Antiquity: Mendicants and their Pasts in theMiddle Ages

Abstract

Dr. Andrew Jotischky who teaches in the history department at Lancaster University, England, is a younger scholar who has devoted  extensive research into medieval Carmelite history especially to into the origins of the order in the Holy Land and its subsequent  medieval sojourn. See the extended review by Fr. Joachim Smet in Carmelus 44 (1997), 176-181, of Jotischky’s The Perfection of  Solitude: Hermits and Monks in the Crusader States. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). In his preface  to The Carmelites in Antiquity (vii) Jotischky writes: “My interest in the Carmelites emerged from studying the religious life of the  crusader states, in which they occupy a unique place as the only contemplative order founded in the Latin East.” Jotischky is a  prolific author, he is also a stouthearted historian not only because of his prodigious industry but because he is unfazed by the pitfalls in  Carmelite history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. In addition, Carmelite historiography throughout the middle ages which Jotischky investigates in the book under review is hardly for the fainthearted. Early sources are scant and what is extant demands acute  interpretation. Much of the medieval Carmelite scene is a cache of documents difficult to understand without an appreciation for the  dynamics of symbolic communication that include the meaning of legend and myth. Yet, thus equipped one can engage in an exciting  and not well known field of study.