This shelf gathers historical (not esoteric-practice) scholarship on the secret and quasi-secret fraternities of the medieval and early-modern West: the rise, wealth, and destruction of the Knights Templars; the Fehmgerichte tribunals of medieval Germany; the Nizari Ismaili "Assassins" of Persia and Syria; and John Robison's 1798 study of the Bavarian Illuminati, the book that founded the entire modern genre of Masonic-conspiracy literature.

None of these authors write as members of the societies they describe. Robison writes as an alarmed outsider convinced of a subversive plot; Addison and Keightley write as nineteenth-century historians working from chronicles, trial records, and captured correspondence. Read them for what secret societies looked like from the outside — to their prosecutors, their alarmed contemporaries, and their later historians — rather than for any esoteric teaching of the orders themselves.