Medieval 12,3_f13_533-553 11/20/06 7:02 PM Page 533

BOOK REVIEWS

Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xiv, 463 pp. $27.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

As I write this review, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors (along with Henry Lincoln) of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (New York: Random House, 1982), are suing Dan Brown. Brown, they claim, stole the framework for the best-selling Da Vinci Code from their book. Thus far, Brown has denied the charges, emphasizing the rigor of his own independent research and his lack of familiarity with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It seems likely that his story will change: at the moment, Brown’s “well-thumbed” and heavily annotated copy of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is being examined in court (Hugh Davies, “Dan Brown and Mystery of the Well-Thumbed Paperback,” March 15, 2006; available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news). At the very least, Brown will probably have to admit that his assertions about his own research were exaggerated. The irony about Baigent and Leigh’s claims is that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has been dismissed as poorly researched fantasy. As Barber puts it, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is “a text which pro- ceeds by innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate” (p. 310). In The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Barber refers to Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln’s book as the work of “imaginative amateurs” whose supposed history is “written in the style of a television programme” (p. 312). Although Barber never mentions Brown and spends only three of his own book’s 463 pages on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the story of the lawsuit, nonetheless, raises questions that are important to Barber’s book: How do we think about sources? What is the relationship between an “original” and later versions? Does anyone have ownership over nar- rative elements? Over history and historical research? In trying to dis- cover the “real” history of the Holy Grail, as Barber sometimes calls it, he writes a book that successfully surveys a wide variety of stories

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534 book reviews

about the Grail. However, as useful as this survey is, the argument pur- sued in The Holy Grail leaves readers with many questions about the relationships between sources, retellings, and history. I will first offer an overview of Barber’s book and then comment briefly on what I believe is at stake in his book’s argument. The Holy Grail is a survey of literary adaptations of the story of the Holy Grail, beginning with medieval romances and ending with popu- lar representations from the late twentieth century. For Barber, the Holy Grail is most importantly the creation of writers and artists. Positioning himself as an “explorer of the past,” Barber “discovers” that the Grail is not, ultimately, traceable to a single source in either pagan/Celtic or Christian religious culture, but is instead an amalgamation of literary representations. These representations are embedded in particular social and religious systems, but for Barber social context is less important than the creative genius of the authors who write stories about the sub- ject. Barber asserts that the Grail was “ultimately a literary concept” (p. 228) and that it is “the creation, not of mysticism, not of pagan religion, not even of Christian tradition, nor of the scholars themselves” who study the history of the Grail and its sources, but rather “of the poetic imagination” (p. 255). The book is divided into three parts. The first two trace the Grail’s origins in medieval literature. Part 1 begins with a description of Chrétien de Troyes’s romance about the Grail, which Barber understands as the foundation for later versions, and then surveys several other literary works, including Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Barber’s under- standing is that Chrétien’s unfinished romance inspires subsequent writers to take up the subject of the Grail. Part 2 offers a thematic overview of religious elements that became inextricably linked with the Grail story—in particular, the quest for spiritual perfection that is perhaps the most familiar aspect of the legend to modern readers. As part of this discussion, Barber traces the history of the Grail as a physical object, noting that earlier medieval writers seemed satisfied to leave this his- tory vague and suggestive. Barber observes that the “romance” elements of the story, which he associates most clearly with Chrétien’s version, are exchanged in later versions, such as Robert de Boron’s, for spiritualized symbols. Barber argues that the Grail’s general connotations, despite diverse literary incarnations, represent an intersection of artistic genius and religion that made stories about the Grail especially powerful for readers up to the Reformation. The medieval Grail was “intimately linked” with “belief in the real presence at the consecration of the Mass”