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Title: The Holy Grail : Imagination and Belief by Richard Barber ISBN: 0-674-01390-5 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 09 April, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Centuries of Imaginative Power
Comment: We all know what it is to seek the Holy Grail. Richard Barber has done a survey of newspapers and other timely publications and found that people are seeking Holy Grails all the time, but may have no idea about the historic origin of the name for that quest. A unified theory is the Holy Grail of physics, Marmite's range of vitamins make it the Holy Grail of foodstuffs, and fashion designers somewhere are seeking the Holy Grail of "nude" tights. These seekers may not know the Grail by name, but the idea of a quest for something perfect, something elusive, something that really is never going to be found is a universal one. In _The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief_ (Harvard University Press), Barber, a British authority on medieval history, has made an exhaustive study of the origins of the Grail legend and how, over 800 years, the legend has been changed, used, misused, parodied, and revered. This is a big, academic reference book, but the appeal of the subject and Barber's erudition and sense of fun make it enticing reading.
There may have been a Grail tradition in stories and in pictures, but no one wrote them down until Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote, among other things, an unfinished romance about Perceval around 1180. Chrétien never finished his story, and didn't say much about the Grail in it, but the idea of this holy relic was so strong that in the succeeding fifty years, several poets from various countries not only completed the tale but added their own material and themes. Barber, going through the conflicting Grail stories, argues that there is little evidence that there is any "true source" for the Grail except Chrétien's stories and their descendents. Their context is the orthodox Christianity of the period, but the Church itself officially and studiously ignored the stories. The stories, however, emphasized the importance of the Eucharist, the spiritual aspirations of knightly questing, and the value of veneration of relics. Barber's book takes Grail lore up to the current times (yes, including Monty Python), including the vessels that people have sufficient faith (or gall) to insist are the real McCoy. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee had some fun with the Grail: "The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several-years' cruise. Every year expeditions went out holy Grailing and next year relief expeditions went to hunt for them. There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money."
Twain's remarks are happier than the other modern manifestations of the legend. The crowd that sees international, centuries-long conspiracies at the heart of all history all value the Grail. Alchemists, Nazis, New Agers, Rosicrucians, and the like have all made some sort of claim to it, and if having religious faith in the item is not sufficient, they have backed up their connections to it using astrology, Tarot cards, ley-lines, and other such evidence. As Barber says, "We are not far... from the world of the flying saucer enthusiasts and alien visitors." In fact, one author has identified the Grail as a flying saucer. The lore of the Holy Grail fits all because there is so little to work on, and imaginations can make of it what they will. Barber knows that the force that has shaped the Grail is not history, not fact, but imagination "... the creative thought that subtly built on an unfinished story." Aspiration to acquisition of the unattainable has produced art and silliness, all well documented in an authoritative book.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Holy Grail as a key to self-identity
Comment: Richard Barber begins this magisterial study of the Holy Grail archetype with these words: "The Grail is a mysterious and haunting image, which crosses the borders of fiction and literature and which, for eight centuries, has been a recurrent ideal in Western literature"--and, as he makes clear in the book, in Western art, religion, spirituality, and psychology as well. Almost all of us have heard about the Grail (especially recently in all the hype over Dan Brown's thriller "The Da Vinci Code"), but almost none of us really know much about it. This is too bad, because the Grail legend is replete with meaning that gestures at the very core of who we are as humans.
The merits of Barber's book are many, but two in particular stand out. In the first place, he provides an exhaustive and entertaining discussion of the origins of the Grail legend, the various authors (such as Chretien de Troyes, Robert de Boron, and Wolfram von Eschenbach) who popularized the legend in the Middle Ages, and the symbolism behind the legends--how it ties in, for example, with the Eucharist. Secondly, he reflects in insightful and sometimes profound ways on just what the Grail legend means to us today, tracing the modern Grail expressions that abound in art, cinema (yes, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is discussed!), and literature. Barber is especially good at discussing the human longing for perfection and wholeness that the Grail quest symbolizes, and in speculating on why the Grail archetype holds such strong attraction. Part of the key to understanding its appeal lies in the fact that it is a product of the interplay between two essential human characteristics: belief and imagination (hence the book's subtitle). The proper hiding place of the Grail, in other words, is in the liminal space between imagination and belief. In focusing on archetypes such as the Grail, humans explore depths of themselves that otherwise might go unnoticed
The book is wonderfully illustrated--as well it should be, since the Grail has been such a common motif in art--with intertextual black and white reproductions and a center section of color photographs which are really quite breathtaking in their beauty. If you're a long-devoted Grail enthusiast, or if you're just beginning the pilgrimage and want a resource that can help you understand, for example, just who the heck the Fisher King is, this is the book for you.
Rating: 5
Summary: Clear, intelligent, admirable
Comment: Richard Barber's history of the texts and contexts of the grail legends couldn't come at a better time.
I write this from Spain, two days after March 11. It again occurs to me that understanding historical context has never been more important, if we are all to work together to solve conflicts and promote democracy. At the same time, it seems that certain politicians and best-selling authors could care less than ever about accuracy, fact, and real conversation and debate. They pick and choose details to support foregone conclusions. They treat the public as dupes, and unfortunately the public often seems to fit the bill far too easily. So, it comes as something of a relief to me to see a writer take on a slippery topic--which is surrounded by so much pseudo-historical mumbo jumbo (often written in the service of one or another extreme ideology)--and produce such a clear, unbiased narrative of the nuances and evolution of the Holy Grail.
For starters, Barber clearly gives credit where credit is due--to the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, for writing the first (and in my opinion still perhaps the best) grail story. Chrétien was the first person to write down Arthurian romance. He is the first to mention Camelot, and the first to write of the Lancelot-Guenivere-Arthur love triangle. In other words, though he wrote in verse, he laid the foundation of the novel. His last work, which he died writing in around 1186, was called "Perceval, or The Story of the Grail." It was a blockbuster in its day and still reads beautifully (and no, the grail is not originally a Christian chalice). It was also unfinished, and so, Barber claims, started the centuries of continuations and rewrites.
"The Da Vinci Code" came out after Barber's book went to press, so it is not included in the chapter on more recent versions of the grail story. Barber does, however, examine the source from which Dan Brown draws most of his information, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." Barber calls this pseudo-history classic an example of a new genre, "fictional history." (See also the article in "The New York Times" of Feb. 22, 2004, called "The Da Vinci Con" by Laura Miller. In it she details the evidence that The Priory of Sion is a notorious hoax.)
So, I have not read Barber's "The Holy Grail" cover to cover yet. It is something of a reference work for me, to be dipped into. But I have read enough to feel a great relief that here, at last, is a source one can trust and enjoy, as Barber traces this most fascinating of literary figures, the grail, through the twists and turns of centuries of history. A masterful, exemplary work--a rigorous, multi-faceted, objective investigation of a figure of great beauty.
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As a note, I can also recommend to people interested in strong, rigorous histories, Karen Armstrong's "The History of God" and MarÃa Rosa Menocal's "The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain."
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