Enthusiasm for a relic

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Damsel of Sanct Grael’ (1857)

The Holy Grail:
the history of a legend
by Richard Barber.
Penguin Books, 2005 (2004).

Richard Barber’s 2004 study – made available in paperback in 2005 – is ambitious in its scope while also inspiring confidence in its interpretations. The Holy Grail also begins with an outline of the main French and German medieval texts, here in considerable detail.

Barber then discusses what the Grail and the quest for it may have meant to contemporary readers of (and initially listeners to) these romances, which began as poems and then moved into prose as if to underline their supposed historicity.

As he shows, in the medieval mind “the Holy Grail [existed] in the borderline between orthodox doctrine and lay devotion” and, though studiously ignored by the Church, reflected “the religious enthusiasm for relics, and for the Eucharist” by well-to-do but pious laity.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Damsel of the Sanct Grael’ (1874)

The Reformation dealt a blow to the literary grail – as it did to a universal Christian doctrine and a devotion to relics – and it only re-emerged in the last couple of centuries when the climate of belief had changed irrevocably.

Re-discovered by scholars, and then by creative artists, the grail now reflected the pre-occupations of individuals increasingly addressing a multiplicity of literate (and, latterly, not so literate) audiences, who neither knew nor cared what the grail may have meant to its medieval authors and readers.

In scholarly but accessible prose Barber chronicles where what he calls “the interplay between imagination and belief” leads: into fascinating territory, certainly, but sadly not to Sarras or Carbonek.

“Where our medieval forebears reached for the spiritual and intangible, our materialistic age reaches only for the top shelf in the supermarket,” Barber writes. So, here there is no code to be deciphered or secret to be divulged; instead, here we have a diverting and detailed pilgrim’s guide to the holy places, available to order from all good bookshops. If you only buy one book on the grail, this should be it.

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First published in 2005 in Pendragon, the Journal of the Pendragon Society, this review was revised and posted online on my Calmgrove blog in 2012 and in 2014