Content area
Full text
The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. By Richard Barber Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xiv + 464 pp. $27.95 cloth.
In The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, Richard Barber sets himself the daunting task of "trac(ing) what we know about the Grail" from its original manifestation in Chrétien de Troyes's Le Conte du Graal, through its various medieval incarnations and nineteenth-century revivals, and into the popular culture of the twentieth century (1). As he does so, he attempts to address the Grail's unique status as a "construct of the creative imagination" that "lays claim to the highest of religious ideals and experience" by eschewing the quest for origins, which, until the 1980s, dominated academic Grail discussions, and by placing individual texts within their religious and cultural context.
Barber divides his Grail quest into three parts, each surveying what he sees as a major stage in the development of the legend. The first, "Creating the Grail: Authors and Texts," covers the period from Chrétien to the LancelotGrail (approximately forty years) and concludes with an excursion into Germany and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. This section contains more plot summary and extended quotation than it does analysis as it retells Chrétien's original account of the Grail and then traces the two French traditions that his unfinished text gave rise to: the Grail continuations-in which the "themes" are "similar to those of secular romances, but the religious connotations present in The Story of the Grail are reinforced"-and the independent "histories"...