Dimensions
163 x 244 x 43mm
Richard Barber tells this extraordinary story: a journey, involving theology, history, literature and art, and ranging across most of western Europe and the Near East.
The diversity of concepts involved shows the wealth of the Grail's cultural influence: from the beginning of prose romances - precursors of the modern novel - to the hotly disputed theological ideas of the medieval period and the passions of popular religion.
In later centuries, the grail leads us through the rise of literary scholarship and the fashionable ideas that shaped it, the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for all things medieval, and twentieth-century New Age. The search for the grail has always been described as a quest; in this book, Barber goes on his own quest, brilliantly exploring the richness of the Holy Grail's cultural impact.
