The Holy Grail by Richard Barber

Author:Richard Barber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937236
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

17

The Scholars and the Grail

J’ai seul la clef de cette parade, cette parade sauvage Arthur Rimbaud

I ignore entirely the pseudo-problems raised by reading which regards symbols as a sort of quarry or game, to be pursued, shot down, bagged and brought in, inducing chiefly a feeling of achievement on the part of the hunter Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery1

In the room a man is copying a manuscript. Between the dramatic visions on the baroque ceiling and the exuberant patterns of the floor, balconies and pillared bookshelves dazzle the eye; everything here is new and appointed in the rich style that befits the oldest and greatest of the Swiss abbeys, that of St Gall.2 The scholar is Christoph Heinrich Müller, who studied under the late professor of Helvetic history at Zurich, J. J. Bodmer, and he is engaged in copying a text. This text is in verse, in a relatively modest manuscript with red and blue initials and the occasional touch of gold. As so often with medieval manuscripts, the first page is worn, but thereafter the words, written by three different scribes, are tolerably clear. Most of the visitors to the library come to see historical texts or illuminated manuscripts; what is unusual is that Müller has before him neither of these, but a work of fiction, Wolfram’s Parzival, one of the long-neglected Grail romances. The results of his labours at St Gall appeared in 1784: this was the first printing of an accurate text of a medieval Arthurian romance. But the manuscripts themselves had lain largely undisturbed since the early sixteenth century.

Why were scholars now turning their attention to medieval literature for the first time as a suitable subject for their researches? Why, in this supposed age of reason, were they hunting out the old fantastic tales again? To understand this, we have to look briefly at the history of European scholarship in the preceding decades:

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