Discovering the Holy Grail

From the great chivalric novels of the Middle Ages to Wagner's Parsifal, passing through the Templars and Dan Brown's novels up to Eco's Foucault Pendulum, the theme of the Grail has never ceased to inspire poets, writers and musicians.

This object with an elusive nature and identified with the chalice used by Jesus in the Last Supper has always fascinated man to the point of becoming a real legend that is intertwined with the myths of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The many original souls, intertwined and stratified, but all intrinsically linked to this mythical object, are now taken up in the volume "The tale of the Grail" (Jouvence, 2021, pp. 558), edited by Giacomo Maria Prati and Alessandro Coscia, a book that focuses on first of all to reconstruct the original importance of the Grail theme by telling its roots and freeing it from sterile commercial and stereotyped readings.

The myth of the Grail was born, in fact, in a very specific historical moment: between the end of the XII century and the first half of the XIII it is possible to identify a whole series of epic-chivalric novels whose central topic is the search for this object. mysterious. The first and most important is the Perceval or Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, which is usually credited with having introduced the Grail in the literature of chivalry, written between 1182 and 1190. The Conte du Graal of Chrétien de Troyes is considered the greatest literary product of the feudal world, the first medieval Rome and the most important mythic tale expressed by Christianity after the year 1000. Moreover, it is the maximum expression of a society, that of the knights, in which peculiar gifts had to emerge. The main one was the willingness to perform brave gestures, that is characterized by that military valor that the warrior on horseback could demonstrate by carrying out extraordinary enterprises, at the service of the weakest, of women or of a higher cause, above all religious type. The Grail is therefore the symbol of an era and its values. An era in which Western Europe, albeit firmly Christian and predominantly feudal, was undergoing some changes capable of modifying the political and social order.

The centuries in which the myth of the Grail spread were those of the maximum vitality of the Italian municipalities, of the dynamism of the seaside cities, of the drive that led thousands of men to build palaces and cathedrals that had little to envy to the classical counterparts. They were farmers, artisans and merchants, in fact, the great novelty of the centuries between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Certainly not all and not all alike, but there is no doubt that it was the peasants who always plowed new lands and gave way to the agricultural revival of the Late Middle Ages. It was the artisans who always started new shops and were the first to revitalize the cities. And it was the merchants who brought the western Mediterranean back to the center of relations between the West and the East.

In this climate of change, it became essential for the feudal lords to reaffirm their centrality also from a cultural point of view. The novels of chivalry served this and, at the same time, they were also the expression of a nostalgia for a good time that already at the time in which they were written seemed to have passed its apogee and for this reason it was celebrated in prose and poetry. The time of the knights, of the noble enterprises thus went to oppose the narrow mercantile and monetary ambitions of the protagonists of the rise of the cities. And what undertaking was more worthy of being remembered than the search for the legendary chalice with which Christ would celebrate the Last Supper?

The Grail was all this for an entire society and an entire culture, even if in the course of the following centuries a large process of reappropriation and recoding of the imaginary of this symbolic object risked losing sight of its own charisms, specific dynamics. of the original Grail novels and their medieval contexts. The tale of the Grail thus offers an overall vision of the Grail dossier with contributions from historians, philologists, anthropologists, philosophers, historians of art and religions, archaeologists, with a scientific and rigorous point of view.

Taking the reader on a journey into the facets of the myth of the Grail is the ambition of this collection of multidisciplinary writings. Accurate in the sources and in the reconstruction, the essays in the volume are addressed, finally, not only to an audience of specialized scholars, but also to the curious and passionate who see in the search for the Grail both an intellectual challenge and the story of an inner evolution. . And they see the Grail as one of the many roots from which the Europe in which we live has developed.