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The Holy Grail by Norma Lorre Goodrich
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The Holy Grail (edition 1992)

by Norma Lorre Goodrich

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2052131,211 (3.37)None
For Richard Wagner and Steven Spielberg, the Holy Grail is a cup; for those at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., it was a book written by Jesus; for early European Christians, it was a reliquary containing the forearms of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; for the contemporary French, it is a gypsy cult. Now, for the first time, Norma Lorre Goodrich traces the history and legend of the Holy Grail, snipping away all the fictions and myths that have accrued around this. Evocative treasure to bring us the true, historical facts of one of the most venerated of Christian objects. From the goddess and priestess era of the proto-Christians through the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, the era of King Arthur and Merlin, and the massacres of the Crusades and the Inquisition, to present-day worship in the Languedoc region of France, The Holy Grail weaves a magnificent tale of the history of religions and nations. The Holy Grail defined a. World where miracles occurred; a world that shunned crass materialism and drew an ordinary person up from his painful everyday life. Knowledge of the Grail was a quest everyone could, in imitation of his royal lords, kings, and great queens, undertake quietly, silently, and humbly. Bringing together worshipers of the disciple John with followers of the Talmud, the Grail quest reconciled the majesty of deity with the misery of humanity establishing an aristocracy of the. Spirit and providing worshipers with a nobler vision than that of war, poverty and daily existence. Worship of the Grail stressed sacrifice, courtesy, duty, care of the poor, and idealization of women (or chivalry). This code of chivalry worked a fusion between religious teachings and idealism, and the Holy Grail gave generations an ideal of purity and holiness to strive toward and, if necessary, die for. But what exactly was the Grail? The ship and altar of Perceval? Jesus' cup from the Last Supper? A stone with the power to bestow eternal youth? To answer this centuries-old question, Norma Goodrich embarked on an ambitious adventure, following the Grail from the conquest of Spain by Semitic peoples of Africa, to St. Peter in Rome, to the Grail Castle of King Arthur, and to Spain (then Aragon) for safekeeping during persecutions of Christians by Valerian. Grail worship was driven underground by the Inquisition, changing political. Fortunes, religious persecutions, fierce nationalism, the massacres of the Crusades, and the purges of heretics in France. Yet despite harrowing odds against it, the Holy Grail surfaces again and again, from Dante's Inferno to Wagner's Parsifal to the honors of Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. In The Holy Grail, Norma Goodrich cuts through centuries of conflicting stories, separating fact from fiction and, for the first time, revealing the true and definitive history. Of the Holy Grail.… (more)
Member:Ron_Peters
Title:The Holy Grail
Authors:Norma Lorre Goodrich
Info:New York : HarperCollins Publishers, c1992.
Collections:Your library
Rating:**
Tags:history, mythology, medieval, Christianity

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The Holy Grail by Norma L. Goodrich

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This is an incomprehensibly bad book. It took me a long time of reading a paragraph or two at a time to finish it. The author is erudite and she has done tons of research. But her writing style seems to be: (a) go to a well-stocked university library; (b) take notes from a whole shelf of books tangentially related to Arthur or the Holy Grail; (c) type notes into a word-processor; (d) publish typed notes. The author, no joke, references things like this (p. 271): "The French dictionary and encyclopedia Peitit Larousse (1967) defines Graal and/or Saint Graal (p. 1,394) as 'the eternal vase' that...." blah blah blah. No joke. No footnotes, endnotes, etc. She says she read in this one book on this one page that. And she does this ad infinitum. She just throws her notes into heaps of paragraphs, grouped into rough chapters, that have no real thesis. There is no real thesis to her book. I learned lots of cool things about some grail lore and some of the great grail romances, but, the author never really tells us anything on her own, or what her damn point was, even in her misnamed "Conclusion." And, she inserts herself, her thoughts, and her opinions into the text at random points. Take this gem, from pp. 246-247: "That light especially warns a backward country like the United States. Here in America women were granted the vote long after those in European countries, and here, in 1990, women are considered minors, not equal to men before the law." First of all, she's dead wrong on the voting, as several European countries did not grant women the right to vote until after the U.S. Her vaunted France did not grant women the right to vote until 1944! So that's just wrong. Second, she's dead wrong on the law, as in no place in the West, and no place in the United States in 1990 were women "considered minors and not equal to men before the law." (Yes, the E.R.A. did not pass, but that doesn't mean anything she said right there is legally correct in any fashion.) How can one trust an author who makes numerous such errors and asides in the book. A star-and-a-half for the reams of interesting info from someone who's read the texts and the literature, but, all-in-all, a worthless drudge of a read with no point and little value. ( )
  tuckerresearch | Aug 2, 2022 |
Scholarly study of the Holy Grail as described in literature; what it is, where it came from, where it is now. Arthurian mythos is very strong. Interestingly, discussion of Saint Theresa (of Spain in the Dark Ages) weaves though out. Although a scholarly dissertation, the storytelling is wonderful! ( )
  PallanDavid | Aug 21, 2018 |
A well-written scholarly work, long on fact and short on speculation. ( )
  bookcrazed | Jun 6, 2006 |
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For Richard Wagner and Steven Spielberg, the Holy Grail is a cup; for those at the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., it was a book written by Jesus; for early European Christians, it was a reliquary containing the forearms of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene; for the contemporary French, it is a gypsy cult. Now, for the first time, Norma Lorre Goodrich traces the history and legend of the Holy Grail, snipping away all the fictions and myths that have accrued around this. Evocative treasure to bring us the true, historical facts of one of the most venerated of Christian objects. From the goddess and priestess era of the proto-Christians through the rise and fall of the Knights Templar, the era of King Arthur and Merlin, and the massacres of the Crusades and the Inquisition, to present-day worship in the Languedoc region of France, The Holy Grail weaves a magnificent tale of the history of religions and nations. The Holy Grail defined a. World where miracles occurred; a world that shunned crass materialism and drew an ordinary person up from his painful everyday life. Knowledge of the Grail was a quest everyone could, in imitation of his royal lords, kings, and great queens, undertake quietly, silently, and humbly. Bringing together worshipers of the disciple John with followers of the Talmud, the Grail quest reconciled the majesty of deity with the misery of humanity establishing an aristocracy of the. Spirit and providing worshipers with a nobler vision than that of war, poverty and daily existence. Worship of the Grail stressed sacrifice, courtesy, duty, care of the poor, and idealization of women (or chivalry). This code of chivalry worked a fusion between religious teachings and idealism, and the Holy Grail gave generations an ideal of purity and holiness to strive toward and, if necessary, die for. But what exactly was the Grail? The ship and altar of Perceval? Jesus' cup from the Last Supper? A stone with the power to bestow eternal youth? To answer this centuries-old question, Norma Goodrich embarked on an ambitious adventure, following the Grail from the conquest of Spain by Semitic peoples of Africa, to St. Peter in Rome, to the Grail Castle of King Arthur, and to Spain (then Aragon) for safekeeping during persecutions of Christians by Valerian. Grail worship was driven underground by the Inquisition, changing political. Fortunes, religious persecutions, fierce nationalism, the massacres of the Crusades, and the purges of heretics in France. Yet despite harrowing odds against it, the Holy Grail surfaces again and again, from Dante's Inferno to Wagner's Parsifal to the honors of Adolf Hitler's National Socialism. In The Holy Grail, Norma Goodrich cuts through centuries of conflicting stories, separating fact from fiction and, for the first time, revealing the true and definitive history. Of the Holy Grail.

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