In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages

Abstract

VERONICA ORTENBERG, In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Pp. xv, 336. ISBN: 1-85285-383-2. $39.95. Like many university libraries, mine has some rather odd surprises squirreled away in Special Collections. One of my students' favorites is the University of Southern Mississippi's Woods Rare Book Room, an eclectic assemblage gathered in the decade that followed WWII by Sam Woods, first counsel general of Munich and husband of Wilhelmina Busch, heiress to the Anheuser-Busch fortune. Upon entering the small room that contains Woods's many acquisitions, one would be hard-pressed to discern any deep guiding principle behind the 1000 or so early printed books and miscellaneous items presumably meant to represent what might charitably be called 'Ye Olden Dayes': volumes bound in reused vellum leaves; books apparently collected more for their fine leather bindings than for their texts; maps; a sky globe; colorful pages from mss and incunabula, now employed in the room as wall decoration; specimens of central European fifteenth-century furniture disposed around the perimeter; and one item to which students are always immediately drawn, a horned 'Viking' helmet more appropriate to a Warner Bros. cartoon than an academic library. What appears random in the Woods Room would probably seem much more orderly to Veronica Ortenberg, whose In Search of the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Middle Ages tracks 'the vitality and continuing influence of the medieval period' (x) from the Renaissance to the present day. Why is it that, when we think 'old,' our thoughts most often turn not to the Renaissance or Greece or Rome but to the Middle Ages? Why, of all the many things to see and touch in the Woods Room, are students inevitably drawn to a faux Norse artifact-and more, why are they no less fascinated by the object even when they learn that the helmet is patently a fake, perhaps nothing more than a prop left over from a long-forgotten performance of Parsifal? These questions, and many others, may be answered, albeit of course indirectly, as Ortenberg's wideranging study takes readers from the Tudor resurrection of the medieval to bolster claims to the throne all the way to New Age 'Celticism' in modern England. Ortenberg's path is anything but direct, but it is nonetheless a profitable one to follow-just as the quest for the Grail is for many much more important than the Grail itself. In fact 'the Holy Grail' of Ortenberg's title turns out to be a something of a metonym for 'Middle Ages' and the 'Quest' the journey on which the author leads the reader as she explores 'not the legacy of the Middle Ages itself, but the way in which the medieval world has been known, perceived, understood, used and indeed misused by its successors' (ix). …

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