The goal of this course is to provide an overview of the many different ways writers of fiction and nonfiction have imagined, and reimagined, the object known as the Grail. We'll look at how the Grail was invented as a powerful literary symbol in the late 12th and early 13th centuries by a group of medieval romancers who celebrated the Grail as a symbol of perfection. At times, this perfection was social, and the Grail functioned as a symbol of the perfect knight or of the ideal chivalric society. Most often, however, the Grail's perfection was unmistakably religious, so that it was indeed the Holy Grail, a symbol of God's perfect love, grace, wisdom, and joy. After being ignored for centuries, the Grail was rediscovered in the 19th century by both poets and scholars, who radically reinvented what the Grail stood for. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the Grail fascinates many who search for the perfect spiritual wisdom it promises.Lecture 1 Chrétien de Troyes's Story of the Grail, or Perceval: Part I
Lecture 2 Chrétien de Troyes's Story of the Grail, or Perceval: Part II
Lecture 3 The Prose Trilogy Based on Robert de Boron's Grail Poems: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, and Perceval
Lecture 4 The Lancelot-Grail Version of The Quest of the Holy Grail
Lecture 5 Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival
Lecture 6 Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Richard Wagner's Opera Parsifal
Lecture 7 Scholarship in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Lecture 8 Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance
Lecture 9 T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
Lecture 10 Charles Williams's War in Heaven
Lecture 11 Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
Lecture 12 A Quintet of Grail Films
Lecture 13 Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln's Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code
Lecture 14 Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum