How to Discover the Grail, by Claudio Lagomarsini (Einaudi) – a truly extraordinary book, simultaneously a scholarly miniature and a narrative fresco – is a scientifically sound account that traces the arc of the most important relic ever discovered in the history of Christianity, and perhaps of history as a whole. A gripping essay-script, from the Middle Ages to the modern age, from the dawn of the evangelists to the Second World War, it establishes how the Grail has been the subject not only of chivalric romances, but also of academic study, eager collecting, exploration, and magical speculation. –Gianluigi Ricuperati, The Italian Review
A Romance philologist and scholar of Arthurian romances, Lagomarsini organises a complex subject that forces us to reconcile the history of the relics with the literary invention that brought the Grail myth into modernity, ultimately establishing it in pop culture through the complicity of a few Hollywood cult movies and Dan Brown's bestseller. –Speranza Cerullo, Il Manifesto
The association between the Knights of the Round Table and the Grail is automatic, and who but a scholar of the Arthurian legend could have written the most interesting and entertaining book on the subject ever written? Lagomarsini, unlike many who preceded him, doesn't pursue suggestive or bizarre hypotheses: he does the opposite, and recounts all the times people thought they'd found it—of course, in vain. –Vanni Santoni, Corriere Della Sera
Claudio Lagomarsini writes the epic, at once rigorous and adventurous, of the “seekers” and their irresistible object of desire, the Holy Grail.
Anyone who wishes to claim the discovery of the Grail must demonstrate that the recovered object is compatible with the era of the historical Christ by attaching to the find a narrative explaining how and why the Grail came to be where it was unearthed.
But what is the Grail? Why do some medieval authors describe it as a chalice for the Eucharist, while others speak of it as a generic tray, and still others identify it with the plate used by Jesus to consume the Paschal lamb? What is the relationship between chivalric romances and historical sources that mention relics of the Last Supper? Some have found in their hands a silver chalice washed up in the desert sands; others an emerald basin won as spoils of war in the Holy Land; still others a plate hidden in a stream and revealed by a mysterious celestial voice.
Claudio Lagomarsini—philologist, Arthurian scholar, and writer—retraces the history of the most significant Grail discoveries claimed from the Middle Ages to the present day in a narrative essay. From New York antique dealers, crusading knights, archaeologists, and even occultists from Victorian England, experts in medieval Arabic, officers of the Third Reich: the profiles of the discoverers could not be more varied. Not everyone, however, has managed to convince experts that they’ve discovered the true Grail. And those who passed the test at a certain point have subsequently had to contend with advances in scientific and historical knowledge, which in some cases have called into question previously accepted discoveries.
Ultimately, what do we know today about the Grails discovered so far? Is there at least one that has successfully passed all the tests?