COMMENTARY ON THE COMPLETE EDITION OF THE BOOK OF THE GRAIL BY ROBERT DE BORON • CATHOLIC STUDIES, N. 539, JANUARY (2006), PP.4-11
An esoteric interpretation
The most famous texts of the corpus of works dedicated to the Grail were written by the French Chrétien de Troyes, at the end of the 12th century, and by the German Wolfram von Eschenbach around 1240. The authors both belonged to the chivalric world, as well as the Burgundian Robert de Boron, who devoted himself to this subject at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and to whom an existing work is attributed both in verse and in prose, the Joseph of Arimathea; one in prose and partially in verse, Merlin; and finally a prose, Perceval. Overall, these texts - linked in a trilogy from the manuscript tradition - are known as The Book of the Grail.
The first complete translation in a single volume with the curatorship and translation of Francesco Zambon comes out of the Book of the Grail for the Grail. It is a refined, philologically shrewd operation - the curator teaches Romance philology at the University of Trento - but also subtly misleading, which marks a precedent in the tradition of studies dedicated to the subject (1). In fact, if it is true that the books "on the Grail" are today frequented by amateur writers who like to mess with texts, press them to the point of obtaining a mystical wine, invariably "esoteric", until today there have been a lack of authoritative endorsements for the esoteric interpretations of the theme, especially in Italy. Even the best popular text dedicated to this subject and based on scientific literature, Richard Barber's Graal, leaves little space for the imagination. It is for this reason that the network of popular esoterism will benefit from the translation and interpretation of Zambon, which could have a role of mediation between the academic world and gender literature, similar to that of Elaine Pagels for the anti-antiquity field (2).
The argument of Robert de Boron's triptych
You know, the Eucharistic symbol of the Grail, linked to theology of redemption, has physical characteristics so uncertain as to constitute an eternal puzzle for the exegetes and the curious. In the work of Chrétien and Wolfram especially, he presents himself as an example of "disfigurability", of something that is not, by definition, comprehensible or figurable (3). This does not happen in Robert's book that clearly describes the Grail as the dish that contained the blood of Christ.
A brief summary will benefit the intelligence of the matter. The first novel of the trilogy, Joseph of Arimathea (pp. 49-103 of the Adelphi edition), sets episodes of some apocryphals: the Acts of Pilate (or the Gospel of Nicodemus), the Healing of Tiberius and the Salvator's Revenge. It tells of the events of Joseph of Arimathea intertwined with the story of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. Joseph, together with Nicodemus, buries the body of Jesus; when the empty tomb is discovered, after the resurrection, he is accused of having stolen the body and then imprisoned. In prison Jesus appears to him who entrusts him with the Grail, a dish that had served to collect his blood. The Risen One also briefly announces to Joseph the future events of the Grail. At the end of the narrative, the Grail - transported to Brittany - is entrusted to Bron, Joseph's brother-in-law.
The second novel, Merlin (pp. 107-237), introduces us to the so-called "matter of Brittany" by narrating the story of Merlin from conception to final hiding. Generated as an opponent to the fulfillment of the divine prophecies, he instead becomes their servant; he makes the plans of evil fail and establishes the Round Table as a representation of the Eucharistic supper. While Bron (Joseph's son-in-law, the "Rich fisherman king") guards the Grail in a hidden place, Merlin, - advisor to the Breton kings - influences their succession in order to accompany an elected knight named Perceval to an important enterprise that will be narrated in the third part of the trilogy. Merlin's function is also complex from a narrative point of view: he is a prophet who tells, to a cleric named Blaise, how the history of the Grail unfolded up to that moment, also anticipating future developments. In short, he recapitulates in his story the subject of the three novels.
Perceval, the third novel (pp. 241-343), tells the story of the knight elected through the stages of his chivalric formation (4). Perceval tries in vain to sit in the "dangerous place", which represents the place where Judas had sat during the last supper. After a revelation of God, Arthur learns that a knight will have to find the Grail. That knight is Perceval, who is commissioned to go by the Fisher King to question him about the Grail. He succeeds in the second attempt, when he heals the king, re-ensizing the "dangerous place" and dissolving the spells that weighed on the land of Brittany. Perceval therefore seems to have the function of Christianizing Brittany with the mysterious Eucharistic power of the Grail.
The Grail and the gnosis of mass
The stories about the Grail have long become one of the engines of the reinterpretation of Christian history as an opposition between two categories of people (or souls): the "ilic" and the "spirituals", that is, between those who would be unaware of the existence of secret and esoteric knowledge (the gnosis) and those who would instead be aware of it. By now, many cultural, historical and spiritual expressions of the Middle Ages are reviewed - by a part of the public - from the perspective of the conceptual couple esotericism/essoterism. The Grail, together with the Templars, is at the center of this dynamic that includes pseudohistorical non-fiction, scandal journalism, fiction and cinema.
The opposition between estoterism and esotericism is an extraordinary cultural war machine that, among other things, has insinuated the idea that in Christianity everything is "imposed dogma", a fraudulent convention between powerful, warped in the ecumenical councils to the detriment of the people. It is also widespread, from a certain cultural industry, the idea that Christianity is a sort of foolish guardian, guardian of treasures that it would not know how to interpret; a guardian who would have crushed the freedom of the few Gnostics - including geniuses of painting, alchemists, philosophers etc. - who, to save themselves, would have communicated with each other in figures in the great works of art and literature. It is a simple scheme but of extraordinary strength. In this sense, the success of the Code da Vinci took as a surprise only those who had remained unaware of the immense cultural work elaborated in recent decades, and of the enormous book production, devoid of scientific value, which succeeded in the enterprise of making a new evangelization, but on the contrary, exploiting ignorance, cultural voids and loss.
The result is that a portion of the audience - it is appropriate to use this term - reads the past in the scheme of conspiracy theory, to be penetrated with a detective-story investigation (not surprisingly, the prince scheme of modern narrative). This model applies particularly to what is not understood, particularly of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the nopsis, the visual element, the strange representation, and the figure of the enigma, were very common, to signify the insufficiency of reason, as in the "bestiaries of Christ" (5). It would be better to admit that much of the Middle Ages is now incomprehensible to us and that despite deep and respectful studies it will remain a remnant of meaning lost forever together with the world that generated it. Unfortunately, for a now common evil, the interpretations of the texts of the Grail too often include the categories of the mass market gnosis with its "secret" and "esoteric" traditions. The Book of the Grail in the Adelphi version is no exception.
Trinitarian gnosis and the role of chivalry
For the curator, Robert's is the "symbolically and theologically most complex version of the myth, the one in which its "esoteric" core most clearly shines through (p. 14)". As for the general meaning, the trilogy would be for Zambon a "triptych" of Giochimite inspiration, which would refer to the doctrine of the three eges, that is, the three temporal kingdoms of the "Father", the "Son" and the "Holy Spirit". The Trinitarian rhythm of The Graal Novel is punctuated according to the three narrative stages, the succession of the three custodians and that of the three tables.
The guardians of the Grail are Joseph of Arimathea, Bron (the rich Fisherman) and Alan. To this succession, Zambon explains, correspond the three parts of the trilogy: the first centered on Joseph, the second on the "painful expectation of Bron, the infirm king", the third with the ste of Perceval "who will finally receive from the rich fisherman the custody of the Grail and the revelation of his secrets" (6). In Robert's conception, the advent of the third man would mark, according to Zambon, "the conclusion of a sort of Occult History of Salvation" (7), therefore esoteric, which would be side by the note (exosteric, exterior, good for the ilics) to bring it to fulfillment.
The providential design would be summarized in the theme of the three tables. The first is the Last Supper Table. The second is the one that Jesus orders Joseph to prepare on which the fish caught by Bron will be placed and where the "Grail service" will take place. Joseph will sit in the seat already occupied by Jesus while the empty seat, corresponding to that occupied by Judas, will be destined for the "third man", Perceval, to whom a recomposition mission is entrusted (8). At the table the Lord "invites all those who have believed in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - the Holy Trinity - and who are ready to obey his commandments, to come forward and sit in the grace of God". (9)
In Merlin, the magician orders King Uterpendragon to build a third Board, after those of the Last Supper and Joseph. It is the Round Table, around which twelve places are arranged, one of which is called "the dangerous place" in memory of Judas' betrayal. That place - as the third part of the triptych, Perceval, tells - will be occupied when a knight full of glory has asked the Fisher King what the Grail is for. Only then will he be able to take the blood of Jesus into custody and allow the Fisher King to die in peace.
Both the trinitarian scanning of the triptych and the meaning of the three tables are explained, for Zambon, in the gametic scheme, as mentioned. In fact, the story of the Grail becomes the "manifestation or temporal deployment of the Trinity".
Although the division of the History of Salvation into three phases was common in Christian thought, the relationship between the novelistic construction of Robert de Boron and the theology of the story of Joachim concerns a decisive point: while in the traditional Trinitarian visions of history the third moment is always understood as a metahistoric state, that of the "eternal life" granted to the elect at the end of time, in the Joachim vision the third state or kingdom is conceived as an age in all and all historical, during which the new Jerusalem, announced in the Apocalypse, will already begin to descend from above and the Holy Spirit will grant on this earth to men the intelligence of truth (10).
Yet, Zambon adds, Robert's revelation contains an important difference also with respect to Gioacchino da Fiore: the third time is not the time of the Spirit, that is, of the contemplative, of the monks, - as in the Joachim doctrine - but that of the knights. In fact, our interpreter observes that Perceval, the one who must complete the Occult History of salvation, is a knight, like that soudoier Joseph of Arimathea who "starts" him. The cavalry is therefore entrusted with the task of completing the Occult History, or rather of "completing it"; and in fact although the figure of the Redeemer remains its pin "Robert builds his entire trilogy on the idea that something has yet to be "completed", completed, in the History of Salvation", by cavalry (11).
In short, a Trinitarian gnosis is overshadowed where it is the chévaliers who assume a priestly function (12). A conception, moreover, widespread in works inspired by the legendary history of Freemasonry or the various mystical cavalry, and which assumes a particular importance in the theories of René Guénon and Julius Evola. Zambon's interpretation is engested, in short, in the climate of revelations about the Templars and the Johannine knights, with which the bookstores are full. The three tales of the Grail are loaded with a very high meaning so that they finally reveal a "Sacred Scripture", even a Gospel of the Grail, that is, an announcement of the good news mediated by the literature of the Grail. So this rereading ends with the unveiling of a curious apocryphal gospel (13).
The syndrome of secret traditionHowever, Zambon's interpretation presents some problems. First of all, Robert's text is part of the medieval novel, conceived for an audience that did not expect religious revelations but aesthetic solicitations, the celebration of its status and values. Literary creation, at the time, also had a function of religious edification, which, however, cannot be confused with that religious and doctrinal announcement hypothesized here. Moreover, Joseph of Arimathea begins with a very clear recap of the fully Catholic faith of Robert de Boron, also reiterated in Merlin and Perceval. It is not understood then how this faith could be reconciled with the Trinitarian gnosis that would make the work of the Church insufficient.
To solve the difficulty, it could be assumed that Robert was transmitting symbols whose implications he did not know. But it seems like a very remote hypothesis; he had an audience to give an account to. It would be more honest to admit that we contemporaries ignore every single implication related to the Grail theme. But those who elaborate suspicious interpretations, which resort to the convenient expedient of reification, do not make a useful operation: the misunderstood is transformed into a secret (mystical, political, religious) and moved into the conceptual scope of the esoteric, and into the functional sphere of the secret convent. An operation equivalent to that of the lazy butler who sweeps the dirt under the carpet.
The reinterpretation of Robert's Grail novels in terms of spiritual revelation, and heretical secrecy, also introduces serious contradictions; for example: why develop a heretical theme in a triptych that begins with a completely orthodox profession of faith? (14) To mislead the reader?
Fortunately, the historical criticism is still valid, and an examination of the text and the context allows for much more solid explanations. We know that Robert wrote for Gautier de Montbéliard, related to the Dukes of Burgundy, who left for the Holy Land in 1212. We also know that Robert's audience consisted of the stately courts of that region. Following the traces of Chrétien, and perhaps the anonymous of the so-called Second Continuation, the Burgundian poet reworked the narrative material of apocryphs widespread in the Middle Ages. Robert's audience, his clients, belonged to the feudal and chivalrous class, the same one that was celebrated in the text. Robert may have chosen the character of Joseph of Arimatea because in the Latin versions of the New Testament he appeared as a decurion, a model of the public to whom the poems were addressed (15). This historical-critical explanation is obviously rejected in the esoteric interpretations of the Grail for which Josephus of Arimathea represents an eccentric and occult spiritual tradition, linked to the blood of Jesus Christ, transmitted to chivalry, in particular to the Templars (16). So let's try to deepen the narrative function of Joseph in the first part of Robert's triptych.
Joseph of Arimathea and the Gospel of the Grail
Joseph of Arimathea appears in the Gospels with Nicodemus as an embalmer and burer of Jesus. As we know, at the beginning of Joseph he is accused by the Jews of having stolen the body of the Redeemer and then locked him up in a cell (17). In the most important scene, Jesus appears to the protagonist, who speaks to him. The episode is contained in a chapter entitled "Jesus reveals the secrets of the Grail to Joseph of Arimathea" (18), The teachings of the Risen One are prophecies concerning the Grail and its function. Joseph also receives from Jesus the dish in which his blood had been collected, becoming, in short, a guardian of the secret of the Eucharist, a man of unshavering faith who, like the apostles, he saw. He is fed by that same object, mysteriously, while he remains locked in the cell (19). The Risen one announces that three will be the guardians of the Grail and Zambon treats this "teaching" as something that is handed down in secret from teacher to disciple.
In Merlin it is evident from the same narrative that the Christian faith is in conflict with the Celtic religion. Merlin tells the story of the Grail to the cleric Blaise:"I will reveal to you things that no one else, except God, could reveal to you: you will have to make a book out of it. Many men who hear these words will become better and abstain from sin. If you write, you will do a very charitable work"."
I will gladly write the book - replied Blaise - but I beg you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - I know and firmly believe that these three people are one thing in God -, of the blessed Woman who carried into her bosom the Son of God - her son and his father together -, of all the angels and archangels, of all the apostles, the saints, the saints and the prelates of the holy Church: do not induce me with deception to perform some action unwelcome to God". (20)
He also recommends that he go, at the end of his work, "to the mysterious place where the community of the Grail lives, bringing the book with it" (21). In fact, Blaise's book coincides in everything with Robert's except "the secret teachings" entrusted by Jesus to Joseph. Robert himself declares that he owns a book, that book, without which he could not have written history. Here it reveals itself, in all its refinement, Robert's metal-literary construction and the extreme awareness of a culture that is already a civilization of narration, of the fascination of the story. These games cannot be interpreted literally, as allusions to secrets, if not with a serious logical leap, not imposed by the text or by its cogence. Here, it seems to us, it is the ideology that casts its spells on poetry and its meanings.The secret and the suspicious hermeneuticsBut there's more. The triptych would also contain, in key, a revelation, as Zambon explains to us: "since Joseph is constantly guided in his actions by a heavenly Voice, and Merlin has received from God the gift of prophecy" the novel turns out to be a prophecy, indeed, as we have seen, "a sacred Scripture, a Gospel of the Grail" (22). And what would be the relationship between the estoteric teaching of the Apostles and the esoteric one of the Grail?
Here too, as in Joseph, Robert de Boron wants to specify what his relationship is with the canonical Gospels: "we will talk forever - Merlin explains to Blaise - of your fatigue and your book. But it will have no authority, for you are neither and cannot be one of the Apostles. The Apostles wrote of our Lord only the facts of which they were direct witnesses; you, on the other hand, do not report anything that you have seen and heard, but only what I tell you. And as I am and will be dark with those to whom I will not reveal myself, so your book will remain secret, and few will be the men who will appreciate it" (p. 141) Once again, Merlin is the image of Christ: his "darkness" corresponds to the secrecy of the revelation of Jesus to Joseph of Arimathea, inaccessible to the evangelists. (23)
Merlin states that the book he revealed will remain dark, secret, and appreciated by a few, but it is precisely Blaise's book, which coincides with that of Robert de Boron, the same one that the reader of the trilogy holds in his hand. This book, therefore, remained neither secret nor obscure, because that would have prevented it from becoming literature. He adds that that book has no authority because whoever wrote it is not and cannot be one of the Apostles; it reports what is known about the history of the Grail and he who told it (and is, in a sense, the author) remembers that it will be dark with those to whom he does not want to reveal himself. The unveiling/unveiling dialectic, in short, is all literary, an exquisite game of narrative camouflages.
The secret is certainly one of the most important narrative and symbolic impulses of Robert's work. But let's see better the meaning of this secret revealed by Jesus to Joseph. The Risen One delivers the dish to the decurion, a Eucharistic object that contains his blood, and a teaching that is then defined as "secret" and ineffable. A suspicious hermeneuta could therefore elaborate various theories starting from that "secret" only ignoring that, in the Middle Ages, the prayer of consecration of the host was called... secret (24). Detail not negligible because its concealment can induce the inexperienced reader to reorganize the meaning of the text.
Contrary to what was stated by the character of Merlin, the book did not remain secret, it was published, trayed in manuscripts. He entered the game of literature by triggering a series of fertile continuations, and a fluent legendary tradition. Here Merlin leaves the role of prophet, breaks the literary convention of the story and addresses the court audience, becomes the author's alter ego, enchanting magician of literature; he warns us that the rare men who will appreciate the book, according to the conventions of the refined chivalric civilization, which in France loved the trobar clus, are the refined, the cultors of the spirituality of letters, elegant theological allusions, figurative relationships (Merlino and Christ, Blaise and Joseph of Arimathea) and then revelations, magic, wonders and wonders. Merlin is in contact with God, like Joseph of Arimathea, but unlike the latter he can tell. Joseph, to whom Jesus Christ appeared, cannot say everything because, like Dante, he lacks high power. He spoke with God incarnate and risen, he looked into the face of the ineffable. Here's the secret, here's the irreferible mysterium.The contrast between the "orthodox" Gospels and the Gospel of the Grail "unknown to the Apostles", between the History of the obvious Salvation and the Occult History of the Salvation, should be turned into a literary game. If the appearance of Christ to Joseph, and the conferring of "secret teachings" were really to be interpreted as an allusion to secret currents, how should we treat the many medieval tales in which Christ appears? And why, then, give only to the fabulae of the Grail a similar value of religious revelation, denying it to others in which inaccessible castles, secret books, brotherhoods of magicians appear? Who could say, "This does not belong to the secret tradition, and this is"?
Let's listen to Richard Barber's words about the secret:The fusion of these two books, the apocryphal gospel (of Nicodemus) and the work from which the allegory of the Mass is taken, constitutes Robert de Boron's book on the "secrets of the Grail"; the writers who took up its history and reworked it were well aware of the peculiarities of that book. The supposed secrets of the Grail are therefore the hidden meanings of the ritual of the mass, explained by Jesus to Joseph and refer to a symbolic interpretation of the revelation of the sacrament. In these works deeply orthodox in their theology, the central ritual of the Church, (...) is the fulcrum of the chivalric world, and the secular order of chivalry becomes the means to achieve the highest religious experience within that ritual. (25)
One world vanishes, the other emerges: Grail and ChristianizationMerlin belongs to a world that is fading but that, before vanishing, transmits the enchantments of the matter of Brittany and its legends, to Robert de Boron, who becomes its singer. Blaise is an alter Joseph of Arimathea. As he in fact receives a story and a prophecy; not from the Risen One, but from the magician of Brittany, Merlin, the mediator who watches over the land of the Fisher King; the druid, who represents a world that is disappearing, already partially converted; a land that awaits the regenerating wave of Eucharistic wine and a knight who frees it from a spell. The world of Merlin and Blaise turns out to be fragile, unable to give the fullness of life to the people who languish. It is no coincidence that Merlin and the Fisher King will have to disappear, give up playing an active role in a new world that belongs to them only half. The magician, before hiding from the world, prays "our Lord to have mercy on all those who would have listened with interest" the book (26). No gnosis value is attributed to it, but whoever hears it with interest to narrate the stories will be worthy of receiving the Lord's mercy. Bron, the second holder of the Grail, also seems to have this symbolic function since, three days after the delivery of the witness, he dies.
Ultimately, freed from the obsession of esoterism, secret convents, terrible secrets, the Graal Novel reveals itself as a tale of the transformation and Christianisation of the Celtic world. A symbolic chronicle of the arrival of the Christian Revelation from East to the West, in pagan lands, a story of the transformation of a world: "At that time, there were no Christian kings in England yet," reads Merlin. But times change, a new sky extends over Brittany as the project of the demons who intended to counter the coming of Christianity with Merlin, son of a witch and a demon, fails.
Despite the questionable interpretation in suspicious line with the fashion of these years, the edition of the Book of the Grail remains interesting because it recovers in its entirety in Italian a text of fundamental importance for literary history. And it has to be said that, fortunately, the great literary works have their own, jealous, autonomy of meaning, which does not accept to be forced by interpretative fashions.
1. Zambon is the author of a book dedicated to the work of Robert, of which the "Introduction" discussed here takes a lot: Robert de Boron and the secrets of the Grail, Olshki Florence 1984. Followed the following year by Graal and hérésie, "Actes du XIV congrès international arthurièn", cur. C. Foulon v. II, Rennes 1985, pp. 687-706. The translation of the Adelphi edition is based on one of the two existing manuscripts of the work, the one preserved at the Estense Library of Modena (the other, so far more translated is the Didot Manuscript.
2. The book by Maurizio Blondet Gli Adelphi della dissolsoluzione, Ares, Milan 1999, is dedicated to Adelphi's cultural policy
3. Concept exposed for medieval art in book G. Didi-Hubermann, Blessed Angelico. Figures of the dissimilar, Leonardo, Milan 1991
4. The Perceval reworks Chrétien's Count of the Grail and the Second Anonymous Continuation.
5. In the edition, edited by him, of Richard de Fournival's Bestiary of Love, Zambon notes that medieval bestiaries probably had a technical function within the Memorial Ark. (Zambon F., "Introduction", in Richard de Fournival. Bestiary of love, Milan, Mondadori 2003, pp. 5-24. There, p. 14) The incomprehensible images inserted in contexts that are difficult to decipher today, were often image agents of the art of memory, which had the purpose of helping rhetoricians, preachers or writers to retain scenes, concepts, narratives in memory. This link should probably also be proposed for the images of the Grail.
6. F Zambon, "Introduction" in Robert de Boron, The Book of the Grail, cur. F Zambon, Adelphi, Milan 2005, pp. 13-40. Ivi, pp. 23.
7. Ibidem. It should be remembered, however, that the trilogy did not come to us as such. If Joseph is complete, we only have the first 500 verses of Merlin. We only have a prose version of Perceval. The existence of the trilogy, in the form presented in the book we are reviewing, is conjectural, based on the existence of the prose versions of the texts themselves in verse. V. "Introduction" to The Legend of the Holy Grail, curr. G. Agrati - M. L. Magini, Mondadori, Milan 1995, p. XXXIX.
8. F Zambon, Introduction, cit., pp. 23-24.
9. Ibidem. About the connection between the Grail and the Last Supper, v. R Barber, Graal, Piemme, Casale M. 2004, pp. 177-178.
10. F Zambon, "Introduction", cit., pp. 25-26. After the death of Gioacchino da Fiore, which occurred in 1202, the gioachymism became a brew of apocalyptic heresies, and of radical requests for renovation, while waiting for the arrival of the Age of the Holy Spirit.
11. Ibidem, p. 26.
12. Which, however, contradicts Robert's statements of faith, for example at the beginning of Joseph of Arimathea. For the trinitarian gnosis in a literary context see also Cavalleri C., Un montale gnostico?, "Studi Cattolici" (1997), pp. 532-555. Where an interpretation of Montale is discussed to which Zambon himself is not a stranger: F. Zambon: The iris in the mud - The eel of Eugenio Montale, Practices, Bologna 1994.
13. F Zambon, "Introduction", cit, p. 32. Regarding Gioachimite spirituality and Robert, Zambon cites a work by Kurt Ruh: Joachitische Spiritualitat im Werke Robert von Boron, in Typologia Litterarum. Festischrift fur Max Wehrli, Zurich and Freiburg i. Br., 1969, pp. 167-196.
14." Reiterating the power of the Eucharist was like raising a banner against the heretics and it is therefore possible to see in the novels of the Grail a sort of call to arms of the European cavalry against the forces that threatened the Church (...but) what is worth underlining (of the novels of the Grail) is their absolute orthodoxy in the presentation of the Christian faith. Robert del Boron has been described as a sympathizer of the Cathar heresy; on the contrary, his exposition of the Trinity and his views on marriage - particularly abhored by the Cathars - are fully in accordance with the teaching of the Church," R. Barber, Graal, cit., p. 180.
15. Ibidem
16. On the modern mythology of the Templars and its cultural and ideological meaning, v. Iannaccone M.A., Templari, the martyrdom of memory. Mythology of the Knights of the Temple, Sugarco, Milan 2005.
17. The source is a work of the fourth or fifth century, known as Acts of Pilate (Acta Pilatii) called in some manuscripts after the tenth century also the Gospel of Nicodemus. One of the many texts, often of popular origin, flourished around the Gospel stories.
18. Robert de Boron, The Book of the Grail, cur. F Zambon, Adelphi, Milan 2005, pp. 59-63. Which sounds different from "Jesus visits Joseph of Arimathea in prison", of another Italian translation, that of G. Agrati and M. L. Magini.Robert de Boron, The novel of the history of the Grail or Joseph of Arimathea in The Legend of the Holy Grail, cur. G. Agrati - M. L. Magini, Mondadori, Milan 1995, pp. 203-268. Ivi, pp. 217-220. Chapters and titles do not exist as such, but are created by publishers. This translation was made on the second manuscript of Robert's triptych, the "Didot : W. A. Nitze, Le roman de l'Estoire du Graal, by Robert de Boron, Paris, Champion, 1927.
19. In the regions of origin of the stories about the Grail and at the time of their composition circulated at least two stories narrated by Jacques de Vitry, which recall the story of Joseph locked up and fed by a Eucharistic food. R Barber, Graal, 146.
20. Robert de Boron, The Book of the Grail, cit, pp. 139-140.
21. F Zambon, "Introduction", cit., p. 32.
22. Ibidem, p. 33. Also Zambon F., Robert de Boron and the secrets of the Grail, Olshki, Florence 1984, pp. 99 ss.
23. F Zambon, "Introduction", cit., p. 33.
24. R Barber, Graal, p. 204. Quoting Amalarius of Metz.
25. Ibidem, p. 206. Barber, in the place cited, admits the possibility that Robert's story has anti-Roman nuances but "only in matters of ecclesiastical politics, not of heresy or orthodoxy in terms of faith". And it disputes the Venetian scholar's assessment of the content of Joseph's teaching and the description of his followers as "a sort of occult community", v. ibidem, p. 468.
26. Robert de Boron, The Book of the Grail, cit., p. 343.