from Medieval Academy News

A Medievalist Meets Dan Brown’s Readers

by Brian Patrick McGuire

The librarian on the telephone was calling from the Southern Jutlandic Regional Library (Lands-bibliotek) in Aabenraa: "I heard you lecturing last winter and I liked the way you spoke. We want you to come back. Not to talk about the Middle Ages as such, but about Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Would you consider it?"

I had spoken in Aabenraa to medieval enthusiasts who have formed their own guild, hold an annual fair, and dress up in medieval costumes that they make themselves. They had wanted to know about medieval mentalities, the attitudes behind the behavior of knights, merchants, and clerics. That was an easy assignment for a medievalist who has spent decades in trying to understand how people thought and felt about themselves and each other in the medieval centuries.

But now I was being asked for something completely different. Danes have been swallowing Dan Brown with as much enthusiasm as Americans. The Da Vinci Code has been on the front page of the weekly brochure from a major supermarket chain and can be bought in hardcover for the equivalent of ten dollars. It is basically the story of Christianity as a great conspiracy: the Roman Church is considered responsible for hiding for centuries the "fact" that Jesus got together with Mary Magdalene. Their offspring are supposed to include the Merovingian kings, whose descendants are claimed to be found to this day.

Years ago, when The Name of the Rose was a bestseller in Denmark, I participated in a lecture series on the historical and literary background for Umberto Eco's work. Eco, however, was trained in medieval philosophy, while Dan Brown lacks such a background. At the same time, however, Brown has managed to gain readers in social groups where reading means checking sms-messages, as I noticed a few years ago on a domestic flight in the U.S. There was a teenage girl totally absorbed in the book-but unable to tell me what it was about when I asked her if she liked what she was reading.

Now it was I who was being asked to explain the novel, in the light of my knowledge as an historian. I said yes to the invitation, for I consider it important to bring the Middle Ages out of the university and to anyone interested in hearing about history. I could use Dan Brown as my excuse for telling Danes what I have tried to convey during the decades I have worked as a medieval historian in my adopted country: that the Middle Ages are not a dark past. They provide the foundation of Denmark, Europe, and what we used to call Western civilization-for better and for worse.

In meeting my Aabenraa audience I decided to speak to my listeners as I do with my students at Roskilde University in the core course in history. I tell them first of all that their attraction to the past is worthwhile, but in order to get somewhere with this interest, they have to follow the lead of the historian in distinguishing fact from wishful thinking. With both a student audience and a general one it is important to assume that people know something about the subject at hand-even if they have gotten their knowledge from a bogus internet site, from a television program, or from a Dan Brown novel.

At Aabenraa I concede that it is impossible to reach some kind of "objective truth" in history, but it is possible to get to know people in the past and the truths they held. This process requires loyalty and sympathy. If we go this way, then we can begin to understand ourselves, not because we are the same as medieval people but because their language and thinking force us to articulate our own way of being in a more precise way.

After these preliminary considerations with my Aabenraa audience-about 65 people wedged in among the books of a well-equipped library-I present the myth of the grail as we know it from medieval literature. I allow myself the luxury of simply telling the story as it first appears in Chrétien de Troyes. I show how Chrétien seemingly did not understand what the grail was supposed to signify. Borrowing from some of the myriad studies of the subject, I mention the possibility of its Celtic origins.

I am no expert in the area, but in Aabenraa I am the authority for an evening and have to do my best. The continuations of Chrétien in the Prose Lancelot, especially in The Quest of the Holy Grail, enabled me to make use of Pauline Matarasso's superb Penguin translation, together with her introductory remarks. This later version of the grail story is much more psychological, and the religious imagery is more transparent than in Chrétien.

After providing this foundation in medieval literature, I moved quickly (and I hope deftly) through the following centuries. I demonstrate a pause in interest in the grail story after the reformations of the sixteenth century and then go to nineteenth-century medievalism, with the Masons, Tennyson, and Wagner. In turning to the twentieth century I mention grail films, while now in the twenty-first century a new Danish film for children and adults tells of how the Templars have hidden a treasure (the grail?) somewhere on the island of Bornholm.

In providing this longue durée I intend to show that the grail has been a central theme in Western storytelling since the twelfth century. And so comes my central point: the apparent attraction of Dan Brown's work is not the grail myth; it is his claim that there has been a huge conspiracy. He claims that the Roman Catholic Church throughout history has repressed knowledge of who Jesus and Mary Magdalene really were and instead made the founder of Christianity into a celibate man.

I conclude at Aabenraa that Dan Brown's novel is based more on fantasy than on fact. He mixes up his version of the Catholic Church with its medieval predecessor. There was no such thing as the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, and even less so "the Vatican," which is the great scoundrel of his novel. Dan Brown has created a hoax, even if a clever one.

The Roman Catholic Church came into existence at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, while the medieval Christian Church in Western Europe was something quite different. The pope was its leader but not its monarch, even though after the eleventh century many popes did their best to lead the Church in an authoritarian manner. But they always had to answer to the bishops and to the councils that were held throughout the period.

This is perhaps a controversial point, even among medievalists, but it is important to exonerate the Christian Church from the conspiracy theories that have been circulating since long before Dan Brown began his novel. I point out to my audience that it is inconceivable nowadays to speak of a Jewish world conspiracy, and it is politically incorrect (except perhaps in Denmark!) to speak disparagingly of Moslems. With Catholics, however, one can say just about anything and get away with it.

In the pause after the lecture a little old lady comes and asks me about the Templars and the churches of Bornholm. I have to disappoint her. The question period, which lasts the better part of an hour, brings both sober queries about the history of the Templars and claims that Jacques Saunière had a hidden truth. Thankfully I am equipped with my Oregon colleague Sharan Newman's excellent The Real History behind the Da Vinci Code and can check on Saunière and his story.

It turns into a good evening. The librarians are happy with the large turnout and many questions. In the coming weeks there will be three more lectures by other experts on subjects connected with the novel. I have enjoyed myself, for I have managed to create a dialogue between fiction and fact, or at least between Dan Brown's version of history and my own. I have succeeded in asking people to reconsider the underlying assumption of the novel, that the Catholic Church has had a plan through history to control people. I suppose that every mystery writer has the right to do what Dan Brown did, to construct a universe that seems convincing and which claims to open doors of perception. But my message to the Aabenraa audience is that the study of history and especially of medieval culture is just as exciting as the good mystery story, if not more so. In looking at the past, we medievalists can be surprised and delighted with what we find, even if there were no great conspiracies and the grail turns out to be, in Dan Brown's own words, "simply a grand idea."