Monday, March 06, 2006

Money Trumps Scholarship?

Money Trumps Scholarship?


Thank goodness for small favors. At least now the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are no longer trying to claim it's historical scholarship.

Not that we didn't already know.

5 comments:

Greg said...

I certainly can't defend the book, but when I read it in the late 1980s, it got me so interested in the Merovingians that I got my graduate degree in Medieval History with an emphasis on the dynasty. So it can't be all bad, can it?

Another Damned Medievalist said...

Hey, I've read fun fantasy novels and played a really decent video game tied into the same conspiracy theory. But scholarship it ain't!

Tony Keen said...

But they are still claiming that. Baigent and Leigh are quite clear in court that theirs is a work of history. Rather than conceding that it's a work of fiction, the ideas of which would then be protected under copyright, they are trying to argue that copyright protects historical conclusions.

Another Damned Medievalist said...

I've not been keeping up with it -- thanks! This is interesting -- I'm thinking now of an awful lot of books I've read that *are* fiction, but that come with bibliographies. Michael Crichton has done it a couple of times, and I know I've seen it with medieval-y fiction.

I have to say, the first thing I thought when someone told me about the Da Vinci Code was HB,HG. But I'm wondering now -- say a book has a character who is modeled on Bloch, or Rostovzteff, and spouts that person's theories, but the author doesn't say so. Is that a bad thing?

Anonymous said...

Federal funding agencies in Canada require ethical review for research involving human subjects. I live in dread of them including history in such reviews.