Re: the device of the partially revealed secret...
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 19 August, 2021 12:53PM
I belonged to the Charles Williams Society (now defunct, I think). In its 76th Newsletter, the CW Society announced a competition. "CW's books mention many fictitious works, such as Sir Giles Tumulty's HISTORICAL VESTIGES OF SACRED VESSELS IN FOLKLORE or Peter Stanhope's A PASTORAL. You are invited to submit a review of any one of these, not more than 100 words in length, before 20 March 1995."
I wrote this, drawing on Williams's entertaining Holy Grail thriller War in Heaven, which has two villains, Gregory Persimmons and Giles Tumulty:
Review: Historical Vestiges of Sacred Vessels in Folklore by Sir Giles Tumulty.
Students of ethnography and ecclesiastical history have long needed an account of surviving pre-Conquest liturgical vessels. They will not find it in this tendentious monograph. The author has prosecuted his researches with a "zeal not according to knowledge," his preoccupation with "occult energies" supposedly resident in such objects and his readings of the Arthurian romances as sober history persistently distorting his findings. Moreover, his sources are largely works in his private library, some of which are treasures rightfully belonging to the nation, others mere trash -- in either case, unavailable to serious scholars.
M. R. JAMES