It seems extraordinary to think that when I finished my book on the Grail five years ago, no one had ever heard of The Da Vinci Code. Perhaps the world was a better place without it, but the book's immense popularity catapulted the Grail into the public consciousness even more effectively than Monty Python and the Holy Grail had done two decades earlier. I would like to take a look at the world of recent Grail scholarship, where I hope that such fantasies have not yet taken root. Let us take as a starting point a book published fifty years ago in Paris. This is the proceedings of a conference on the Grail romances in the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth century, an international colloquy held in Strasbourg in 1954. It was a time when, as Mario Roques declared in his opening address, ‘on the question of the Grail our knowledge has marked time for the past thirty years’. He promised that the discussions would be aimed at showing those then working in the field where to direct their efforts. Now Peter Field, in his contribution to this volume, has pointed out the dangers of presumption in Grail quests, and I make no such sweeping claims for this chapter, which aims only to do a little exploration.