Interest in the Rosslyn Chapel, featured in The Da Vinci Code, has reached extraordinary proportions, with hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. This book is responding to that interest by offering the most authentic account of the building of the chapel yet published. John Ritchie, a journalist born in the village and whose family has been bound up with the chapel for generations, has teamed up with successful author Alan Butler to produce this definitive account. For the first time they introduce its presiding genius Sir Gilbert Haye, precursor of the Renaissance, Keeper of the Royal Library in France, and family tutor to the Earl, William Sinclair, who built the chapel. They tell the truth about the its relationship with freemasonry and European philosophy. They explain the meanings behind its fantastic carvings and the pillar which for 200 years has had its story hidden, until now. It is a journey through a secret library of stone, overturning previous understanding of the period. Butler and Ritchie show that the truth about the chapel is stranger than fiction.
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Ultimately the fascination of Rosslyn Revealed lies in the time-honored, axiom, that truth may in fact be far stranger than any fiction. If we question man's ability to maintain in secret a strong humanist ideology in the face of unrelenting authoritarianism we need look no further than the events of the Holocaust and seventy-five years of Communist rule in Eastern Europe in our own time to understand that the human spirit is enormously resilient. At this level Rosslyn Revealed transcends being a well researched history and becomes a testimony to that resilience. ~ , GrailWorld
The reader takes a historical tour around the building and its features, and is then introduced to its history and the various circumstances associated with it. From this book, one sees that its subtitle "a library in stone" is fully justified. ~ , Network Review
Rosslyn Chapel is the most extraordinary in the UK but so much has been written already that I wondered what Alan Butler and John Ritche would be able to add. Butler is an astrologer and Templar expert and he has joined forces with a local expert on Rosslyn, John Ritchie to explore the chapel. After ten years of investigation they have made some important discoveries. ~ Wendy Stokes, WitchHiker's Guide Magazine