In Reply to: DaVinci Code posted by Porceleindoll on June 10, 2004 at 01:51:42:
The book is an incredible rummage sale of accurate historical nuggets alongside falsehoods and misleading statements. The bottom line: it is a shame the book does not come coded for "black light” like the pen used by Sauničre in the book to record his dying words. That way readers could scan the book under black light and see which “facts” are trustworthy and which patently not. And perhaps even more importantly (if a black light could do this!), show the gray area where the author is dealing with very complex issues with a broad brush that misrepresents in service of sensational effect.
People should enjoy this book as fiction, but certainly not consider it to be uniformly historically reliable.
[...]
But despite Brown’s scholarly airs, a writer who thinks the Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in Avignon is hardly a model researcher. And for him to state that the Church burned five million women as witches shows a willful—and malicious—ignorance of the historical record. The latest figures for deaths during the European witch craze are between 30,000 to 50,000 victims. Not all were executed by the Church, not all were women, and not all were burned. Brown’s claim that educated women, priestesses, and midwives were singled out by witch-hunters is not only false, it betrays his goddess-friendly sources.
This list is by no means exhaustive but only representative. We would need a full editorial and bibliographic full-press to present the “black light” edition, which neither you nor I have the time to do, and which would make it something other than a novelistic thriller. However, these examples should serve sufficiently to refute Brown’s prefatory statement, presented under the headline “Fact” in boldprint: “all descriptions of ...documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
Source: Margaret M. Mitchell, PhD, in Lake Magazine, Fall 2003, quoted in the "further reading" section of Not InDavincible, by J.P. Holding
See full article if interested
http://www.crisismagazine.com/september2003/feature1.htm