The literati turned up their noses at the book’s prose. Scholars bristled at its distortions. And conservative Christians cringed, fumed and published refutations. But the book’s taut plot and clever word games—along with the idea of a mysteriously lost “sacred feminine”—helped move more than eighty million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in history. Though The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, Brown and his wife, Blythe Brown, carried out voluminous research. They took notes from the Gnostic gospels, from dictionaries of codes and symbols and from books about the Holy Grail
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