the public imagination is seen in the cottage industry of works that it inspired, replicating his style and theses or attempting to refute it. In Brown's novel, the protagonist discovers that the grail actually referred to Mary Magdalene, and that knowledge of this, as well as of the bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary, has been kept hidden to the present time by a secret conspiracy. This is very similar to the thesis put forward by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln in Holy Blood and the Holy Grail though not associating the hidden knowledge with the Cathars, and Brown also incorporated material from Joyce, Thiering and Starbird, as well as the 1965 The Passover Plot, in which Hugh J. Schonfield claimed that Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea had faked the resurrection after Jesus was killed by mistake when stabbed by a Roman soldier. Still, Brown relied so heavily on Holy Blood that two of its authors, Baigent and Leigh, sued the book's publisher, Random House, over what they considered to be plagiarism. Brown had made no secret that the bloodline material in his work drew largely on Holy Blood, directly citing the work in his book and naming the novel's historical expert after Baigent (in anagram form) and Leigh, but Random House argued that since Baigent and Leigh had presented their ideas as non-fiction, consisting of historical facts, however speculative, then Brown was free to reproduce these concepts just as other works of historical fiction treat underlying historical events. Baigent and Leigh argued that Brown had done more, "appropriat[ing] the architecture" of their work, and thus had "hijacked" and "exploited" it. Though one judge questioned whether the supposedly-factual Holy Blood truly represented fact, or instead bordered on fiction due to its highly conjectural nature, courts ruled in favor of Random House and Brown. Dynasty of the Holy Grail A presentation of analogous concepts within a Mormon context was published in 2006: Dynasty of the Holy Grail: Mormonism's Sacred Bloodline by art historian Vern Grosvenor Swanson. Formatted as a footnoted scholarly study and claiming to be the culmination of almost three decades of research, the work was framed in part as a response to "a fuzzy gnostic, leftwing, liberal, and adamantly feminist bias" regainding the divine feminine and sacred marriage that pervaded the recent literature on the subject, and that the author viewed as "idiologically corrosive to faith in Jesus Christ." He