Jessie Laidlay Weston (1850 - 1928) was an English independent scholar, medievalist and folklorist, working mainly on mediaeval Arthurian texts. Her best-known work is From Ritual to Romance (1920). In it she brought to bear an analysis harking back to James George Frazer on the Grail legend, arguing for origins earlier than the Christian or Celtic sources conventionally discussed at the time. He later claimed, in his lecture The Frontiers of Criticism (1956), that his original intention was merely to add the references he had employed, to counter earlier criticisms of his work as plagiarizing. More extensive notes were requested by the publisher to bulk out the length of the poem in book form, calling them "bogus scholarship".
