In both cases the romance follows the prose rendering of Borron's Joseph of Arimathea and Merlin, and precedes a Mort Artus, thus forming part of a complete cycle.
The "sudario" from which it takes its name is asserted to be the shroud in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus.
According to the legends which grew up under the care of the monks, the first church of Glastonbury was a little wattled building erected by Joseph of Arimathea as the leader of the twelve apostles sent over to Britain from Gaul by St Philip. About a hundred years later, according to the same authorities, the two missionaries, Phaganus and Deruvianus, who came to king Lucius from Pope Eleutherius, established a fraternity of anchorites on the spot, and after three hundred years more St Patrick introduced among them a regular monastic life.
The Perceval forms the third and concluding section of a group of short romances, the two preceding being the Joseph of Arimathea and the Merlin.
With regard to the religious form of the story, recent research has again aided us - we know now that a legend similar in all respects to the Joseph of Arimathea Grail story was widely current at least a century before our earliest Grail texts.
