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As a historian, she made annotations in the margins of the book -- starting on Page 4 -- when she came across errors. When she finished, Newman was surprised at how much of novel's background differed from what she knew was true.

"Last summer, I started to realize that people were taking 'The Da Vinci Code' very seriously," she says, "and were treating it as fact and reporting it as fact, various things about it."

Newman, a historian and author of mysteries set in medieval France, knew better. Her new book, "The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code," is meant to be a companion book to the best-selling novel by Dan Brown. Organized alphabetically, from "Apocrypha" to "Wren, Christopher," Newman's work looks at the key (and obscure) points of interest in "The Da Vinci Code" from a historian's perspective.

However talented Brown is as a storyteller -- and Newman insists she enjoyed the novel -- the factual errors bothered her, even as she insists "this is not a refutation of 'The Da Vinci Code.'"

Still, there were mistakes that Newman could not let pass. When she went to the Louvre in Paris and tried to follow Brown's directions into the museum, she ran "smack into a window."

"It's definitely a fictional Louvre, but that makes no difference," Newman says, noting that as far as anyone knows, Brown has never been to the museum. "Anybody can make a fictional Louvre."

Other items, such as the presence of metal detectors at Westminster Abbey in the book when there are none ("There may be one now since the book came out, since he mentions them so often," Newman says), are incidental and minor errors that anyone could make. But the historical information proved more nettlesome to the author, whose Catherine Levendeur mystery series is set in 12th-century France.

One of the central plot elements in "The Da Vinci Code" is Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of "The Last Supper." Characters discuss whether the Apostle John is actually Mary Magdalene.

A close examination of the painting indeed seems to indicate that the figure to the left of Christ might be a woman.

Newman argues otherwise.

"Da Vinci didn't write very much about his paintings, but he wrote about 'The Last Supper,' the composition of it," she says. "It's clear from that they're all men. Obviously people will say, 'It was a secret; he didn't tell anybody.' But if it's a secret, there's no evidence, and, therefore, I can't say. I don't know Da Vinci's mind, but I have read his notebooks, and I just don't see any evidence at all for that.

"And also, looking at his sketches and his other things, and other painters of that era like Raphael, very often young men look extremely feminine. And John the Evangelist was supposed to be quite young, in his teens."

"The Da Vinci Code" also discusses the life of Mary Magdalene, traditionally viewed as a prostitute who reforms her life and becomes a follower of Jesus Christ. In the novel, however, she is seen as a symbol of the Holy Grail, and some characters believe she was the wife of Christ and bore him children.

Both theories, Newman believes, are untrue, since it is historically likely that the contemporary Mary Magdalene is a composite of three or more women.

"This was well known until the Reformation," Newman says, adding that the Gospels contributed to the confusion by mixing up various Marys, including Mary of Bethany, Mary of Egypt and Mary Magdalene, who was revered as an evangelist up to the 16th century.

"The only one she's not mixed up with is the Virgin Mary," she says. "But this happened over several hundred years, as stories were told in an oral tradition alongside the ecumenical Biblical tradition."

Newman found numerous smaller errors in the novel, ranging from listing Godefroi de Bouillon as a king of France when he was actually a duke, to misinformation about the Knights Templar -- "The Da Vinci Code" lists them as the first European bankers, when Jewish merchants had set up a simple banking system at least 100 years before the Knights were founded, as had the Italian cities of Pisa, Genoa and Venice.

None of this, Newman insists, drastically took away from her enjoyment of the story itself. Nor does she think historical novelists have a duty to be 100 percent accurate.

"It's fiction, and as long as they say it's fiction, of course they don't have that obligation," Newman says. "As a historian and a novelist -- and I have been both for almost 30 years now -- to me it's a point of honor in a novel. All of my mysteries have been based on primary research."

Newman adds that her research, especially reading deeds of sales, charters and other medieval documents, often yield plots for her books. But she doesn't expect other writers to be as obsessive as she is about historical accuracy.

She says: "But I do think that it adds to the texture of the novel if the reader can say, 'I trust this writer to get it right; I don't have to worry about it.' And it gives you more local color the more you know about the period."

Capsule review

Sharan Newman's "The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code" serves as the perfect companion to Dan Brown's popular novel of the same name. If, like Sam Cooke sang, you "don't know much about history," Newman's encyclopedic, A-to-Z look at topics ranging from "Aprocrypha" to "Wren, Christopher" provides perspective and insight.

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