Jessie L. Weston (1850–1928) was a pioneering British scholar of medieval literature, particularly Arthurian romance. She was one of the first professional women scholars in the field and published influential theories of the relationships between religious ritual and medieval literature. Her most famous work, From Ritual to Romance (1920), combined her textual scholarship with occult ideas using methods from the emerging fields of folklore, anthropology, and comparative religion to argue that the European grail romances are coded records of an ancient fertility cult. Long discredited, this book was, along with her more conventional textual scholarship, lauded during her lifetime.