the De nugis curialium has also been taken, unjustly as I hope to show, as evidence for a confused mind. James Hinton, who did much to explain the text, warned against the tendency to equate Walter’s intellect and the sole manuscript of the De nugis curialium, which was written some two centuries after his death: “whether Walter Map had originally a plan, or not, the crudities manifest in the disposition of materials are not due to the author’s slovenliness or mental incoherence so much as to the fact that he never completed his editing, but left his materials fragmentary and unpublished.”5 This plea, however, has largely passed unheeded.6 Indeed, in reading scholarship on Walter, it takes little time to realize that “dismissive remarks on the nature of Walter’s achievement are the rule.”7 Frederick Tupper and Marbury Ogle thought of Walter “as a gentleman, an amateur rather than as a professional author.”8 M. R. James believed Walter incapable of organization and driven by impulse: “As to the plan and date of the de Nugis, nothing can be clearer than that there is no plan, and that the work was jotted down at various times, as the fancy struck the author.”9 He also believed Walter guilty of a serious literary transgression—“he did not always know very clearly the meaning of the words he used.”10 Walter’s wide-ranging interests have at times been seen as a fault, rather than the mark of a dynamic mind. He is “an author who struggled to exercise control over his highly varied material.”11 And some of his stories “reveal to us a Map both critical and credulous, divided between reason and irrationality.”12 Ian Short simply calls him “indescribable.”13 David Knowles, who may have felt the sting of Walter’s anti-monastic satire too keenly, was no great fan, saying he “lacked both balance of mind and ethical sobriety.”14 Walter’s most recent editors also imply that he lacked sobriety, but not of the ethical sort: “The De nugis curialium was the commonplace-book of a great after-dinner speaker; and if one is entirely sober when one reads it, it is easily misunderstood.”15 Most scholarship on Walter leaves the impression that if he were alive today, he might make a superb blogger: quick with a witty anecdote, an expert aggregator of popular culture, and given to passionate first impressions. The studied discipline of a novelist, however, would elude him.
This chapter and the next reevaluate both the textual state of the De nugis curialium and Walter’s critical reputation. In this chapter, I show that Walter sometimes revised his earlier work and that he did so with meticulous care. And in the next, I argue that medieval readers, and not Walter Map, are responsible for the idea that the De nugis curialium should be considered a single, unified work. The title of the work and its chapter divisions are not Walter’s. Moreover, several glosses, many of which are faulty, have found their way into the main text, adding another layer of textual difficulty to Walter’s work. Overall, I suggest that the De nugis curialium as we have it is best understood as five separate works in various stages of completion that have been bound together, almost certainly after Walter’s death. Seen in this light, it is clear that Walter does not deserve his reputation as a scatterbrained author. It is hardly his fault that the only surviving copy of his work has been taken as the definitive testament of his literary talents. Not only does this reevaluation render Walter’s presence as an auctoritas for the Lancelot-Grail Cycle less incongruous—he had the patience and focus needed for such a work—it also bears directly on his reputation as a writer who worked in the Matter of Britain. As Chapter 4 shows, understanding Walter’s practice of revision sheds new light on one method medieval authors used to write stories set in ancient Britain.
Evidence of Revision in the De nugis curialium
James Hinton was the first scholar to examine the structure and plan of the De nugis curialium in depth.16 Although he recognized that Walter’s text survives in an unedited state, he proceeded to reconstruct the text in the order in which he believed it had been composed. Identifying as many termini a quo and termini ad quem as possible, Hinton distinguished twenty separate “fragments,” which he thought gave little evidence of a larger design: “From what has been noticed of the casual manner in which Map wanders from one topic to another even while he is writing straight ahead, it is clear that he was not restrained by a definite plan; he wrote willingly upon whatever occurred to his mind, careless of the drift of his discourse.”17 This is the Walter Map familiar to scholarship. Indeed, I will concede that dividing the De nugis up into small pieces and ordering them on the basis of chronology makes Walter’s text even less coherent, but it must also be admitted that splitting up almost any literary work into the chronological order of its composition would result in disorganization, too. The Canterbury Tales would certainly look the poorer for it. And everyone, it seems, has followed Hinton in claiming that Walter all but announces his lackadaisical style of composition when he writes, “Hunc in curia regis Henrici libellum raptim annotaui scedulis” (I have swiftly [raptim] noted this little book down in pages of parchment in the court of King Henry).18 Hinton takes raptim with its etymological force “by snatches,” which lends credence to the belief that Walter’s literary activity occurred at intermittent stages. However, this meaning is not attested in Medieval Latin (nor in Classical Latin for that matter).19 Instead, it is best to take raptim here with its normal meaning of “swiftly” or “hurriedly”—a subtle, but important, distinction. Although Hinton’s contributions remain valuable, especially his observations that the De nugis curialium is an unfinished work and that the chapter titles are the product of a later scribe or compiler, this chronological arrangement is unnecessarily complicated and relies on a rather constrained view of literary composition.20
Brooke and Mynors, Walter’s most recent editors, accept many of Hinton’s arguments regarding dating. However, they propose that the De nugis curialium has more structure than Hinton allows. Instead of a series of fragments thrown together by Walter or a later scribe with little attempt at order, they suggest that the work “was composed more or less as a single book, into which additions small and large were later inserted.”21 They show that apart from eight interpolations, the work belongs mostly to the early 1180s. In their view, the manuscript’s current disarray results overwhelmingly from Walter’s subsequent tinkering and erratic insertions.
The bulk of it was drafted in 1181 and 1182, and it lay for a number of years in loose quires, roughly arranged in the order dist. iv, v, i, ii, iii. It was still a draft, not a finished work, and included two versions of the satire on the court; some chapters were never completed. From time to time the author added insertions small and large on slips of vellum; in 1183 he provided the whole work with a prologue. At some date unknown, he decided to make the satire on the court the opening of the book, and so cut his loose quires like a pack of cards, arranging the material in approximately its present order.22
This explanation has the apparent benefit of originally placing the two versions of the satire on the court in succession, with the more polished version immediately following the earlier draft version (though exactly why this is preferable is left unexplained). Additionally, in the original order proposed by Brooke and Mynors the book begins with the Dissuasio Valerii, Walter’s most popular work, which alone of the contents of the De nugis curialium circulated widely. Since it first circulated under a pseudonym, it would have been a good marketing ploy to open a work of some considerable size with the surprising revelation that Walter himself had composed the popular Dissuasio Valerii. But, as Brooke and Mynors admit, this account does not solve all the infelicities of the De nugis curialium. Here, Walter comes in for yet more criticism. Since they argue that the manuscript’s current form results more or less from Walter’s own meddling, the blame for all the faults of the De nugis curialium lies squarely on his shoulders. Brooke and Mynors, for example, are more inclined to believe the subpar rubricated chapter headings are Walter’s own invention: they are “untidy in every possible way, and with an untidiness which clearly reflects in part the mind of Master Walter.”23 And what of the internal epilogue, which even in their reconstructed form still sits oddly in the middle of the work? They suggest that “since it was evidently
