but once his machinations were laid bare, Walter Map ceased to be the greatest Welsh writer of his age.
Given the impressive scope of Walter’s fictitious lives, it is easy to see how his pseudepigrapha overshadowed his genuine work until the twentieth century. While it is common to read that the De nugis curialium is Walter’s only work to survive, this assertion is not quite true. The Dissuasio Valerii, an anti-matrimonial tract, circulated widely and was a medieval favorite. Indeed, it gathered anti-matrimonial exempla from antiquity with such range and verve that it struck a chord with misogynist readers everywhere. It is, in essence, Jankyn’s “book of wikked wyves,” made famous in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Recognizing its appeal, Walter revised the Dissuasio, and a copy of this revision appears in distinctio 3 of the De nugis curialium alongside Walter’s mournful comments about having to use a pseudonym to gain literary fame. Nonetheless, in 1468 the Dissuasio’s popularity earned Walter the noteworthy distinction of being the first English author whose work appeared in print; however, he would have surely been disappointed to see that he had been confused with St. Jerome.13 Apart from the Dissuasio and the rest of the De nugis curialium, scraps of verse survive here and there in addition to a few of Walter’s witty anecdotes.14 Finally, it is possible that a few of the satiric verses that bear his name are genuine, though not nearly to the extent that the attributions would have us believe.
Nonetheless, Walter’s modern fame rests on this strange book known as the De nugis curialium, which survives in only one manuscript, Bodley 851. In spite of the existence of only one medieval copy of this work, Walter’s name is ubiquitous in studies not only of twelfth-century British history and literature but of the European Middle Ages in general. His ability to craft engaging, peculiar vignettes of figures such as Henry II makes for memorable reading. For example, his use of Bernard of Clairvaux’s failed miracles to mock a monkish predilection for pedophilia is unforgettable, and any discussion of the French language in England includes Walter’s ridiculing of Geoffrey Plantagenet for speaking what he terms “Marlborough French.”15 Walter is often praised as one of the best satirical writers of his age. His anti-monastic satires, in particular, are deliciously compelling in their well-directed scorn and baroque farce, especially in their treatment of the Cistercians, who at one point are compared unfavorably to the barbarous Welsh. Walter’s interest in the Welsh, for that matter, pervades several tales, and the presentation of the Welsh therein has become one of the major sources for Anglo-Norman views of their western neighbors. As mentioned above, Walter also has the dubious honor of writing one of the most vicious and popular anti-matrimonial tracts of the Middle Ages, the Dissuasio Valerii. The Dissuasio’s deft command of classical and patristic sources has impressed modern and medieval readers alike. Although Walter could wield the vast array of auctoritates expected of a secular cleric, he was to a surprising extent open to what we would now call the popular culture of his day. His stories of fairy lovers, zombies, and phantasms provide folklorists with some of the first medieval witnesses of certain folkloric motifs, and his knowledge of Welsh folklore has even been used to reconstruct the archetypes of a few Celtic myths. Finally, the De nugis curialium has garnered significant scholarly attention for its construction of authorship and its presentation of reading practices. In several provocative passages, Walter addresses his shortcomings as an author, voices his complaints for contemporary literary taste, and explicitly instructs readers how to approach his text.
The above has certainly not exhausted the reasons for Walter’s continuing appeal, but it should help explain why scholars from all disciplines so often quote the De nugis curialium. Urbane, learned, and occasionally scurrilous, the De nugis curialium is a potpourri of twelfth-century literary culture. Yet Walter Map is typically treated as scholarly window dressing. He is often called in to deliver a witticism or anecdote before being shown the door, and when he is encouraged to stay for a little longer, the interest usually lies in only one or two of his tales. In many respects, this behavior is hard to fault: Walter, always prepared with a bon mot, seems to have been something of a twelfth-century Oscar Wilde. While this book does not aim to offer a complete synthesis of Walter’s work, it does, I hope, provide a clearer path for those who may desire to do so in the future.
Unlike its modern-day popularity, the De nugis curialium does not appear to have been widely read in the Middle Ages, thus seemingly fulfilling Walter’s prophetic complaint: “For when I have begun to rot, then my work will begin to gain flavor for the first time, and my decease will compensate for all its defects, and my antiquity will make me an authority in the most distant future, since then, as now, old copper is preferred to new gold.”16 Yet while the De nugis curialium has gained modern currency, the nature and extent of its “defects” are still misunderstood. Indeed, few modern readers have thought the text without defect. With a quip that has resonated widely in discussions of Walter, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, the most recent editors of the De nugis, have called the work “the untidy legacy of an untidy mind.”17 And while I will show that this characterization is unfair—its untidiness, in fact, results from the disorderly transmission of the only manuscript of the De nugis curialium—the presentation of Walter as inattentive and scatterbrained in the edition most consulted by Anglophone scholars has perhaps had an outsized impact. Framing the De nugis curialium as the disconnected jottings of a hectic courtier has in turn produced untidy readers of Walter’s work, readers who are content to examine a few tales or sections at a time, without pausing to examine the place of individual tales in their overall context. After all, if there is no discernible structure to the work, or if its textual transmission has been hopelessly bungled by a scribe, or even by Walter himself, why should one try to understand the text as a whole?
Of course, the otherwise excellent edition of Brooke and Mynors is not entirely to blame for this phenomenon; the eclectic nature of the De nugis curialium, its confused textual state, and its anecdotal approach to history with only a passing regard for what we may call historical fact all invite readers to approach the work in snatches. Perhaps it is for these reasons that only one book-length study of Walter has been completed.18 The De nugis curialium belongs to that curious category of a text that is widely known and carefully read, but consulted only in part and not as a whole: it is the Lonely Planet Great Britain of the late twelfth century.
The De nugis curialium deserves a better reputation than a series of hastily scribbled anecdotes, and in exploring Walter’s involvement with the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, this book also offers a reappraisal of textual history of the De nugis curialium. I argue that the work was never meant to be a single, unified text, but likely represents at least five works in various stages of completion. Its presentation as one work called the De nugis curialium results from several layers of scribal interference, not from a haphazard process of composition on Walter’s part, as many have believed. Moreover, the De nugis curialium preserves several instances of revision, passages that Walter has reworked from earlier versions.19 Seen in this light, the De nugis curialium provides important evidence for the practice of revision in twelfth-century literature. In its exploration of the De nugis curialium as a text in the process of revision, this book offers a timely reappraisal of Walter and his work, one that shows Walter to be a careful, focused reviser in the vein of Gerald of Wales or even William Langland.
While this reevaluation has wide-ranging implications for all aspects of Walter’s work, it is particularly helpful in understanding how he became associated with the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. In one instance, recognizing Walter’s revisions allows us to see a tale about ancient Britain taking shape before our eyes. Walter, although he never mentions Arthur, was in fact interested enough in stories about ancient Britain that he wrote one himself, almost from scratch. Moreover, noticing the extent of the scribal interventions and corruptions that pepper the De nugis curialium provides a clearer picture for how Walter dealt with Welsh material. He, as will be seen, tended to know what he was talking about when it came to Wales, a fact often obscured by later scribal tinkering. Finally, viewing Walter as a careful reviser better accords with how the Lancelot-Grail Cycle portrays
