Parody, Sarcasm, and Invective in the Nugae of Walter Map

INTRODUCTION

Modern day commentators on Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles) have long been aware of its playful, obtuse nature.¹ The only extant work that can be accurately attributed to Map’s authorship,² the De Nugis was compiled during the 1180s, at a time when Map, a secular clerk trained in the Parisian schools, was employed at Henry II’s court.³ Divided into five distinctions and operating as a seemingly haphazard collection of personal anecdotes, gossip, wonder stories, digressions, and historical musings—an admixture of genre styles that has led some scholars to label the work the “untidy legacy of an untidy mind”⁴—taken as a whole it can be read as a pointed satire on the vague, indefinable life of a courtier.⁵ The belief that the De Nugis was collated from a series of unedited notes and may not even be in the “correct” order does not invalidate this theory.⁶ Indeed, its codicological ambiguity allows the De Nugis to be read as a microcosmic manifestation of a courtier’s own fluid and unbound identity, as Map himself intimates at the beginning of the first distinction:

Scio tamen quod curia non est tempus; temporalis quidem est, mutabilis et uaria, localis et erratica, nunquam in eodem status permanens … ut sola sit mobilitate stabilis.

(De Nugis, dist. i. 1, pp. 2–3)

(I do know however that the court is not time; but temporal it is, changeable and various, space-bound and wandering, never continuing in one state. [The court] is constant only in its inconsistency.)

Just as Map’s liminal existence was made manifest in the “anti-structure” of his masterwork,⁷ so the narratological elements of the individual “trifles” (nugae) were also subject to conscious (and conscientious) realignment. The manipulation of genre tropes to destabilize the meaning of a seemingly stable text was, ironically, the structuring principle that bound the disparate collection of nugae together. Like the wanderings of the royal court, the contents of the De Nugis were constant only in their inconsistency.

The literary techniques employed to destabilize the “trifles” were another way of highlighting the ill-defined nature of court life. Irony, the dissonance between the underlying meaning and literal form of a text, was a technique that depended on the ability of the reader to discern whether or not a statement was truthful. As such there could be no direct (i.e., constant) way of reading an ironic work of literature. Irony, indeed, had close associations with the writing of satire. Whereas contemporaneous works such as the Speculum Stultorum (ca. 1190) and Architrenius (ca. 1184) sought to ridicule vice and condemn folly, the De Nugis Curialium had less of a corrective function.⁸ The “Menippean” qualities of the De Nugis—such as its fusion of genre styles, exaggeration, the reluctance to apply moral meanings to the text, and the love of ambiguity, disruption, and “play”—have already been noted by previous scholars.⁹ This said, it is interesting to note that parody, as an altogether literary and self-reflexive form of “exaggeration,” has hitherto received little attention where its usage in the De Nugis Curialium is concerned.¹⁰ Likewise, the use of sarcasm, which can be defined as a more aggressive, overt, and “oral” form of irony,¹¹ has yet to be discussed with regard to Map’s invectives against his most hated of enemies, the Cistercians.¹² Given the anecdotal origins of many of Map’s “trifles” and his fame as an eloquent and witty speaker (eloquio; dicta),¹³ it may be possible to trace the instances of sarcasm that survived the transition from the spoken vernacular to the written Latin.

The aim of this article, then, will be to analyze the parodic and sarcastic elements of Walter Map’s literary output, with an especial focus on his satires against marriage and monasticism. The first part of this investigation will explore the common definitions of—and the interrelationship between—parody and sarcasm in medieval literature. Then, taking into account the idea that mimicry, quotation, and hyperformality constitute a direct...