Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith (review)

It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Walter Map (ca. 1209/10) is one of the most enigmatic figures in medieval literary history. To date, the only work that can be accurately attributed to Map’s authorship is the De Nugis Curialium (ca. 1180–90s), a seemingly haphazard collection of pseudohistories, folktales, and satirical asides that the book’s most recent editors, Christopher N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, described as being “an untidy legacy of an untidy mind.” Joshua Byron Smith’s Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is the first monograph-length, English-Language investigation into Map’s literary legacy and a long overdue refutation of the commonly held belief that he was a careless, undisciplined writer. Smith’s aims are twofold: to re-evaluate the codicology and contents of the De Nugis and understand why, exactly, a writer most famous for composing short, witty asides in Latin became known as the author of the vernacular Lancelot-Grail Cycle (ca. 1220). According to Smith, the answer to this question also refutes the theory that the Matter of Britain—a body of literature relating to the legendary, pre-Saxon inhabitants of Great Britain—was transmitted from Wales to the rest of Europe through the oral performances of Breton minstrels. In a highly persuasive argument, it is instead suggested that early twelfth-century churchmen working closely with Welsh-Latin texts were the main agents of transmission.

Chapter 1 offers three interrelated reasons why Map was seen by his near-contemporaries as an appropriate author for the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. First, as a Marcher with close personal and professional ties to the Herefordshire region, Map had direct knowledge of the customs and mores of the neighboring Welsh, an expertise he put to good use as a clerk at Henry II’s court (p. 28). Second, the court—the focus of Map’s most piquant invectives—was wholly invested in the patronage and propagation of Arthurian literature. Finally, Map himself was known to compose romances, as testified by the four miniromances included in distinctio 3 of the De Nugis (of which “Sadius and Galo” has received the most prominent scholarly attention). Despite the fact that the De Nugis is written in Latin, Smith notes that Map’s satirical swipes against the type of courtly love found in vernacular literature are suggestive of a close, personal engagement with French Arthuriana. Knowledge of Welsh culture, an association with Henry II’s court, and a known interest in romance made “Walter Map” a paradigm of Angevin literary endeavours and an appropriate name to attach to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle (pp. 35–36).

Whereas Chapter 1 operates as an overview of the cultural context of Walter Map’s life and career, Chapter 2 provides a more critical analysis of the De Nugis Curialium itself. As intimated above, scholarship on Map has often adhered to the belief that the De Nugis represents a flustered, inexpert, and unfinished attempt at literary creation. Building upon the work of James Hinton and A. C. Rigg, Smith offers an alternative hypothesis: rather than seeing the De Nugis as a “piecemeal work for piecemeal reading” (p. 38), the distinctiones in fact represents a series of separate texts frozen in a state of revision, inexpertly welded together during the processes of textual transmission. Engaging in a close philological reading of the text, Smith argues that distinctiones 1 and 2 include material that has been adapted from distinctiones 4 and 5. Such changes include the increased use of alliteration, the use of more resonant and/or appropriate terminologies, and a cleaner, sharper writing style. Taking the critiques of life in Henry II’s court as an example (dists. 1–10 and 5.7), Smith notes that the “revised” version doubles down on the satire, includes a prudent apology for Henry II, and rewrites certain tales to better fit the newfound literary...