Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Neil Cartlidge Walter Map and the Matter of Britain By Joshua Byron Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Few writers in the Middle Ages, or indeed in any period, have enjoyed a more complex, enduring, and incongruous literary afterlife than Walter Map (d. 1209/1210). Within decades of his death, Map was being credited with the composition of several parts of the monumental French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle--making him, in effect, a founding father of the Arthurian tradition. At the same time, medieval manuscripts so frequently associate him with various Latin satirical poems within what is now generally known as "Goliardism" that he effectively functions as a legendary father of this tradition too. (When Thomas Wright edited much of this material in 1841, he chose to entitle this volume Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes.) At the end of the eighteenth century Map's reputation still exerted such a hold on Welsh imaginations that the bardic antiquarian Iolo Morganwg (aka Edward Williams, 1747–1826) was moved to create spurious Welsh-language writing in his name. These days it is generally agreed that all of the literary work that can genuinely be attributed to Walter survives only in a single medieval manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 851), where it is rubricated "de Nugis curialium" ("Courtiers' Trifles"). It was under this title that Walter's work was edited in a pioneering edition by Montague Rhodes James in 1914 (followed by a translation in 1923); and James's edition/translation was subsequently reissued (with revisions by R. A. B. Mynors and Christopher Brooke) in a Clarendon Texts volume first published in 1983. Ironically, there is one part of the De nugis curialium (and only one part) that did circulate widely in the Middle Ages, but in most cases without ascription to Map. This is the Dissuasio Valerii, an extravagant polemic against marriage, which survives in dozens of medieval copies (and which was the first work by an Englishman to be printed). The Dissuasio even makes an appearance in the Canterbury Tales (where it is cited as "Valerie")—which means that Walter Map is also one of the relatively few English writers whose work Geoffrey Chaucer can definitely be shown to have read. [End Page 145] Walter Map can thus be described as a figure who is central to several different literary histories of the Middle Ages. He was also a colorful and charismatic personality in his own right, as De nugis curialium amply demonstrates. Yet there have been remarkably few scholarly attempts at a rounded assessment of his work both in relation to his original cultural contexts and his subsequent literary reputation(s). From this point of view, Joshua Byron Smith's Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is something of a landmark. To my knowledge, it is the first published monograph in English exclusively devoted to a study of Walter Map. Fortunately, it is also a lively, wide-ranging and original book, distinguished by an impressively energetic reluctance to allow any received assumptions to pass unscrutinized. It makes a number of substantive suggestions in relation both to the interpretation of De nugis curialium in detail (including some interesting possible solutions to some of the specific textual difficulties posed by the one surviving manuscript) and to its placing in a wider socio-intellectual context—foregrounding in particular the networks centred on St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, and on the tradition of Welsh-Latin saints' lives represented by London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.xiv. It also makes some compelling arguments about Map's attitudes to (and knowledge of) Wales; about what Smith calls "Britonicization" (i.e., the setting of stories in an "ancient British past"); and about the nature of the authority that Map came to exert within the tradition of Arthurian romance. Overall, this is an important book, and engagement with it will be essential for all future work on Map. All that being said, there are some problems with the way its claims are presented. For example, Smith uses his introduction to suggest that "this book makes two larger arguments concerning the literary...