Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Elizabeth M. Willingham joshua byron smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 254. isbn: 978–0–8122–4932–3. $69.95. Smith has written a linguistically adept, frequently well–argued consideration of the textual nature and significance of Map’s De Nugis Curialium, directing positive attention to Map’s authorial competence and his use of the matière de Bretagne. De Nugis, the only work attributed definitively to Map, is composed of five distinctiones and exists uniquely in Bodley 851, a compilation dated around the last quarter of the fourteenth century. With others, Smith affirms the De Nugis text as ‘quite corrupt’ (p. 81), but he seeks to demonstrate Map’s methods of composition and revision with readings of certain paired narratives, in which he theorizes Map’s use of Welsh source material from Latin texts. In Map’s availing himself of literary sources to incorporate Celtic elements into purposeful narrative revisions in De Nugis, Smith finds plausibility for Map’s nomination as the supposed author of books of the Prose Lancelot. Smith’s opening chapters present what is known of Map’s Welsh credentials, his clerical and courtly connections, and his interest in romance, the latter based on De Nugis narratives. Smith studies several of De Nugis’s paired narratives to show Map’s aims and methods in revising his tales and to affirm Map’s competence as a writer. In spite of messy interpolations in the De Nugis text, Smith argues for its possessing unity and coherence (pp. 74–81). Smith’s fourth chapter, his most demanding in terms of the reader’s background, probes Map’s rewriting and use of Celtic materials in the tale of King Herla. Next, Smith theorizes Map’s Celtic sources based on narrative details that Smith asserts compellingly point to textual—not oral—sources: namely, Latin texts on Welsh topics. Map’s access to repositories, particularly to the Abbey library of St. Peter’s of Gloucester, which Smith theorizes may have held as many as eighteen texts treating Welsh (and Irish) topics (pp. 114–15), seems highly plausible. [End Page 161] Smith’s sixth chapter considers the Prose Lancelot’s attributions to Map, suggesting that Map’s supposed use of textual sources, his intimacy with Welsh culture and language, and his reputation for Celticized/Britonized narratives made Map a sound contemporary resort for Vulgate authorship. Beyond Map’s theorized access to Latin Celtic sources, Smith contributes no compelling new arguments. Smith’s references to the structure and naming of the Prose Lancelot, with its books and divisions, are confused; textual references to it are generally nonspecific; details of the ‘earliest’ text(s) remain unclear (pp. 149, 150, 153); a descriptor of Yale MS 229 repeats a small but unattributed characterization; the assessment of a large, double–register miniature—Yale 229’s 272v—could have benefitted from the work of earlier commentators; what the illustrator(s) of Yale 229 ‘was [were] unlikely to have known’ (p. 149) can hardly be a point of useful speculation; and because Map’s name is given as Map, Mappe, Mape, and Maples in Yale 229, the claim that his name ‘never unambiguously appears’ as ‘Mappe’ (p. 15) errs. Logic problems need mending: ‘direct verbal similarities’ in narrative versions do not ‘prove that Walter had an earlier version in front of him as he reworked his prose’ (p. 60); asserting that De Nugis, ‘like many favorite medieval texts, did not achieve a wide audience’ is a puzzle (p. 63); and who is ‘the most-well known reviser’ [sic] in medieval England is debatable: along with Langland, Chaucer is a contender, and so may be Marie de France; and a kinship of ‘revision’ fleetingly implied between two disparate Bodley 151 texts, each noted for corruption, is pointless (p. 62). Asserting James Hinton’s failure to ‘continu[e] looking for orthographic clues,’ then identifying the ‘few’ Hinton supposedly overlooked as four personal–name variants and claiming that these can be used independently to differentiate scribes (pp. 64–65) is disconnected with scribal practice. Asserting a parallel between Map as...