In unraveling this question, this book makes two larger arguments concerning the literary history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first is that Walter Map’s De nugis curialium is not the disheveled and disorganized text that scholars have imagined—or, at least, its disorganization is of a completely different nature than has been realized. This better understanding of Walter’s work in turn provides new evidence in support of a second, larger argument. I show that ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England in the twelfth century. Overall, this book attempts to rewrite the history of how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. It contends that inventive clerics like Walter Map, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, were responsible for popularizing these stories about ancient Britain. In the early thirteenth century, someone envisioned Walter Map withdrawing ancient documents about the Holy Grail from a monastery and putting them in order for Henry II. This story cannot be true. But it is not the literary equivalent of an April Fools’ joke, either. As this book will show, it was a succinct and clever way of summarizing how literary material about ancient Britain made its way to numerous gifted and innovative writers in the twelfth century.
Walter Map’s posthumous lives have in the past overwhelmed the real, historical Walter Map. Thankfully, Walter’s actual career is relatively well documented for a twelfth-century author, and several good biographies have rendered clear the major phases of his life.2 The details of his early life, however, are rather more cloudy. Walter’s exact birthplace is unknown, but he seems to have been born in southwestern Herefordshire, sometime in the late 1130s.3 Walter tells us that his family was “faithful and useful” to Henry II, both before his coronation and after, and that his promotion to Henry’s court was due to their loyalty.4 (Frustratingly, he never names these members of his family.) As several scholars have suggested, and as I argue as well, Walter may have begun his education at St. Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, before moving on to Paris, where we find him studying theology with Gerard la Pucelle in 1154. Upon his return from the schools, Walter entered the service of the church when the bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Foliot (1148–63), employed him as a clerk. It is very likely that Gilbert already knew Walter, having met him as a youth when he was abbot of St. Peter’s, Gloucester (1139–48). When Gilbert Foliot became bishop of London (1163–87), Walter followed him there, and by 1173 he was a canon of St. Paul’s. By 1173 he had also entered royal service, traveling with King Henry II to Limoges. He served as a royal justice in England in 1173, and in 1179 he was one of the king’s representatives at the Third Lateran Council. He was at Saumur in 1183 when the Young King Henry died at Martel. All in all, Walter seems to have been a trusted courtier. Gerald of Wales, Walter’s colleague and friend, calls him a clericus familiarius of the king and gives two anecdotes that suggest Walter had King Henry’s ear.5 Walter proved useful at court, and he seems to have remained in Henry’s service until his death in 1189. Like so many of Henry’s courtiers, Walter may well have found himself out of favor with Richard. Nonetheless, we have no evidence that Richard or even John was particularly hostile to Walter.6 Indeed, in 1202 John even gave Walter the revenues from the archdeaconry of Brecon.7
While Walter is mostly remembered today as a witty courtier, he probably considered himself to be a servant of the church more than the king. He seems to have accumulated some benefices early on, likely in the 1170s. He held the church of Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, and Ashwell in Hertfordshire. Probably sometime in the 1180s, he became a canon of Hereford, where he would be joined by a rather illustrious group of intellectuals under Bishop William de Vere.8 From Gilbert Foliot he received a prebend in St. Paul’s. Additionally, Walter became a prominent figure in the diocese of Lincoln. By 1183–85 he was a canon, and by 1186 he became chancellor. Upon the death of Henry II, he become precentor of the cathedral. Finally, in 1196 or 1197 he moved south and became the archdeacon of Oxford, which was to be his final ecclesiastical position. Although he was nominated for two bishoprics, Hereford in 1199 and St. Davids in 1203, neither was granted to him. Like his contemporaries Peter of Blois and Gerald of Wales, he ended his career as an archdeacon; literary prowess and a quick wit only got one so far in the twelfth century. In the cursus honorum of the English church, Walter could claim a respectable, though not outstanding, career. His death in 1209 or 1210, however, proved to be the best career move he could have made.
The thirteenth century witnessed the rise of two Walter Maps. The first is the subject of this book: early in the century, probably only a little more than a decade after his death, he became associated with the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, an attribution that, if true, would have made him one of the most influential authors of medieval Europe. Equally impressive is the fact that Walter Map’s name quickly became attached to the corpus of satirical poetry widely known as Goliardic verse. This, too, first began in the thirteenth century. While it is clear that Walter did compose satiric verse—one of his poems, for example, provoked a feisty reply from an Oxford contemporary—the vast majority of these attributions are spurious.9 Thomas Wright’s 1841 volume The Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes testifies to the wide variety of poetry that attracted Walter’s name, as does Alfred Lord Tennyson’s play Becket, in which an incorrigibly satirical Walter Map is criticized for “Goliazing and Goliathizing.”10 Interestingly, this reputation seems to have developed haphazardly throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the works of several satirical poets by the name of Walter circulated together in manuscripts, which ultimately gave way to the name Walter being associated with a certain type of irreverent, satirical poem.11 Walter Map (or “Mapes” as he is often called in this tradition) became the foremost of these Walters, and many poems that were written by other Walters, as well as many that were anonymous or had the misfortune of being composed by someone not named Walter, came into his orbit. In Medieval Latin poetry, the name Walter Map became more a marker of genre than of authorship. It is hard to know what exactly Walter would have thought about this development, but it seems that the man who could craft exquisite monastic and curial satire would not have been entirely displeased with some of his more biting pseudepigrapha.
These first two alternative lives, Arthurian author and Goliardic poet, are well known to scholarship, but the least familiar development in Walter’s posthumous reputation occurred in nineteenth-century Wales, when the most famous Welsh intellectual of his day, Edward Williams (1747–1826), better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, endeavored to turn Walter into a leading figure of medieval Welsh literary culture.12 Iolo took to Walter with customary inventiveness, making him responsible for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain and a medieval Welsh agricultural treatise. So great was Walter’s pull on his imagination that he created the Llyfr Gwallter Demapys (The Book of Walter Demapys), an agricultural treatise that contained spurious—but attractively romantic—biographical information about Walter. He also brazenly claimed that Walter had translated works from Greek. Additionally, Iolo made Walter the son of a Norman knight and a Welsh princess, and he used Walter as one example of the literary precocity of the peculiar Cambro-Norman culture of the southern Welsh Marches. It took Welsh scholarship at least a century to work out Iolo’s forgeries, 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,