Map, Walter

(ca. 1140–ca. 1210)

    Walter Map was a courtier and writer, a favorite in the English court of HENRY II, whose best-known work, De nugis curialium (Courtiers’ Trifles), is a witty, entertaining, and often satirical collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, observations, fairy stories, and gossip written in Latin prose. Map, whose road to preferment was guaranteed by his religious education, ended his career as the archdeacon of Oxford.

   Map was born in Wales and at the age of 14 went to Paris to study with Gerard Pucelle, an expert on canon law who was later bishop of Coventry.Map returned to England in 1162, and became attached to Henry II’s court. His wit and intelligence apparently made him a favorite of the king,with whom he traveled on occasion and served for a time as an itinerant justice.He was also selected clerk of the king’s household, an appointment that suggests he had received holy orders, or was about to do so. In 1179, Map attended the Third Lateran Council in Rome as the king’s representative. Here he was specifically appointed to dispute with the Waldensians, a recently established proto-Protestant heretical sect that denied the value of intercession by saints or the Virgin, denied the existence of purgatory, and denied all sacraments but baptism and the Eucharist. He continued to receive royal preferments and by 1186 had been made chancellor of Lincoln. In 1197, he was named archdeacon of Oxford. In about 1210, his friend and fellow Welshman GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS speaks of him as having passed away sometime earlier.

   De nugis, composed probably between 1181 and 1192, is the only text attributed with certainty to Map. It is filled with a fascinating variety of material. Its first book laments the corruption in orders like the Carthusians, the Templars, and the Hospitallers, but particularly the Cistercians, or White Monks, whom Map seems to have especially abhorred. Map also attacks heretics, such as the Waldensians he had previously disputed at Rome. Book 2 of De nugis includes a number of fairy stories and other Welsh anecdotes, including a close analogue of the romance of SIR ORFEO, concerning a man who rescues his wife from death when he finds her in the company of a fairy host. The third book contains a number of romantic stories, while the fourth, amid more tales, includes a famous text usually called “The Epistle of Valerius to Ruffinus.” This treatise, often erroneously attributed to St. JEROME or St. AUGUSTINE, was popular in the later Middle Ages and was widely circulated independently in manuscript form.Nicholas TRIVET, the English Dominican, even wrote his own commentary on it in the 14th century. Later, CHAUCER refers to the text in the prologue to The WIFE OF BATH’S TALE. The epistle, descried by the Wife of Bath as an antifeminist tract, condemns men who seek pleasure with women rather than wisdom.Map’s fifth book provides a history of the Anglo-Norman court. Map was highly regarded in the later medieval period, and was for a long time believed to be the author of most of the satiric extant GOLIARDIC VERSE, and was as well the purported author of a Latin original of the prose Lancelot, part of the vast French VULGATE CYCLE of Arthurian ROMANCE. Neither of these attributions is accepted any longer by modern scholars. Even so, Map’s De nugis provides a multivalent picture of an intelligent man with broad and varied interests, and with certain bitter enmities: Giraldus Cambrensis claims that when Map took the oath as king’s justice, he swore to dispense justice fairly to all men except Jews and Cistercians, whom Map claimed were just to no one themselves.

   Bibliography

   ■ Hanna, Ralph, III, and Traugott Lawlor. Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves. Using materials collected by Karl Young and Robert A. Pratt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

   ■ James, M. R., trans. De Nugis Curialium: Courtier’s Trifles. Revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

   ■ Levine, Robert. “How to Read Walter Map,”Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 23 (1988): 91–105.