SOURCE: "Underground Treasures: The Other Worlds of William Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, and Walter Map" in Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing, The University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp. 93-128.

[In the following excerpt, Otter describes Map as "an extremely self-aware narrator," blurring the lines between fiction and fact as other Medieval historians have done, but more intensely aware than they seem to have been that his "history" lacks a reliable foundation.]

… A fuller, more properly self-referential use of the Liar [paradox] is one of the major premises of Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium. Walter can be called a historian only in a rather loose sense. De Nugis Curialium, his only surviving work, is a collection of anecdotes, facetiae, and short tracts.⁶⁵ But Walter, as we have already seen, is interested in definitions of history, and his ambition in De Nugis is to be a chronicler of sorts, though primarily of modernitas, not of the past.⁶⁶ Above all, he is interested in, and perplexed by, a narrative problem that bears very much on our discussion. In playing out his philosophical concern—in a rather covert and playful fashion—Walter not only allows us to revisit many of the issues dealt with in this chapter (the Gerbert legend, "underground" episodes, intruders from other realities, and Liar jokes), but helps us contextualize them through his description of the royal court and the anomie of the courtiercleric.

De Nugis Curialium survives in a single, late manuscript, and the text shows clear signs of incompleteness, or clumsy interference, or both. Some anecdotes appear twice, sometimes with major differences; the repetitions are so clumsy that one suspects one of the versions was meant to be edited out but was not. The prologue reappears, almost verbatim, at the end of the book. (I am less sure that this is an error; the exact repetition is odd, but it makes a certain amount of sense to open and close the book with a vision of "hell.") The chapter rubrics are far from satisfactory, sometimes splitting up a story that clearly is one unit, introducing "epilogues" near the beginning of a distinctio, and generally showing little consistency or logic. In the end, what looks superficially like a meticulously systematic outline—the book is divided into five distinctiones, which are in turn subdivided into capitula—does not amount to much of an order at all. Although there are thematic connections of various kinds, it is not easy to pinpoint a consistent theme for any one distinctio, let alone to find an organizing principle for the work as a whole. Textual scholars have tried their hand at sorting out the mess. James Hinton suggested that the rubrics, as well as the arrangement of the work as we know it, is the work of a later adapter or scribe; Walter, according to Hinton, could not have left much more than unsorted loose-leaf drafts, compiled over a considerable length of time, possibly two decades. Hinton attempted—influenced, one suspects, by Canterbury Tales scholarship—to identify continuous "fragments" of connected tales that Walter himself might have ordered.⁶⁷ In his introduction to the text, C. N. L. Brooke refutes much of Hinton's conjecture, especially his views on the status of the rubrics. He concludes, quite plausibly, that the rubrics are Walter's, and that the work was substantially written in the early 1180s and cast more or less in the form that we have now. Walter, he surmises, kept updating the book for another fifteen years or so, and many of these insertions may indeed have been in loose-leaf form; these were later copied into the text, "on occasion with startling incompetence" by a redactor or scribe.⁶⁸ At any rate, he concludes, no matter to what precise extent Walter is responsible for the work's final form, it is "the untidy legacy of an untidy mind," and one cannot entirely disagree with him.⁶⁹ Even if the exact shape in which the "untidy legacy" has come down to us may be a historical accident, it fits in very well with Walter's auctorial persona and the conceit that underlies the whole work: that the royal court is hell and that Walter is therefore stuck in a "hell" characterized by disorder and restlessness.

Some of the auctorial comments create the impression that even under ideal circumstances, with no scribal interference and with Walter's full attention, the book would not have been significantly less untidy. Only a few pages into the work, Walter apologizes for his inability to stay on the subject, as so many tangentially related matters intrude themselves on him: "De curia nobis origo sermonis, et quo iam deuenit? Sic incidunt semper aliqua que licet non multum ad rem, tamen differri nolunt [Well, the court was the subject with which I started, and see the point at which I have arrived! Such topics are always liable to emerge, perhaps not much to the purpose, yet refusing to be put aside]."⁷⁰ The opening of distinctio 2 announces two tales on "Dei iudicium et misericordiam [the mercy and judgment of God]," only to dismiss them, untold, since they "non solum non delectant sed tediosa sunt [are not only not pleasant but are even tiresome]."⁷¹ This looks as if Walter has lost control of his scholastic system: the narrator does have a plan but lacks the patience or seriousness to execute it.

Walter is an extremely self-aware narrator: he constantly comments on what he is doing, and, as Shepherd observes, the work is not only a collection of stories but "also a book about stories and their status."⁷² Brooke aptly characterizes Walter's witty, colloquial, offhanded stance as "bravado." But Walter's boast does not consist in superior craftsmanship and control, in anything like Chrétien's "conjointure," but rather the lack of it. Most of his auctorial comments form a kind of large-scale, ongoing modesty topos. Distinctio 2 ends with a virtuoso disclaimer:

Conclusio premissorum

Siluam uobis et materiam, non dico fabularum sed faminum appono; cultui etenim sermonum non intendo, nec si studeam consequar. Singuli lectores appositam ruditatem exculpant, ut eorum industria bona facie prodeat in publicum. Venator uester sum: feras uobis affero, fercula faciatis.

The Conclusion of what has gone Before.

I set before you here a whole forest and timberyard, I will not say of stories, but of jottings; for I do not spend time upon the cultivation of style, nor, if I did, should I attain to it. Every reader must cut into shape the rough material that is here served up to him, that thanks to their pains it may go forth into the world with a fair outside. I am but your huntsman. I bring you the game, it is for you to make dainty dishes out of it.⁷³

Thus, in apparent confusion, the narrator turns his raw materials over to "singuli lectores," abdicating all responsibility for the final "meal."

The reason for his confusion, as he explains at length in distinctio 1—by far the most unified and streamlined of the distinctiones—is his situation as a writer at court.⁷⁴ The book begins with an "Assimilacio Curie Regis ad infernum [A Comparison of the Court with the Infernal Regions]." With the owlish mock-scholasticism that characterizes much of the book, the narrator sets out to examine the proposition that the court is hell:

Infemum aiunt locum penalem. Quid si presumem audax effectus, et temerarie dicam curiam non infernum, sed locum penarum? Hic tamen dubito an eam recte diffinerim; locus tamen uidetur esse, nec ergo infemus. Immo certe quicquid aliquid uel aliqua in se continet, locus dici potest. Sit ergo locus; uideamus si penalis.

Hell, it is said, is a penal place, and if I may presume so far, in an access of boldness, I would rashly say that the court is, not hell, but a place of punishment. Yet I doubt whether I have defined it rightly: a place it does seem to be, but it is not therefore hell. Nay, it is certain that whatever contains a thing or things in itself, is a place. Grant, then, that it is a place: let us see whether it be a penal one.⁷⁵

As if the definition of "place" had been at issue! And he concludes:

et sufficit ex hiis secundum dictas concludere raciones, quod curia locus penalis est. Non dico tamen quod infemus, quia non sequitur, sed fere tamen habet ad ipsum similitudinem quantam equi ferrum ad eque.

It is enough to conclude from the above, according to the reasons here set forth, that the court is a place of punishment. I do not however say that it is hell; that does not follow: only it is almost as much like hell as a horse's shoe is like a mare's.⁷⁶

One effect of this long and witty meditation is to establish and reinforce the secularity of the work. This may seem like an odd assessment, given the large proportion of stories and comments that deal with religious matters of all kinds. Walter is deeply concerned about the moral and spiritual degeneration of the contemporary world. He frequently expresses the view that stories can and should serve moral instruction.⁷⁷ Many stories are concerned with religious orders, with the church and ecclesiastical politics, and while Walter's stance is satirical, he seems genuinely interested in according praise where it is due and in mitigating his criticism whenever he can. Then again, the seriousness of some of these remarks is also open to question. For instance, the introduction to distinctio 2, quoted above, where moral tales are announced but immediately withdrawn, may conceal a self-deprecating joke. It begins with a moral sententia: "Victoria carnis est aduersus racionem, quod que Dei sunt minus appetit homo, que mundi maxime. Racio uero, cum tenetur, anime triumphus est; reddit que Cesaris Cesari, Deique Deo [The victory of the flesh is against reason, for man desires the things of God little and those of the world much. But reason, when it is held to, is the triumph of the soul, for it renders to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's]."⁷⁸ The rejection of tales about God's mercy as "not pleasing" and "tedious," which immediately follows this sententia, would seem to illustrate the "victory of the flesh against reason."

On the whole, then, the tone of the work is not anti-religious but cynically resigned to a world in which divine things are remote and almost impossible to attain. The long critical overview of new monastic orders—a distinctive sign of the times in twelfth-century religious life—seems to serve, among other things, to illustrate this point. Apart from his specific objections against each order (intermingled with occasional praise), Walter begins and ends the section with highly skeptical remarks on the usefulness of so many new rules: "Suffecerunt due femine mouere Dominum paucis etiam precibus ad suscitationem quadriduani; tot autem hominum et feminarum milia noui uel ueteris ordinis quem suscitant [A few prayers uttered by two women were enough to move the Lord to raise a man four days dead: but so many thousands of men and women, whether they belong to an old order or a new, whom do they avail to raise]?"⁷⁹ He continues to argue that the religious—not unlike the courtiers—are squandering their energies in hectic and multifarious pursuits and have sided with Martha rather than Mary. We can be "raised," he suggests, not by relying on the orders, but by pursuing our salvation "quisque pro se."

As if to underscore the sterility of the new orders, a series of uncharitable and sometimes off-color jokes, among other things about unsuccessful "miracles" by Bernard of Clairvaux, echoes the question, "quem suscitant?" When Bernard throws himself on a boy who has just died, trying to resurrect him, nothing happens—although, as Walter quips, "Numquam enim audiui quod aliquis monachus super puerum incubuisset, quin statim post ipsum surrexisset puer [I have heard before now of a monk throwing himself upon a boy, but always, when the monk got up, the boy promptly got up too]."⁸⁰ On another occasion, Bernard unsuccessfully tries to resurrect his recently deceased friend, the count of Nevers, by shouting, "Galtere, ueni foras."⁸¹ Not only is Bernard unable to raise the dead, but his attempts to model himself on the Lord result in utter ludicrousness.⁸² The only way the modern church seems to be able to "raise" anything or anyone is by corruption: Jocelin, bishop of Salisbury, advises his son to get a bishopric by bribing the pope: "'ipsique bursa grandi paca bonam alapam, et uacillabit quocunque uolueris.' luit ergo; percussit hic, uacillauit ille; cecidit papa, surrexit pontifex ['Give him a good smack with a heavy purse, and he will tumble which way you like.' He went: one smote; the other tumbled. Down fell the Pope, up rose the bishop]."⁸³

The subject of simony is of course a staple of ecclesiastical satire, and the Bernard jokes are prompted in part by Walter's intense dislike of Bernard of Clairvaux. But there is a note of real urgency, even despair, in Walter's comments on the godlessness of his world. Toward the end of the section on the orders, Walter complains: "et cum omnibus modis hec tempora Deum attrahere contendant, minus nobis adesse uidetur quam cum de corde simplici sine uestium aut cultus artificio petebatur [And though these times vie in drawing God to them in every fashion, he seems to be less with us than in days when he was sought out of a simple heart without peculiarity of dress or worship]."⁸⁴ All the attempts to "draw God into the world"—some of which, Walter is quite ready to admit, are perfectly sincere—are not very successful. God is now "less present" than in an earlier, simpler age.⁸⁵ The secularism one senses in Walter—and in other writers of his time—does not consist in an absence of religious concerns, or general rejection of the religious life, but in a painful sense that God and, by extension, transcendent sources of meaning are inaccessible.⁸⁶

Being thus isolated, trapped within the visible world and its shortcomings, the narrator's power to comprehend his world is of necessity limited. Imprisonment—in court, in "hell," in time—is the real theme of the prologue and, in a sense, of the entire first distinctio:

"IN tempore sum et de tempore loquor," ait Augustinus, et adiecit: "nescio quid sit tempus." Ego simili possum admiracione dicere quod in curia sum, et de curia loquor, et nescio, Deus scit, quid sit curia. Scio tamen quod curia non est tempus; temporalis quidem est, mutabilis et uaria, localis et erratica, nunquam in eodem statu permanens. In recessu meo totam agnosco, in reditu nichil aut modicum inuenio quod dereliquerim; extraneam uideo factus alienus. Eadem est curia, sed mutata sunt membra. Si descripsero curiam ut Porphirius diffinit genus, forte non menciar, ut dicam eam multitudinem quodammodo se habentem ad unum principium. Multitudo certe sumus infinita, uni soli placere contendens: et hodie sumus una multitudo, cras erimus alia; curia uero non mutatur, eadem semper est.

"IN time I exist, and of time I speak," said Augustine: and added, "What time is I know not." In a like spirit of perplexity I may say that in the court I exist and of the court I speak, and what the court is, God knows, I know not. I do know however that the court is not time; but temporal it is, changeable and various, space-bound and wandering, never continuing in one state. When I leave it, I know it perfectly: when I come back to it I find nothing or but little of what I left there: I am become a stranger to it, and it to me. The court is the same, its members are changed. I shall perhaps be within the bounds of truth if I describe it in the terms which Porphyry uses to define a genus, and call it a number of objects bearing a certain relation to one principle. We courtiers are assuredly a number, and an infinite one, and all striving to please one individual. But to-day we are one number, to-morrow we shall be a different one: yet the court is not changed; it remains always the same.⁸⁷

It is not hard to see that this can be a description of the world as well as of the court and that Walter, in offering this opening statement, is aiming at no less than a representation of the world, of reality. The passage establishes the large metaphor on which the whole book depends: the court is the world, and the book, with its scholastic-sounding division into distinctiones, undertakes to be a kind of secular summa, a more or less systematic exposition of the world from the school-trained courtier's—not the cleric's—point of view. Walter does concede that the court is not the world; but a little later, he argues, with similar seriousness, that the court is not hell—only almost indistinguishable from it. The quotation from Augustine, however lightly handled, makes the equation inevitable.⁸⁸ It outlines his theme, facetiously but also quite seriously: being inside time, one cannot describe time; being inside the court, or the world, one cannot describe the court or the world: one lacks an Archimedean point. Walter complains to his friend Galfridus, who commissioned the Nugae, that writing at court is almost impossible. The reason he gives is chiefly the restlessness and noise, which are not conducive to serious thought. But the theme of enclosure, of imprisonment, is also clearly sounded:

Et me, karissime mi Galfride, curialem … in hac si uere descripta curia religatum et ad hanc relegatum hinc philosophari iubes, qui me Tantalum huius infemi fateor? Quomodo possum propinare qui sicio? … Unde non minus a me poscis miraculum, hinc scilicet hominem ydiotam et imperitum scribere, quam si ab alterius Nabugodonosor fomace nouos pueros cantare iubeas.

And you, my dear Geoffrey, would have me courtly … ? Yet, I repeat, you bid me, me who am bound in and banished to this court which I have here truly described, me who confess myself the Tantalus of this hell, to philosophize. How can 1, who thirst, give you to drink? … You are asking an inexperienced and unskilled man to write, and to write from the court: it is to demand no less of a miracle than if you bade a fresh set of Hebrew children to sing out of the burning fiery furnace of a fresh Nebuchadnezzar.⁸⁹

Walter's repeated complaints to Galfridus are a modesty topos, but at the same time they confirm that Walter's ambitions go far beyond a loose collection of nugae. The word "philosophari" in the passage above is a signal. Walter becomes even more explicit in chapter 12, where he again complains to Galfridus that the task laid upon him is too hard. The weighty complaints—"materiam michi tam copiosam eligis, ut nullo possit opere superari, nullis equari laboribus [the subject you choose for me is so vast that no toil can master it, no effort cope with it]"—are perhaps designed to look comically disproportionate with the assignment; Galfridus, it seems, simply asked Walter to write down his best jokes and anecdotes. Walter manages, and not necessarily for comic purposes, to rephrase the assignment so as to make it seem weighty indeed: "dicta scilicet et facta que nondum littere tradita sunt, quecunque didici conspeccius habere miraculum, ut recitacio placeat et ad mores tendat instruccio [it is just the sayings and doings which have not yet been committed to writing, anything I have heard that is more than ordinarily inspiring: all this to be set down, that the reading of it may amuse, and its teaching tend to moral improvement]."⁹⁰ This is indeed a potentially limitless assignment; taken seriously, it amounts to depicting all past dicta and facta as far as one can know them—the task, in other words, that a historian faces. Not surprisingly, Walter ends this paragraph with a historian's traditional statement of intention: "Meum autem inde propositum est nichil noui cudere, nichil falsitatis inferre; sed quecunque scio ex uisu uel credo ex auditu pro uiribus explicare [My own purpose in the matter is to invent nothing new, and introduce nothing untrue, but to narrate as well as I can what, having seen, I know, or what, having heard, I believe]."⁹¹ In the chapter's final paragraph, he compares himself to Gilbert Foliot, Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter, and Baldwin, bishop of Worcester, "temporis huius philosophi" (today's philosophers). Although the comparison may be tongue-in-cheek, and although it is negative—unlike them, he does not have the leisure and tranquility to write—he is indicating in what league he intends to play. But at the same time, he has set the tone for a rather skeptical "history," since, being inside the world, he cannot know what it is.

Within Walter's world, too, any certain knowledge, especially knowledge of other people and their intentions, is nearly impossible. Immediately after the hell prologue, Walter embarks upon a lengthy defense of King Henry. Using himself as an exemplum of a paterfamilias who cannot hold his own against his household,⁹² Walter concludes that the king, whose household is so much greater, cannot be held responsible for the state of his court:

Quod in tanta tot milium et diuersorum cordium aula multus error multusque tumultus est, cum singulorum nec ipse nec alius possit nomina retinere, nedum corda agnoscere; et nemo preualent ad plenum temperare familiam cuius ignorat cogitaciones aut linguam, id est, quid eorum corda loquantur.

For in a hall (palace) that holds many thousand diverse minds there must be much error and much confusion; neither he [the King] nor any other man can remember the name of each individual, much less know their hearts; and no one can entirely control a household whose thought and speech—I mean the speech of their hearts—he knows not.⁹³

God alone is a "scrutator cordium," a searcher of hearts; the king cannot be. Humans wear various disguises, and since a higher vantage point is not possible, other humans cannot penetrate these disguises. This, incidentally, seems to be one of Walter's main objections, later in distinctio 1, to the proliferation of new orders. It adds a new set of disguises, one that is unnecessary with respect to God, "cordium scrutator …, non pannorum" (a searcher of hearts, not clothes),⁹⁴ and threatening to fellow human beings: Walter, as we have seen, is highly suspicious of the true intentions of each order.

The description of Henry's court is followed by two stories that illustrate both the hectic madness of the court and the impossibility of knowing people's intentions in such an environment. King Herla, whose "wild hunt" was well known in Wales until, it seems, the Herla court metamorphosed into Henry's court, is the innocent victim of a trick. He follows an invitation from a "pygmy" king to attend a feast at his court; he has no way of knowing that his host intends to take him and his attendants out of human time, detain them much past their natural life span, and thus force them to wander about eternally on horseback, on pain of disintegrating immediately if they alight, for under real-world conditions they have been dead for centuries.⁹⁵

The King of Portugal is even more obviously a victim of disguised intentions. This king's problem, like Henry's, is that he cannot see through the people who surround him; thus he falls victim to some courtiers' intrigue: they falsely accuse the queen and a fellow courtier of adultery, thus inciting the king to plot the courtier's murder and to kill, in a fit of rage, both his pregnant wife and the child she carries. When he later learns of the treason, he becomes profoundly depressed and never recovers. But this tale also turns into a story about the production of rumor—equally relevant to court life, one assumes, as intrigue and disguised intentions. Rumor is an inevitable, irrepressible phenomenon. Walter describes it as both a communal and an individual process: "Est autem rumor uetitus licito sermone uelocior cum erumpit, et propagata uiritim admiracio, quo priuacius dicitur, eo multiplicius pubblicatur [A forbidden tale, when it does break out, travels swifter than words which are licensed, and a wonder, passed from mouth to mouth, gains the wider publicity from the secrecy of its propagation]."⁹⁶ In an ironically "scientific" tone, he both blames and exculpates each individual who participates in the rumor mill: everybody feels perfectly within his or her rights to entrust the secret to just one other person; while this is, of course, selfish and shortsighted on the part of each individual, the process is, on the other hand, quite inevitable. Rumor is the mode of communication most suited to Walter's world. It is created and propagated by individuals; but these individuals are tied into an amorphous (yet almost personified) structure, so that the origin of all communicated information, as well as any responsibility for it, appears uncertain and diffuse.

The world of the Nugae, then, almost of necessity breeds the loose collection of short tales as its most appropriate narrative expression. There is no stability and no order.⁹⁷ There is no vantage point outside the "hell" in which the narrator is trapped. Although there is a God who is a "scrutator cordium," He is "less present" than he used to be; and to humans, "searching the heart" of others is not possible. For that very reason, there is no central authority—or, even if there is (such as a king, a head of household like Walter, or a narrator like Walter), the authority is passive and powerless, no more able to impose order on the madhouse that surrounds him than anyone else. The shapelessness of the work is thus a necessary consequence of its moral and epistemological premises; the futile attempt to impose a rigid formal organization on the material only underscores this fact. Walter, as we have seen in chapter 2, uses and plays with gaainable tere imagery; but unlike Geoffrey and other writers discussed in that chapter, he is no conqueror, no resolute appropriator of territory. He tends to feel encroached upon, overwhelmed, for instance by all the religious orders whose expansionism he fears. His sly self-portrait near the beginning of the work as the clear-sighted yet benignly incompetent paterfamilias, who knows that all his servants and all his nephews take advantage of him but is powerless to stop them, is a very telling image for his narrative stance.⁹⁸

In this context Walter's constant preoccupation with "apparitions" becomes understandable. Distinctiones 2 and 4 in particular are full of anecdotes about supernatural creatures who enter the lives of humans, usually disappear as mysteriously as they have arrived, but often leave tangible reminders of their visit to human reality. Eadricus Wilde, for instance, falls madly in love with a fairy; he abducts and rapes her, and she consents to become his wife, but on condition that he never mention her origin. Of course the condition is violated, and the fairy-wife disappears. Eadric dies of grief soon after. "Reliquit autem heredem filium suum et illius pro qua decessit, Alnodum [He left, however, an heir—his son, borne by her for whose sake he died—Alnoth]."⁹⁹ Walter provides a somewhat remarkable story about this Alnoth—a miraculous cure at St. Ethelbert's shrine; but, considering his mysterious origin, Alnoth is a model not only of Christian piety but of normality. After his cure,

cum graciarum accione donauit in perpetuam elemosinam Deo et beate Virgini et sancto regi Edelberto Ledebiriam suam, que in terris Wallie sita est, cum omnibus pertinenciis suis, que adhuc nunc in dominio episcopi Herefordensis est, diciturque triginta libras annuas facere dominis suis.

With thanksgiving [he] presented in perpetual alms to God and the Blessed Virgin and St. Ethelbert the King, his manor of Lydbury, which is in the Welsh country, with all its appurtenances, and it is to this day in the lordship of the bishop of Hereford, and is said to yield its lord thirty pounds a year.¹⁰⁰

This is an astonishingly down-to-earth ending for a fairy tale, with its remarkable geographic precision and exact money amount. Walter then goes on to remark on the oddity of the story: "Audiuimus demones incubos et succubos, et concubitus eorum periculosos; heredes autem eorum aut sobolem felici fine beatam in antiquis hystoriis aut raro aut numquam legimus [We have heard of demons that are incubi and succubi, and of the dangers of unions with them; but rarely or never do we read in the old stories of heirs or offspring of them, who end their days prosperously]."¹⁰¹ The next short chapter is devoted entirely to the question of what to make of such real children of imaginary parents (or real donations by imaginary donors), and Walter cannot solve the problem any more than William of Newburgh can:

A fantasia, quod est aparicio transiens, dicitur fantasma; ille enim aparencie quas aliquibus interdum demones per se faciunt a Deo prius accepta licencia, aut innocenter transeunt aut nocenter, secundum quod Dominus inducens eas aut conseruat aut deserit et temptari permittit. Et quid de his fantasticis dicendum casibus, qui manent et bona se successione perpetuant, ut hic Alnodi et ille Britonum de quo superius, in quo dicitur miles quidam uxorem suam sepelisse reuera mortuam, et a corea redibuisse raptam, et postmodum ex ea filios et nepotes suscepisse, et perdurare sobolem in diem istum, et eos qui traxerunt inde originem in multitudinem factos, qui omnes ideo "Filii mortue" dicuntur?

Fantasma is derived from fantasia, i.e. a passing apparition, for the appearances which occasionally devils make to some by their own power (first receiving leave of God), pass by with or without doing harm, according as the lord who brings them either protects or forsakes us or allows us to be tempted. But what are we to say of those cases of "fantasy" which endure and propagate themselves in a good succession, as this of Alnoth and the other narrative of the Britains [sic] told above, in which a knight is said to have buried his wife, who was really dead, and to have recovered her by snatching her out of a dance, and after that to have got sons and grandsons by her, and that the line lasts to this day, and those who come of it have grown to a great number and are in consequence called "sons of the dead mother."¹⁰²

The only answer Walter can offer is that God is to be praised in all his works, and such phenomena elude our understanding.

Oldoni rightly sees these tales of "personaggi senz'autore" as central to Walter's world picture: according to him, Walter's world is vulnerable to irruptions, usually harmful, from other realities, since it is tempted to curiositas, to reliance on secular intelligence, to a kind of intellectual gluttony.¹⁰³ Yet I do not think that Walter is presenting a morally weighted alternative between a religious worldview and secular intellectualism. His problem seems to be primarily epistemological. From Walter's perspective—imprisoned in "hell"—the origin and reality of anything around him cannot be judged; hence the constant irruption of "characters without author," some of which, as he remarks, are harmless, others quife dangerous. From Walter's perspective, all reality is "authorless," since he cannot see beyond the confines of his hell, world, or time. The brief discussion of "fantasmata" he offers extends this image to history as well: some realities around us, he suggests, come at the end of a long lineage of normal generation and tradition; but their origin, back in time, is "fantastic." Even if we can trace back people like the "sons of the dead woman" for several respectable generations, this does not ultimately tell us anything about their real status.¹⁰⁴

Ultimately, Walter refuses to sort out these confusing stories, as he says at the end of distinctio 2: he will assemble stories but not shape, order, or explain them. Nostra modernitas is a jumble of things, and the narrator of De Nugis does not recommend himself as the man to impose order on it. As a matter of fact, he feels similarly trapped in modernitas as he does in the court. This is the serious point to his repeated complaint that as a modern author, he will not be read: you must be dead to be an auctoritas, but, as Walter says, he does not intend to be dead just yet.¹⁰⁵ He blames this dilemma partly on the stupidity of the reading public, but it is also a problem of perspective, as his other musings on modernitas suggest: at one point, he offers the insight that as our past was once somebody's modernitas, our modernitas will have the status of auctoritas to another age.

Where the other writers are explorers and conquerors, Walter more or less passively waits for stories to come his way. To mix Walter's and William of Malmesbury's metaphors, Walter is inside the cave already; the hell around him is peopled with stories right from the start, which he presents in brief vignettes: "De Tantalo," "De Charo," "De Yxione."¹⁰⁶ What he lacks is a standpoint outside the stories from which to survey them. His advantage, and his problem, is his complete awareness of the situation: like his alter ego the paterfamilias, he is clear-sighted, sees through everybody's deception, but is powerless to do anything about it.

This turns Walter's persona into a cynic. He uses a guarded, modified Liar paradox throughout, which makes him out not only a liar, but also a thief, a credulous fool, and a violent man.¹⁰⁷ "Map," the name he uses for himself throughout the book, is a nickname for a Welshman; so every Welsh joke—of which there are many—is partly on him. Clearly this was Thomas Becket's point when he asked Walter whether a Welshman can be trusted¹⁰⁸ (although Walter, in his account of the episode, does not unequivocally identify himself as a Welshman, but as "marchio … Walensibus," i.e., a "Marcher," someone who dwells in the border region). On that occasion, Walter's reply, delivered as a story, is essentially that it depends on whether you are stronger than the Welshman; if you are armed and he is not, everything is fine; if he gets a chance to do harm ("potestatem nocendi"), he will do so. This fits the discussion of Welsh-English relations in the preceding chapter, but it also fits Walter, a man famous for clever put-downs; perhaps Becket was hoping to hear one. (Some of the unpleasant witticisms about Cistercian miracles, quoted above, are presented as parts of conversations Map recalls.) The conversation with Becket comes in the middle of a string of stories about Welsh thieves. In the previous chapter, these is a story of a Welsh custom that requires young men to go out and steal something on New Year's day as a sign of ingenuity and valor; stories, or information, are explicitly among the things one can "steal" on that occasion: young men go out "uel in predam, uel in furta, uel saltem in audicionem [to raid, to steal, or at least to listen]," and the young man in this particular anecdote chooses the last.¹⁰⁹ At the end of this distinctio, Walter describes himself as a hunter of stories; a thief of stories is not so far off: "audicio" is what he does—all his stories come from oral sources, as he frequently emphasizes; and for him, as for the young thief in this story, or for Cheueslin the Master Thief (a story told just after the conversation between Walter and Thomas Becket),"¹¹⁰ showing his skill and proving his superior wit is at least part of the point.

Paradoxically, although Walter attempts to raise his nugae to the authoritative status of a philosophy or history of the modern world, his whole scheme is always on the verge of imploding. While the writers with underground stories temporarily throw into question their ability to truly know and depict reality, Walter makes it clear from the outset that he has no authority: not the authority of texts, for despite his fondness for quotations and allusions, most of his material is oral, "not previously committed to writing";¹¹¹ not the authority of allegorizing religious truth, for he cuts off that connection by placing himself in hell and by constantly ironizing everything he touches; not even, in his case, the authority of the competent vernacular author, in the manner of Chrétien. The gestures toward the liar paradox are especially appropriate for Walter. The Liar is, after all, a paradox of inescapable self-inclusion and consequent dubious logical status of the statement. ("I, a Cretan—or Welshman—assert that all Cretans/Welshmen are liars. Being one myself, I have to include myself in that statement. But can I then meaningfully make such an assertion?") For Walter, the paradox takes the form "In tempore sum, et nescio quid sit tempus." There really is no "backing" to his stories, or the collection as a whole. He claims to have invented nothing, but he also makes it impossible for us to conceive of any standard by which we could verify this, or by which the claim would even make sense.¹¹²

Walter Map thus not only exemplifies but also reflects on the detached, ironic, disenchanted intellectual stance that he sees as characteristic of modernitas.…

Notes

…⁶⁵ On Walter and his work, see Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 88-93.

⁶⁶ Cf. Oldoni 3:194: "II De Nugis oltre a storie ed irregolari segmentari novellistici, riesce a costruire una sua logica anche storiografica, nata proprio dalla somma di quest'universo cosí polivalente e multiespressivo: finche tutto si pone come una globale interpretazione della realta, delle cose e della storia."

⁶⁷ Hinton, "Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium." See also Seibt, "Über den Plan der Schrift De Nugis Curialium."

⁶⁸ Introduction to De Nugis Curialium, xxxii.

⁶⁹ Ibid., xxx.

⁷⁰De Nugis Curialium, 6-7.

⁷¹ Ibid., 132-33.

⁷² Shepherd, "The Emancipation of Story," 53.

⁷³De Nugis Curialium, 208-9.

⁷⁴ Hinton speculates that distinction 1, chapters 1-12, constitute one "fragment" ("Walter Map' s De Nugis Curialium," 94-99).

⁷⁵De Nugis Curialium, 8-9.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 14-17.

⁷⁷ For example, ibid., 127-29.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 132-33.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 48-49.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 80-81.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Walter's satiric discussion of the new orders is especially interesting in light of Bynum's essay, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?" Walter is mocking both the idea of a "corporate identity," the search for a "life" or "order" rather than individualism, and the notion of modeling oneself on Christ, both of which Bynum isolates as essential ingredients in the twelfth-century sense of self. On both subjects, sometimes with close parallels to Walter, see also Walter's contemporary and fellow satirist Nigellus Wireker, in his Speculum Stultorum.

⁸³De Nugis Curialium, 68-69.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 116-17.

⁸⁵ Cf. Gerald of Wales's introduction to his Itinerarium Kambriae (see chap. 4 below).

⁸⁶ Cf. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, 314-15, on John of Salisbury's scepticism.

⁸⁷De Nugis Curialium, 2-3.

⁸⁸ An approximate quotation—presumably from memory—of Confessiones XI. 14.

⁸⁹De Nugis Curialium, 24-25. Cf. Peter of Blois, The Later Letters, 31.

⁹⁰De Nugis Curialium, 36-37.

⁹¹ Ibid.

⁹² Ibid., 16-25.

⁹³ Ibid., 24-25.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 116-17.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 26-31. On time and the Herla story, see also Schmitt, "Temps, folklore et politique."

⁹⁶De Nugis Curialium, 35-36

⁹⁷ Oldoni 3:223: "Walter Map, accettando di non normalizzare la storia, persuaso che serva piú accettare mille verità caduche e parziali piuttosto che predicare una sola verità che non si manifesta mai …"

⁹⁸De Nugis Curialium, 17-25—under the heading "De germinibus noctis" (Of the Creatures of the Night).

⁹⁹ Ibid., 158-59.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² Ibid., 160-61.

¹⁰³ In Oldoni's reading, this is what Walter's version of Gerbert stands for. Walter's Gerbert story (350-63) has no underground adventures; it has nothing in common with William of Malmesbury's version except for the ending, Gerbert's death in "Jerusalem." The main story, in Walter, is an analogue of Marie de France's "Lan-val": Gerbert, a brilliant but poor student, enters into a pact with an endlessly munificent and generous fairy named Meridiana, receiving from her not only sexual favors and money, but also learning and success. His relationship with her remains his guilty secret while he becomes bishop, then pope; he repents just in time to escape a terrible punishment. This story helps Oldoni to link the theme of "fantaticae appariciones" with other antifeminist passages in De Nugis Curialium (notably the long misogynist tract "Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum"): "fantasmata," like women, tempt, emasculate, and sometimes kill men. On the other hand, the name of Gerbert's devil, "Meridiana," ties her to the notion of the "meridianum daemonem," which is associated with "acedia," the sin and spiritual malaise to which intellectuals are most susceptible. Finally, we can make the equation "sapere-Diavolo," knowledge and Devil. This is the notion that, according to Oldoni, all versions of the Gerbert legend grapple with in one way or another (Oldoni 3:200-241).

¹⁰⁴ This is in striking contrast with the Melusina legend, with which Walter's stories have rightly been compared: tracing the family's genealogy back to the fairy Melusina seems to enhance its prestige, rather than inspire uneasiness. See Le Goff, "Melusina: Mother and Pioneer"; Lecouteux, Mélusine et le chevalier au cygne, 24-25 and 28; Lundt, Melusine und Merlin im Mittelalter, 71-83.

¹⁰⁵De Nugis Curialium, 36-37.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 8-11. Some of these chapters are missing at the beginning but supplied in the final recapitulacio, 498-513.

¹⁰⁷ That the Welsh had a reputation for lying is also suggested by several of Gerald of Wales's anecdotes, discussed in the next chapter. See also the advice given to Peter of Leia, a Norman bishop of St. David's, by one of his advisers: "Sire, ne creez vus unques un sul de cel pais ne clerc ne lai [Sir, don't you ever believe anyone from that country, cleric or layman]" (Gerald of Wales, Opera Omnia 1:223; quoted in Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis, 90; my translation). On Gerald of Wales's opinion that the Welsh are naturally mendacious, see Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 35-36.

¹⁰⁸De Nugis Curialium, 194-95.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 188-89.

^1l0 Ibid., 199-200.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 36-37.

¹¹² There are many striking similarities between Walter's work and certain Elizabethan satirists, especially Thomas Nashe, writing at what is perhaps a rather similar historical moment. See Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, esp. 45-54, 65, 74. I am grateful to Jonathan Crewe for drawing my attention to this parallel.…