The development of the Matter of Britain in Latin literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has seen a number of notable treatments in the last few years, positioning authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, and Walter Map as privileged mediators of Welsh literary material and themes to audiences in England. Joshua Byron Smith's Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, the first book-length study on Walter Map, presents a significant contribution to this conversation. It is of significance not least in its assessment of the double reputation of Walter as the author of De nugis curialium and the putative author of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Although the latter possibility is certainly understood to be spurious, Smith observes its fundamental plausibility to early readers of French romance: Walter is precisely the type of author whom one would expect to be associated with Arthuriana.
Following the statement of his thesis in chapter 1, framed as an overview of the relationship between “Wales and romance” (11–36), Smith's analysis begins in earnest in chapters 2 and 3, with a detailed study of the text of De nugis as it appears in the fourteenth-century Bodleian Library, Oxford, Bodley MS 851, the only manuscript in which De nugis survives. The Bodley text, with its problematic readings (not least the apparent integration of incongruous, and often inaccurate, glosses into the main text), is reconceptualized as an attempt, after Walter's own day, to impose some manner of unity on “what might best be understood as five separate works in various stages of completion” (39). Smith draws our attention to a series of revisions and rewritings, which might tell us much not only about Walter's literary practice, but the fundamental literariness of his work. This context is brought to bear on analysis of Walter's tale of the British king Herla, in chapter 4, which exists in both a long and a short form in Bodley 851, suggestive of a revision process. In this episode, Smith notes, Walter manufactured his own British legend, a variation on the translatio imperii of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1136), featuring a hero whose name was not Welsh yet may—to English eyes—have looked plausibly so (98). Walter's entire exercise here might be understood much like the false attribution of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle—an exercise in plausibility. Smith incorporates an interesting political reading of Walter's revisions to the tale of Herla, beyond its largely well commented upon satirical function. More might have been said here in relation to the tale's potential as a response to perceived ambitions for Welsh re-conquest, which is touched on briefly, although certainly this is not Smith's principal interest in his analysis.
In the consideration of Walter's De nugis at an intersection between Welsh historical-literary materials and English literary culture, it is cheering to see that unthinking assumptions concerning the Welshness of Walter's sources in his British-set tales are avoided. All too often, as Smith observes, certain literary themes (not least those concerned with the supernatural) are designated as markers of Celtic source traditions (99). Yet certainly, as Smith explores in chapter 5, there were genuine elements of Welsh—or rather Latin-Welsh—material known to Walter, circulating in a cross-border clerical culture, in which we might situate Gerald of Wales also. The Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter's in Gloucester presented a particular site of accretion of Welsh material during the twelfth century. Smith provides examples of the likely reception of Welsh vitae at the house, although he proceeds with due caution as to the precise nature of the circulation of texts through ecclesiastical networks in the southern Welsh March during this period. Of particular interest is his treatment of Walter's fairy narrative of Wastinus Wastiniauc, often understood as a literary reworking of a Welsh tale in oral circulation. Building on earlier scholarship by Brynley Roberts, Smith notes the place of personal names, and naming strategies, in the anecdote in common with Welsh-Latin vitae, suggestive of Walter's consultation of written sources (131–39)—although, quite rightly, the author is wary of any blanket assertions about the source of the tale (if indeed there is one).
The author's conclusions emphasize the importance of Latin literary transmission in the development of the Matter of Britain—a departure from a problematic thesis that, as Smith notes, has proven particularly enduring: of Breton minstrels as the primary transmitters of British material into England and France. Smith sketches out this broader context in chapter 6, providing a succinct expression of a very strong hypothesis in scholarship on Marcher writers of this period: a direct connection between Latin authors, with Welsh affinities, and the development of the Matter of Britain during the twelfth century. In this respect, Smith's conclusions are certainly not novel; as he writes, “To suggest that the educated classes of two neighbouring yet linguistically distinct medieval peoples were able to exchange historical, literary and legal material through the medium of Latin is on par with suggesting that medieval people may have been familiar with cattle” (158). Rather, his research adds further color to an emerging picture of literary transmission during this period, explored with scholarly rigor.
Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is an impressive book that draws on considerable expertise in the study of Welsh and Latin literature. Its concluding assessment of the vogue for unthinking Celtic-source hunting in scholarship produced in the context of English literature departments is perhaps a little sweeping. Accordingly, there are some striking absences from the bibliography—not least, the collaborative and more nuanced works on insular multilingualism that have appeared in the past few years (we might think of the collections edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler; Judith A. Jefferson and Ad Putter; and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, for starters). Indeed, Smith's work stands in an interesting dialogue with scholarship in this area—for certainly, he makes a strong claim for the value of high medieval Latin literature as a source for study in the historical dissemination of Welsh materials in England.
