SOURCE: "Walter Map and Gerald of Wales," Medium Aevum, Vol. XLVII, No. 1, 1978, pp. 6-21.

In the following essay, Thorpe examines the connections between Map and Gerald of Wales (also known as Giraldus Cambrensis) and speculates on the extent to which the prolific Gerald might have been influenced by the apparently unprolific Map.

When one considers how often his name has appeared in manuscripts and in print, and what remarkable attributions have been made to him, it is strange how little we really know about Walter Map as a writer. All that we seem to have from his pen is the so-called De Nugis Curialium, an interesting work, but incomplete, uneven, without shape or order, and existing in one copy only, MS. Bodleian Library, Oxford, 851, which was carelessly transcribed and which dates from as late as the second half of the fourteenth century.¹ Of this unfinished book Walter Map...