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...