Walter Map and the Matter of Britain

Joshua Byron Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas.

"Impressive in its scholarship, manner of exposition, and significance, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain offers an important new interpretation of Walter Map as an author, which in turn provides a firm basis from which to develop significant arguments about the circulation of Welsh literary material beyond Wales." --- "Working fluidly across Latin and Welsh sources, Joshua Byron Smith makes clear why Walter Map is so important in his own right and also useful as a lens for exploring the growth of romance." --- "Joshua Byron Smith has presented a meticulous work that more than accomplishes his primary aim of making Walter Map and his Latin sources relevant once more." --- ""Joshua Byron Smith's engaging and thought-provoking study uses what we know of Walter's life, works and reputation to explore a range of important questions, not only about Walter himself, but about the transmission of the Matter of Britain and the relationship of Welsh, Latin and French writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries." --- "[A] thought-provoking and original book, which represents the new starting point for any future discussion of Walter Map . . . The prose is engaging, accessible and often witty, resulting in a book which is both academically rigorous and highly readable. Smith's approach is truly interdisciplinary, and his quest to identify Map's textual sources, rather than simply pointing to oral traditions (which can rarely be proved or disproved), is refreshing." --- "Walter Map and the Matter of Britain is an impressive book that draws on considerable expertise in the study of Welsh and Latin literature . . . 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." --- "Joshua Byron Smith lays hold of two slippery entities, not one, thereby meriting praise. What he offers is professional scholarship, elegantly presented by himself and his publisher. Painstaking and wide-ranging, his investigations nevertheless have clarity and even wit (a rare quality in a research volume) . . . Walter Map and the Matter of Britain deserves welcome as a groundbreaker."