England for his repartees and witticisms, so
celebrated indeed that he himself came to agree to others' opinion, and
thought them worth collecting. He thus formed a very bizarre book,
without beginning or end, in which he noted, day by day,[285] all the
curious things he had heard--"ego verbum audivi"--and with greater
abundance those he had said, including a great many puns. Thus it
happens that certain chapters of his "De Nugis Curialium," a title that
the work owes to the success of John of Salisbury's, are real novels,
and have the smartness of such; others are real fabliaux, with all their
coarseness; others are scenes of comedy, with dialogues, and indications
of characters as in a play[286]; others again are anecdotes of the East,
"quoddam mirabile," told on their return by pilgrims or crusaders.

Like John of Salisbury, Map had studied in Paris, fulfilled missions to
Rome, and known Becket; but he shared neither his sympathy for France,
nor his affection for St. Bernard. In the quarrel which sprung up
between the saint and Abelard, he took the part of the latter. Though he
belonged to the Church, he is never weary of sneering at the monks, and
especially at the Cistercians; he imputes to St. Bernard abortive
miracles. "Placed," says Map, "in the presence of a corpse, Bernard
exclaimed: 'Walter, come forth!'--But Walter, as he did not hear the
voice of Jesus, so did he not listen with the ears of Lazarus, and came
not."[287] Women also are for Map the subject of constant satires; he
was the author of that famous "Dissuasio Valerii ad Rufinum de ducenda
uxore,"[288] well known to the Wife of Bath and which the Middle Ages
persistently attributed to St. Jerome. Map had asserted his authorship
and stated that he had written the dissertation "changing only our
names," assuming for himself the name of Valerius "me qui Walterus sum,"
and calling his uxorious friend Rufinus because he was red-haired. But
it was of no avail, and St. Jerome continued to be the author, in the
same way as Cornelius Nepos was credited with having written Joseph of
Exeter's "Trojan War," dedicated though it was to the archbishop of
Canterbury. Map is very strong in his advice to his red-haired friend,
who "was bent upon being married, not loved, and aspired to the fate of
Vulcan, not of Mars."

As a compensation many poems in Latin and French were attributed to Map,
of doubtful authenticity. That he wrote verses and was famous as a poet
the