Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/312

 304 SHORT NOTICES April Of the former he says, ' when you find Ingulf quoted, put away for ever the book that thus stamps itself as belated and unscientific '. This is sound doctrine for England, but it would be dangerous to export it into Germany, where Ingulf may still be found cited as a genuine authority by writers of the highest reputation. I. M. Ferdinand Lot, in his Etude sur le Lancelot en Prose (Paris : Cham- pion, 1918), has given us a minute critical examination of the famous romance, on which he formulates the conclusion that the ' Corpus Lancelot- Graal ', omitting the Merlin and its continuations, which are certainly additions, is the work of a single author, possessing, under an apparent diversity, unity of conception and a fixed plan. With the literary criticism which necessarily forms the main part of M. Lot's learned review we are not here concerned. But the question of authorship is also one for historical students. M. Lot rejects altogether the theory that Walter Map was the author of any part of the prose Lancelot, and suggests that the attribution to him was due merely to the desire of the real author to give his work the prestige of a great literary name. If one accepts his conclusion that the Lancelot was composed not earlier than 1214 and perhaps not till 1222, it is of course impossible that the work in its present shape could be Map's. M. Lot further holds that the writer, who was a clerk but not a monk, was neither a Norman nor an Anglo-Norman, and claims that he was a native of Champagne partly on the ground of evidence of familiarity with Meaux, and partly because what he believes to be the oldest manuscript is in the Champenois dialect, adducing also the frequent reference to the feast of La Madeleine, which in Champagne and Brie alone was of administrative importance. One of his reasons for rejecting the theory that the writer was an Anglo-Norman is the impossi- bility of identifying many of the supposed places in England, though he accepts, apparently without hesitation, the identification of * Salebierre ' with Salisbury in spite of the fact that no Salisbury abbey ever existed. It would seem safer to recognize that the topography of the romance is purely fantastic, in which case no argument can be drawn from it. But M. Lot does not touch the possibility that Map, if he was not the author of any part of the prose Lancelot, may have had a share in the earlier poems on which it was founded. The peculiarity of the description of Map by the so-called Helie de Borron as * clerc le roi Henri ', instead of by his later title of archdeacon, and still more the positive reference by Hue of Rotelande (who like Map was a native of Herefordshire) to Map as a romance writer, are pieces of evidence not lightly to be rejected. Whether the author of the De Nugis Curialium was capable of writing a romance on a larger scale must be a matter of opinion, though for our own part we see no reason to suppose that he was not. M. Lot (p. 129) instances a curious parallelism in a passage of La Quete and the reference in the De Nugis (ed. James, p. 96) to the thieving propensities of the Welsh which had given rise to a proverb : ' iuvenis mortuus aut senex pauper.' He would accept the former as inspired by the latter, were it not for the evidence that the De Nugis was little known. Does not this very fact rather favour an opinion that the passage in La Quete is based on a lost