Arthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods, and theoretical issues. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT The influence and significance of the legend of Arthur are fully demonstrated by the subject matter and time-span of articles here, ranging from a mid twelfth-century Latin vita of the Welsh saint Dyfrig to the early modernArthur of the Dutch. Topics addressed include the reasons for Edward III's abandonment of the Order of the Round Table; the 1368 relocation of Arthur's tomb at Glastonbury Abbey; the evidence for our knowledge of the French manuscript sources for Malory's first tale, in particular the Suite du Merlin; and the central role played by Cornwall in Malory's literary worldview. Meanwhile, a survey of the pan-European aspects of medieval Arthurian literature, considering key characters in both familiar and less familiar languages such as Old Norse and Hebrew, further outlines its popularity and impact. Elizabeth Archibald is Professor of English, University of Durham;Professor David F. Johnson teaches in the English Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee. Contributors: Dorsey Armstrong, Christopher Berard, Bart Besamusca, P.J.C. Field, Linda Gowans, Sjoerd Levelt, JulianM. Luxford, Ryan Naughton, Jessica Quinlan, Joshua Byron Smith

Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and irrepressible wit? And why, though the attribution is spurious, is it not, in some ways, implausible? Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer these and other questions in the first English-language monograph on Walter Map—and in so doing, he offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. Smith contends that it was inventive clerics like Walter, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, who popularized these stories. Smith examines Walter's only surviving work, the De nugis curialium, to demonstrate that it is not the disheveled text that scholars have imagined but rather five separate works in various stages of completion. This in turn provides new evidence to support his larger contention, that ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England. Medieval readers incorrectly envisioned Walter withdrawing ancient Latin documents about the Holy Grail from a monastery and compiling them in order to compose the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. In this detail they were wrong, Smith acknowledges, but a model of literary transmission that is not vernacular and popular but Latinate and ecclesiastical demands our serious consideration.