LO SPECCHIO DEL CAVALIERE L’USO DEL FANTASTICO PER RAPPRESENTARE I LATI OSCURI DEI MILITES NEL DE NUGIS CURIALIUM DI WALTER MAP

Many years have passed since George Duby in his Male Moyen Age showed the strict connection between the rise of the knighthood as a new social group, the praxis of being a hedge knight, and the growing of the courtly literature. The knighthood expressed his ambitions through the use of the literary fiction. However the courts during the ‘XII century Renaissance’ were the battlefields of a fight for the cultural supremacy. On one side the chivalry, his new rules and values, on the other the clergy, depositary of the ecclesiastical tradition whose only power was to control and use the knowledge and to have the possession of the culture. This article has the purpose to investigate a particular way to fight this battle: using the topos of the ‘chivalric adventure’ against the chivalric ideas. The analysis will use an atypical text: the De nugis curialium (Courtier’s trifles) of Walter Map. The De nugis curialium was written at the court of Henry II Plantegenet, one of the most influential courts of his age, in which the presence and the opposition between clergy and chivalry was strong as never before. Presented as an entertainment for the court the De nugis curialium is not just this. The De nugis curialium is a deep specimen of courtly writing; under its words there are messages that were pointing directly to the ears of the court. The article will analyse the way in which Walter Map, a proud clergyman, was expressing the same queues against the knights as many of his contemporaries did (Peter of Blois Blois, John of Salisbury) but hiding it under the cover of the literature. The analysis of some tales, which are build up like a classical ‘chivalric adventure’, wants to demonstrate that Walter Map’s goal was to subvert the ‘chivalric propaganda’ using its same instruments. This tales, populated by fairies, demons and ghosts, show the ‘dark side’ of the knights, maybe the one more close to reality, for sure the one against the clergy were fighting.