PORTRAITS OF ROYALTIES IN THE DE NUGIS CURIALUM OF WALTER MAP. A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT CHIVALRIC ROYALTY AND POLITICAL FACTIONS AT THE PLANTAGENET COURT.

During the XIIth century the court of Henry II had a leading role in the construction of the idea of courtli- ness and it was a propitious laboratory for the weapon of the courtiers: the word. A peculiarity of the cultural pro- duction at the Plantagenet court was the use of literature to translate, fight or explain, in literary terms, the conflicts of the ‘Angevin Empire’. A lot of texts are used as medium for other messagesthat are hidden under the fine courtly language. The article will analyse a particu- lar case of study: the De nugis curiali- um of Walter Map. An atypical text whose author was a venomous and typ- ical courtier. His work is a heterogene- ous anthology, written in a fine Latin, which concerns all the themes of the XIIth century world of the courts. Wal- ter Map tells us about the most incredi- ble stories with the same facility used to describe events in which he was in- volved himself. Among fairy tales, knights, tournaments and venomous satires we can catch also the figures of a lot of kings and queens: images which talk about the capacity of ruling, and about personal attitudes. The reading of those stories needs bearing in mind the double- nature of the courtly texts, the literary one and the political one, strictly con- nected with the aspiration of the patron and the writer. The description of royal- ty in the work of Walter Map asks directly to his own needs and the ones of the Angevin rulers, painting portraits of good and bad kings, real and fantastic ones. The way used by the author to describe Henry II, Luis VII and Henry the Young King, could reveal the ideas of the author, of this patron or, better, which idea of royalties and kings they wanted to propagate.