Political Prodigies: Incubi and Succubi in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium and Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Cambriae

This article discusses two late twelfth-century accounts of incubi and succubi localized in Norman-occupied Wales, in the writings of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales. These are understood as markers of a Welsh Galfridian reception history, preserving elements of Welsh material oppositional to Norman occupation drawing the incubus narrative of Book vi of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae in line with contemporary Welsh political prophecy.