SOURCE: "The Pilgrim as Curious Traveler: Mandeville's Travels," in Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 130-57.

[In the following excerpt, Zacher presents an overview of Mandeville's Travels, focusing on Mandeville's treatment of the Holy Land, and argues that the work is worth interest because of "its peculiar attitude toward pilgimage and exploration, its intricate sturcture, and its sophisticated point of view. "]

Mandeville's Travels was internationally popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (over 250 manuscript versions of it survive): it influenced contemporary writers like Chaucer and the Gawain-poet,¹ and Columbus, among other explorers, turned to it for advice before making his ocean voyages.² In our time, however, it is largely unread and seldom discussed by medievalists. There may be some excuse for this neglect. The complicated manuscript tradition of the Travels has long demanded most of the attention scholars have given the work (there are, for example, three modern editions of the Cotton MS English version alone, which dates from about 1400³). Debate about the provenance of the book has led to a concentration on the date of composition, the author's still-uncertain identity and nationality, and his reading and sources.⁴ New discoveries about these matters will surely be made, but more attention should begin to be given to the Travels as imaginative literature and to its contribution toward modern understanding of certain intellectual concerns of its time. Except for an occasional remark in commentaries to editions and in some portions of two book-length studies of the work, there has been little discussion of the literary worth of the Travels.⁵ Readers have long been fascinated by its revelations about Asia, but the book—a "romance of travel," in Josephine Bennett's view⁶—ought to interest us also because of its peculiar attitude toward pilgrimage and exploration, its intricate structure, and its sophisticated point of view. And what should intrigue us above all is the insistent presence of a narrator who interests us in him and his travel book because he himself is so curiously interested in the world. The mind of its author is at once naive, inquisitive, ironic, self-deprecating, and serious; it is a mind that intelligently speculates about the differing mores and values of late medieval Christian and pagan cultures. Approaching the book with this in mind at least would enable us to shunt aside what seems an irrelevant issue: the longstanding assertion of historians, geographers, and textual scholars that the work is an unoriginal mixture of half-truths mostly borrowed from other sources, a fraud, a hoax.⁷ These, in substance, are the opinions Mandeville's readers have untiringly rendered—and the application of a term like "fraud" to both the identity claimed by the author and the veracity of what he reports has accounted for confusion and harshness and misunderstanding in many of these judgments.

Mandeville's Travels is in part the record of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but it is in greater measure the account of a curious man's exploration of the earth. And the book is not simply a diary-like summary of successive experiences, composed seriatim (as, for example, Marco Polo's), but a consciously arranged sequence of adventures. Structurally, the book breaks into two parts, and these reflect the differing motivations of the traveler.⁸ The first part recounts the pilgrimage routes through the known world from Europe to Palestine; the second and slightly longer part describes the marvels of the unknown world that stretches beyond Jerusalem to the lands of Prester John, the Great Chan of China, and the Terrestrial Paradise. The changing nature of Mandeville's itinerary corresponds to (and indeed demonstrates) the author's actual motives for traveling. In the linear narrative of the book, the devout pilgrim metamorphoses into the wide-eyed curious wanderer. But at the same time, in a number of other ways Mandeville shows himself to us, from the moment of departure from "the west syde of the world," as an incorrigible curiosus, made so in part by the thirty-four years he spent "longe tyme ouer the see." Furthermore, Mandeville's book reveals that for him, as for humanists like de Bury, curiositas was rather a happy condition of mind than a moral fault. Unlike the Chaucer of the Tales, Mandeville viewed pilgrimage not as an ideal spiritual practice become desiccated but as only one form of travel, which can and must be supplemented by a further, worldly kind of travel. I wish to show that in the Travels we are witnessing, as it were in a compressed form, the shifting motivations that distinguish the medieval pilgrim from the Renaissance voyager. Within this one book pilgrim piety is replaced by confessed curiosity. And that curiosity leads Mandeville to a perception of the cultural and religious diversity of the world—a world gradually seen to be larger, stranger, and more deserving of investigation, the world that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries thinkers and travelers (often inspired by this book) began to uncover.⁹

Mandeville's Prologue explains why Christians should go to the Holy Land and why he has chosen to describe this pilgrimage route. Christians journey to the "Lond of Promyssioun" because Christ selected it over all other lands inasmuch as it is "the herte and the myddes of all the world" (1).¹⁰ Aristotle had said "The vertue of thinges is in the myddes," but common sense also teaches that anyone wishing to make public an announcement "wil make it to ben cryed and pronounced in the myddel place of a town," as Christ wished his Word to become known "euenly to alle the parties of the world" (2).¹¹ Throughout the first portion of the Travels, as he moves toward Jerusalem, Mandeville often reminds us that Christ's home is the focal point of every pilgrim's journey, and once in the city he will allude to the exegetical and mystical beliefs that pictured Jerusalem as the navel of the world. All good Christians also need to make the "holy viage" to "chacen out alle the mysbeleeuynge men" (2). Earlier itineraria to the Moslem-beseiged Holy Land normally began with this call to crusade, and Mandeville, though somewhat less vigorously, follows suit.¹² Aziz Atiya would have us understand Mandeville's Travels as "paramountly a work of propaganda," an exhortation to the nobility to put aside vice and unite to repel the Saracens.¹³ However, unlike contemporary crusade propagandists, Mandeville is eager to describe the wonders of the East, and he displays little serious interest in the military stance of the enemy aside from estimating Saracen fighting strength (26). He does worry that pride, covetousness, and envy have made fourteenth-century European lords "more besy for to disherite here neyghbores more than for to chalenge or to conquere here right heritage" (2-3). The immorality of a lax nobility—a perennial topic with homilists of the time—is a recurrent theme in the Travels, and it may partly account for the frequent inclusion of Mandeville's book in collections of moral treatises.¹⁴

But having made the standard plea for lords and "comoun peple" to go and disperse the heathens, Mandeville turns to his real motives for writing the book. He writes, he says, for the "many men" who "desiren for to here speke of the Holy Lond" but have been deprived of news because there has been for a "longe tyme … no generalle passage ne vyage ouer the see" (3); he also, of course, is writing a guidebook for pilgrims planning to visit the region. In between these brief statements of intention, Mandeville tells us his name, says he was born in England at St. Albans, and notes that he went to sea in 1322. His credentials as a world traveler are more imposing than Chaucer's Knight's. He has journeyed through "Turkye, Ermonye the Litylle and the Grete, thorgh Tartarye, Percye, Surrye, Arabye, Egypt the High and the Lowe, thorgh Lybye, Caldee, and a gret partie of Ethiope, thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the Lasse and the More a gret partie, and thorghout many othere iles that ben abouten Inde." Clearly he is going to give us more than a guide to the Holy Land. His assumed audience includes all curiosi waiting to be transported from the known to the unknown world. Mandeville wants us to believe he is no vicarious encyclopedist; he everywhere makes us feel he has been there, seen it all, and returned home to take us back with him; and he has taken pains to convince us that what follows are his own observations, his own experiences. Indeed, not until the last chapter is there any explicit admission that he has also used "informacoun of men that knewen of thinges that I had not seen myself" (228). With a further reminder that he has traveled East "often tymes," much as Chaucer's Knight had "riden, no man ferre, / As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse," Mandeville calls upon other competent authorities to correct or add to his book and begins "To teche you the weye out of Englond to Constantynoble."

Through chapters I-XIV Mandeville sketches the pilgrimage routes on a map that extends from "the west syde of the world"—specifically England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Norway—to Palestine. He describes not the whole network of pilgrimage roads but only the "most princypalle stedes," because to name them all would (as he has occasion to say so often during the book) "make to long a tale" (5); and, besides, for Christians "the weye is comoun and it is knowen of many nacyouns" (39). Since the book is meant to entertain curious readers who like "to here speke of straunge thinges of dyuerse contreyes" (15) as much as to instruct potential pilgrims, these chapters offer a mixture of local history, mileage estimates (given in terms of "iourneyes"), and descriptions of cities, shrines, and relics. This initial decision to write for two audiences, the pilgrim and the expectant armchair reader, proved to be Mandeville's guarantee of popular success. As an incessant curiosus he was naturally equipped for the task.

His first pause along the road to Jerusalem is in Constantinople at Saint Sophia, "the most fayr chirche and the most noble of alle the world" (6). In front of the church stood a gold statue of Emperor Justinian on horseback; a round gold apple he once held in his hand, Mandeville observes, "is fallen out therof. And men seyn there that it is a tokene that the emperour hath ylost a gret partie of his londes and of his lordschipes.… This appulle betokeneth the lordschipe that he hadde ouer alle the world that is round." Bennett says "symbolism required that it should have fallen out," agreeing with other commentators that the apple, in Mandeville's time, was still in place, not fallen.¹⁵ Mandeville mentions the statue, of course, because it was a pilgrims' landmark and because the moral sentence echoes what he says elsewhere about lords who grow too fond of the world. He understood the fallen apple as a sign of Justinian's lost empire; and the world where fallen man has lived since Adam "ete the appulle" (8) was commonly enough symbolized by that fruit in the late Middle Ages.¹⁶ But it is clear Mandeville is also very much interested in the roundness of the apple; the object is not only a symbol but also the first of a series of spherical images he will discover in surveying the religious geography of the Christ-centered pilgrim world that wheels about Jerusalem. In chapter X he describes in detail the various circular structures in and around the city lying in the middle of the world. And he finds in Egypt a temple "made round after the schappe of the temple of Ierusalem" (34); the apple tree of Adam (35), whose seed produced the tree later used to make Christ's cross (8)¹⁷; and a fruit (in actuality the banana) the Egyptians call the apple of Paradise, which, when cut open, reveals in its core "the figure of the holy cros of oure lord Ihesu" (35).

Mandeville's eye lighted on the round object Justinian held because it suggested all this. The mappamundi he will tell us he saw in the Pope's chambers on his way home to England (229) (a map probably similar to the Ebsdorf and Hereford T-O maps) might have represented the earth as round and two-dimensional and depicted Jerusalem (a round or square emblem at the center), the circular maze at Crete (usually moralized as the labyrinth of this world), the garden of Eden at the top circled by a wall, and Christ's head, hands, and feet visible at the four sides of the map as though He were crucified on the globe.¹⁸ While Mandeville generally adheres to this conception of a Jerusalem-centered world, there is a further implication in the nature of the world's roundness—but he saves that till later. The world, he will say, is round in three dimensions, not just two; a man might go all the way around it; and, strangest of all, he will probably find other men living all over it.¹⁹ All these ideas are withheld at this early point in the book because the pilgrims are merely going to the Holy Land; it is the curiosi who think about circumnavigating the earth.

Only in Jerusalem could pilgrims visit the site of their Savior's crucifixion, but they might receive a foretaste of the experience in Constantinople, where the cross Saint Helen found, Christ's coat, the sponge of gall, and one of the nails were preserved. Mandeville in passing warns pilgrims against believing the monks of Cyprus, who, in order to defraud visitors, wrongfully pretend to possess half of the cross (7, 20), then describes the four kinds of precious wood used to fashion the cross. He notes, perhaps for the benefit of English readers, that Saint Helen's father and son were English kings. As for the crown of thorns, half of it is in Constantinople and the other half in Paris. Mandeville brags a bit by confiding that he has "on of tho precyouse thornes," and says, almost as if all eyes are on him and he is still examining it, that it "semeth liche a white thorn, and that was youen to me for gret specyaltee" (9). Continuing on through Greece, Mandeville informs us that men honor Aristotle at his tomb "as though he were a seynt" (12), and this reminds him that back in Saint Sophia the body of another ancient pagan, Hermogenes, was unearthed along with a tablet on which he proclaimed his belief in the Savior who would be born to Mary (12-13). He assays a short explanation of the doctrinal differences between the Greek and western churches and cheekily repeats the Greek patriarch's curt reply to Pope John XXII's demand for obedience, a reply that ended with the taunt, "Dominus tecum quia dominus nobiscum est.… Lord be with the, for oure lord is with vs" (13). Mandeville refrains from criticizing the autonomous stand of the Greeks; even when he sees that they "sellen benefices of Holy Chirche," he wryly mentions that "so don men in othere places" (14).

Sacred and worldly marvels are as numerous in the islands and seaports of the Mediterranean as on the continent. At Ephesus one can visit the grave of John the Apostle and watch it "steren and meuen as there weren quykke thinges vnder" (16). Not far off is the isle of Lango (here we are in romance territory) where a fair lady in the shape of a dragon waits for the brave knight who will kiss her and thus become lord of the region (16-18). There is Tyre, where Christ preached, and, eight miles away at Sidon, the home of Dido "that was Eneas wif" (21). After arriving at the port of Jaffa (named for Japhet, son of Noah), pilgrims can proceed directly to Jerusalem; but Mandeville interrupts to say that some pilgrims may go first to Mount Sinai through the wilderness, up to Babylon, before going to Jerusalem—and this means meeting the Saracens.

Babylon is the seat of Saracen rule, and Mandeville rehearses the history of its rulers, customs, and military conquests at some length, for the account would have interested still-hopeful crusaders as well as pilgrims wandering by the way. He gained his thorough familiarity with Islam, we are to believe, during long service at the sultan's court "as soudyour in his werres a gret while ayen the Bedoynes" (24); the sultan even offered Mandeville the chance to marry a prince's daughter, but (unlike Constance in the Man of Law's Tale) he refused the proprosal since it would have meant forsaking "my lawe and my beleue" (24). As an after-thought, he tells us that this city of Babylon (present-day Cairo) is distinct from that other Babylon "where the dyuersitee of langages was first made for vengeance by the myracle of God, whan the grete tour of Babel was begonnen to ben made" (28). The "tour of Babiloyne," now surrounded by desert, dragons, and serpents, was built by Nimrod, "the firste kyng of the world," the same man responsible for inventing "the ydoles and the symulacres" (28).

Mandeville guides us back from old Babylon to the new one and the pilgrim's road, though not before mentioning the awesome names of the Great Chan and Prester John, whose distant realms he promises to speak of later. In a quick survey of the sweep of the Arabian desert from east to west, he identifies Mecca ("where Machomet lyth") and, again mindful of English and French legendary ancestry, the city of Carthage "that Dydo that was Eneas wif founded, the whiche Eneas was of the cytee of Troye and after was kyng of Itaylle" (30). Egypt would have been the major attraction for pilgrims taking the southern route to go up through Sinai, and Mandeville devotes a long chapter to this country, combining edifying tales about a deformed desert beast that believed in Christ and the phoenix bird who is like the resurrected Lord with practical advice on how not to get duped when buying balm from Saracens and his sure opinion (one very few actual travelers disputed) that the pyramids were once Joseph's grain garners and not, as "sum men seyn," tombs.²⁰

The nearer the peregrini are brought to the Holy Land, the more their progress is slowed by the increasing number of shrines and holy places lying in their way. Mandeville has so far described two prominent overland routes from western Europe, one leading through Egypt and the other bypassing it, and now, in chapter VIII, he pauses to insert an alternate itinerary for pilgrims who desire a speedier journey. This route leads by sea from Italy and includes stopovers at Sicily (the site of Mount Etna and volcanoes that "ben weyes of Helle"), Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Constantinople, Alexandria, and finally the new Babylon. Here pilgrims who have arrived by ship join others to go through the Arabian wasteland where "Moyses 1adde the peple of Israel" (41) on an earlier and more memorable pilgrimage. Mandeville misses none of the historic spots along the way, he is careful to note the exact lengths of various legs of the journey, and he adds an occasional bit of factual information (the Red Sea, for instance, "is not more reed than another see"). We are made to notice several monasteries in the desert, particularly one lying at the foot of Mount Sinai. It adjoins the Church of Saint Catherine, where men may go to see the burning bush of Moses. Indeed, says Mandeville, since all the birds of the country come there annually "as in pilgrymage" to honor the virgin Catherine and do so lacking "kyndely wytt ne resoun," therefore "wel more oughten men than to seche hire and to worschipen hire" (43). With the slyness Chaucer's Pardoner might have appreciated, Mandeville the curiosus has here quietly rebuked the impiety of Christian pilgrims; but no reader could have done less than nod in pious agreement, since he would not learn until much later that Mandeville is ultimately concerned more with terrestrial than spiritual observations. The final stage of the trek through the desert brings the pilgrims, in succession, through Beersheba and Hebron—where Adam wept one hundred years over the death of Abel—past the dry tree that will grow green again only when "a lord, a prince of the west syde of the world" wins back the Holy Land, through Bethlehem and, then at last, only two miles farther on (about as far as Canterbury lay from Harbledown), into Jerusalem.

That city has been the reader-pilgrim's destination all along, but it would be wrong to make too abrupt an entry. Thus, Mandeville spends four chapters (X-XIII) showing pilgrims and readers the abundant sacred wonders of the Holy Land.²¹ The shrines and miracles that may have edified pilgrims up to this point were merely stimuli urging them on along over the many ways that, like spokes of a wheel, "comen to on ende," Jerusalem. Nearly everything Mandeville describes in these chapters underscores that major consideration of traditional Christian geography, the actual and symbolic location of Jerusalem at the center of the world, the orbis terrarum comprising Europe, Africa, and Asia.²² The lands surrounding Judea, the country about Jerusalem, exist at the four points of a compass whose center is Jerusalem: Arabia lies east, Egypt south, the Great Sea and Europe on the west, and Syria on the north (54). Within a smaller circuit lie the cities of the Holy Land, described here in terms of their distances from the city of peace.

And there are holy spots within spots in the central city of Christendom. Men's "first pilgrymage" in the city is to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a building "alle rownd," in the middle of which rests the tabernacle enclosing Christ's tomb. Inside the church pilgrims will also find the rock of Golgotha, on which is written in Greek and Latin, "This God oure kyng before the worldes hath wrought hele in myddes of the erthe" (Psalm 74:12). As men "gon vp to that Golgatha be degrees" they can find wonders of history miraculously condensed in a small space: the head of Adam, discovered on the rock after Noah's flood, the place of Abraham's sacrifice, and the tombs of crusaders Godefroy de Bouillon and Baldwin and other Christian kings of Jerusalem (56). By this point in the description, none of Mandeville's readers would be amazed to learn that "in myddes of that chriche" a "compas" or circle in which Joseph of Arimathea laid Christ's body was also "the myddes of the world" (58).

It is a short walk from the Holy Sepulchre to the Temple of Jerusalem, which is similarly "alle round." Mandeville takes a moment to boast that while the Saracens usually forbade Christians to enter the temple, the sultan gave him a special pass and instructed subjects that he be allowed to "seen alle the places" throughout the country and be shown "alle the mysteries of euery place" (60). As one might expect, there are some places the pilgrim cannot go that the curious man with the right connections can. We are given the history and dimensions of the temple and the names of its builders and protectors. The remains of Biblical history to be seen around it on every side overwhelm the pilgrim: the ark containing the Ten Commandments; Aaron's rod and Moses' staff; the rock of Jacob's ladder (in Christian mystical thought, a means of ascent to heaven usually located at the navel of the earth, along with Mount Tabor, the rod of Jesse, and the cross²³); the headquarters of the Knights Templar; Herod's house; Mount Sion; the innumerable scenes from Christ's life and passion (67-72). Mandeville concludes his tour of the Holy Land in the next two chapters (XII-XIII), offering the long-suffering pilgrim-reader a visit to the Dead Sea and towns along the Jordan, a summary of the arguments over the authenticity of a head of John the Baptist kept in Samaria, a prediction of what the Last Judgment will be like, and the information that Cain lived two thousand years before being slain by Noah's father.

In chapter XIV Mandeville closes the portion of his book devoted to the itineraria hierosolymitana. He admits that the routes he has shown us from England to Jerusalem are the "farrest and longest" ones, and in short order he lists three other faster and more direct routes. It is worthwhile knowing these ways, because

some men will not go the other; some for they have not spending enough; some for they have no good company, and some for they may not endure the long travel, some for they dread them of many perils of deserts, some for they will haste them homeward, desiring to see their wives and their children, or for some other reasonable cause that they have to turn soon home.²⁴

We are not halfway through his book, yet already we sense that Mandeville would not count himself among those travelers who might choose safer and quicker routes. Here and there in the Travels he implies that he journeyed in a style befitting a knight, a friend of sultans, and at times a mercenary. He enjoyed traveling in the "gode companye of many lordes" (3) and had an unusual liking for "long travel," as his thirty-four years of journeying testifies. Later we will watch him risk not only the "perils of deserts" but a valley full of devils, "on of the entrees of Helle" (203). And at the end we will hear him grudgingly confess to having returned home not in haste but "mawgree myself … ayenst my wille, God knoweth" (229).

John Mandeville was no ordinary pilgrim, but a far-traveler whose guide to the Holy Land was only the preamble to an account of the longer excursions that dominate the Travels. He wrote a book of travels, not just another itinerarium, and pilgrimage was to him but one form of travel, undertaken, he realized, for various spiritual reasons and with particular destinations in mind. Pilgrims gloried in hearing saints' stories and in learning of the world symbolically fallen from an emperor's hand as they journeyed on toward Jerusalem, the city symbolic of the higher world. But Mandeville's book effectively subordinates pilgrimage to a form of travel motivated by love for this world. Ultimately, though Mandeville speaks of the divided earth as if it were two equal halves, his greater interest is not in the commonly known Christian world but in the vast, unknown, non-Christian sphere lying beyond; not in the familiar tales of saints but in anecdotes about Alexander and the Chan; not in moral significances but in empirical speculations about the round earth diverse races of men inhabit. At chapter XV Mandeville left the pilgrim to retrace his way home, while he pushed past Jerusalem. In his narrative he goes on to do what cartographers like Fra Mauro and Bianco a few generations later began to do: he decentralizes Jerusalem (and the objectives of pilgrimly travel) because his mental map of the world is much larger and his reasons for travel are other than spiritual.²⁵ He is eager to tell "of the marches and iles and dyuerse bestes and of dyuerse folk" in the East—"yif it lyke you," he adds, playing with our curiosity as Chaucer, turning from the solemn Knight's Tale, playfully apologized for the Miller's Tale to "whoso list it nat yheere."

Since Mandeville's exact itinerary in the rest of the book would have been of little practical use to readers, we do best to discontinue following his progress from one place to another. Besides, his curiositas—as I have already suggested—is really discernible from the very start of the Travels, not just in the second part of the book. To expose this curiosus disguised in pilgrim's clothing we must look all over his book at once.

At the beginning and end of the Travels Mandeville quite openly admits that he has written the book for people like himself who enjoy seeing and hearing about strange new things; but it is not until midway through the work that he takes the occasion to explain why he and kindred curiosi are the way they are. His reaction to the enormous population of Ind prompts him to remark that the people there

han this condicoun of kynde, that thei neuere gon out of here owne contree, and therefore is ther gret multitude of peple. But thei ben not sterynge ne mevable because that thei ben in the firste clymat, that is of Saturne; and Saturne is slough and litille mevynge, for he taryeth to make his turn be the xii. signes xxx. yeer, and the mone passeth thorgh the xii. signes in o moneth. And for because that Saturne is of so late sterynge, therfore the folk of that contree that ben vnder his clymat han of kynde no wille for to meve ne stere to seche strange places.

But sloth and inertia have no such hold on Mandeville's countrymen:

[for] in oure contrey is alle the contrarie, for wee ben in the seuenthe clymat that is of the mone, and the mone is of lyghtly mevynge and the mone is planete of weye. And for that skylle it yeueth vs wille of kynde for to meve lyghtly and for to go dyuerse weyes and to sechen strange thinges and other dyuersitees of the world, for the mone envyrouneth the erthe more hastyly than ony other planete. (119-120)

Mandeville's explicit coupling of curiosity with travel and of both preoccupations with Englishmen seems to have hardened into a conviction among English writers by the fourteenth century.²⁶ Ranulph Higden, the historian, observed that the English are

curious, and kunneth wel i-now telle dedes and wondres that thei heueth i-seie. Also they gooth in dyuers londes, vnnethe beeth eny men richere in her owne londe othere more gracious in fer and in straunge londe. They konneth betre wynne and gete newe than kepe her own heritage; therefore it is that they beeth i-spred so wyde and weneth that euerich other londe is his owne heritage.²⁷

The ever-restless palmers, said Chaucer, "longen … for to seken straunge strondes, / To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes." In Confessio Amantis Gower accounted for the Englishman's wanderlust with the same astrological evidence Mandeville used:

… he schal his places change
And seche manye londes strange:
And as of this condicion
The Mones disposicion
Upon the lond of Alemaigne
Is set, and ek upon Bretaigne,
Which nou is cleped Engelond;
For thei travaile in every lond.²⁸

This influence of the moon, which, as C.S. Lewis said, was thought to produce wandering of two kinds, traveling and lunacy,²⁹ also occurred to Caxton as an explanation for the wide variance of English dialects. "For we englysshe men / ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone which is neuer stedfaste but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another season / And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother."³⁰ Ruled by the moon and "this condicioun of mynde"—curiosity, manifested by ceaseless travel—Mandeville went forth to search the world. He could have wished it said of him as it was said of Marco Polo, that he "observed more of the peculiarities of this part of the world than any other man, because he travelled more widely in these outlandish regions than any man who was ever born, and also because he gave his mind more intently to observing them."³¹

Mandeville is the main character of the Travels as well as its author; he is present at the center of every experience. Sometime after 1400, in fact, the book was recast into an English metrical romance, centering on the adventures of "Sir Iohn Mavndevile."³² Indeed, "I, John Mandeville"³³ resembles that other popular medieval hero, Alexander the Great, whose reputation in the romances as a curious wanderer may explain in part his conspicuous presence in the Travels. In one well-known episode from Alexandrian romance, the young king voyaged as far as the garden of Eden but was prevented from entering by gatekeepers who gave him an eye as a sign "that thine eye is not satisfied with riches, nor will thy desire be satisfied by thy roaming over the earth."³⁴ In one of Mandeville's own tales, Alexander's combination of curiosity and pride earns him a rebuke from the islanders of Gynosophe who cannot understand why he is "so besy for to putten alle the world vnder his subieccoun" (213). To be "busy" is one delight of the curiosus, and Mandeville himself is always "busy"; for example, he stresses that he "did gret besyness" at the Chan's court to learn the trick of making metal birds dance and sing (157). The magicians there refused to teach him, claiming that Chinese could "seen with ii. eyen, and the Cristene men see but with on, because that thei ben more sotylle than thei" (157). Most Christians, knowing what thinkers like Augustine and Bernard had said about lust of the eyes, might meekly accept that remark as a compliment. But to Mandeville it must have been as painful a rebuff as any teacher could give an aspiring student.

However, Chinese opinion to the contrary, Mandeville in various ways everywhere exhibits a curious eye. In the Travels we have "one of the few descriptions of Islam in the literature of medieval Europe"³⁵ only because Mandeville obtained permission from the sultan to see and learn "alle the mysteries of euery place." He prided himself on witnessing things at first hand. He assures us he saw the spear that killed Christ (10), that he had "often tyme seen and radd" the Koran (96) (an unusual and questionable activity for any European of his day), and that he personally observed the efficacy of pagan auguries and prognostications (though, naturally, a Christian should not "putten his beleeve in suche thinges") (123). He vouches for the existence of Asian reeds thirty fathoms long (perhaps bamboo shoots or else the redwood-sized reed trees mentioned in earlier Alexander sagas) and fish that cast themselves out of the sea in homage to a king (140-42) by stressing that he saw them "with myn owne eyyen" (140). He takes a special detour to visit the castle of the sparrow-hawk in Armenia, explaining that "This is not the right weye for to go to the parties that I haue nempned before, but for to see the merueyle that I haue spoken of" (108). As we are wondering whether Mandeville actually saw all these marvels, he abruptly disarms us with candid admissions that there are some other places he has not been to. As for the dragon-lady of Lango, "I haue not seen hire" (16); he heard of, but never saw, the trees of the sun and moon that conversed with Alexander (36, 215). Yet Mandeville often credited reports of things he had never set eyes on. As he tells us, he was just as skeptical of the Chan's power and riches as we might be, "til I saugh it" (159); and once he had actually experienced fear in the valley of the devils "I was more deuout thanne than euere I was before or after" (205). For the curious, most of the time anyway, seeing is believing.

In other ways, Mandeville keeps reminding us that he conscientiously sought out and investigated all phenomena, both the marvelous and the more strictly miraculous (Mandeville equates these two things, in fact, throughout the book, just as de Bury treated holy and secular books as companionable storehouses of learning). He examines the crown of thorns at Constantinople to check its authenticity and verifies the Jewish plot to poison all Christianity by listening in on Jews' confessions (139). He learns that Saracens counterfeit balm and Indians falsify diamonds, figures out how to tell the genuine article in both cases, and passes along the information for other travelers (36-37, 117-18). Though at times he accepts a rumor or story because it is supported by authority, at other times he makes a point of testing opinions by his own experience. The land Christ chose to dwell in naturally sits in the middle of the world because, as Aristotle said, virtue lies in the middle way, and because a message is best spread equally to all men from the center of population. But, as Mandeville confidently adds, the centrality of Jerusalem can also be "preuen" by placing a spear into the ground there at noon and observing that it casts no shadow (134). As a curiosus, Mandeville always keeps an eye out for matters of scientific interest. Egypt, he says, is an ideal place for astronomers to work, since "the eyr is alwey pure and cleer" (32). He twice mentions the ingenuity of the Chinese magicians and astrologers, whose ruling authority is second only to the Chan's (157, 169-70). With apparent seriousness (we can never be sure) he claims to have taken the "smale children" engendered by "male and femele" diamonds and watered them with May dew until they grew (116). In a more practical vein, he argues after long thought, experimentation with the astrolabe, and "sotyle compassement of wytt," that "yif a man fond passages be schippes that wolde go to serchen the world, men myghte go be schippe alle aboute the world and abouen and benethen" (132).

The curious man betrays an unflagging desire to examine all that he sees; he also reveals himself by telling tales that are strange, or unbelievable, or both. Putting aside for the moment the possibility that Mandeville's Travels is one gigantic tale-in the sense of a fiction, or even in the sense Mandeville's modern critics mean when they call it plagiarism—it is feasible to read the book as if it were a miscellany of tales. Pilgrims were expected to be tale-tellers (Chaucer and his Canterbury folk knew that), and the individual stories John Mandeville offers us are often as unusual as this curious book as a whole. To define what he meant by "tales," or to classify them as legends, fables, saints' lives, and romances, is unnecessary. As a curiosus and a believer in the heterogeneity of earthly inhabitants, Mandeville found all varieties of stories useful, and for two purposes: to amaze, but finally to enlarge his readers' outlook on the familiar and the unfamiliar worlds.

There are all sorts of tales about his new-found wondrous world that need to be recorded. He writes about an abbot's lamp that lights and quenches itself (and expresses annoyance at the monks' refusal to tell him how it happens); he describes the sea off Java that seems higher than the land and the perpetual zone of darkness in Persia that once protected Christians from heathens; but in each instance he eventually accounts for the wonder by quoting relevant passages from the Psalms about God's mirabilia (44, 145, 188). For a far-traveler who sees exploration as an inevitable extension of pilgrimage, God's miracles and the inexplicable marvels of God's creation are one. Mandeville satisfies the pilgrim audience's liking for anecdotes about the saints, then enthralls them with a story of the woman in the shape of a dragon who has killed two knights that feared to kiss her and, like Joyce's Earwicker, still sleeps, waiting to be restored to human form (16-18). In between a capsule life of Saint Athansius (106-7) and a skeptical report about a monk who said he climbed Mount Ararat (109) Mandeville's readers could find a tale—so far traceable to no known literary source—about "a faire lady of fayrye" who would grant men "wyssche of erthely thinges." To a rich lord who asked for her body she gave instead poverty and strife, to a Knight Templar she gave riches that eventually destroyed his Order, but to a poor boy she gave fame and wealth (107-8). The Travels also offered readers a selection of extracts from the romances about Alexander,³⁶ a tale of trees that grow and disappear in a day—truly "a thing of fayrye" (198)—and a story of the insidious Gatholonabes, the original Assassin, who lured "lusty bacheleres" into an enclosed garden that he called Paradise (200-202). Mandeville could usually match these wonders with an invention or two of his own, most notably the intriguing story "I haue herd cownted whan I was yong" about a precocious medieval Magellan who traveled all around the world till he reached home again (135). The fact that manuscripts of the Travels were often bound together with romances suggests one effect all these disparate tales had on readers' understanding of the book.³⁷ Mandeville realized perfectly well that "men han gret likyng to here speke of straunge thinges" and that "newe thinges and newe tydynges ben plesant to here" (228). Chaucer, like his curious pilgrims, knew it too. And one must wonder where on his eclectic shelves de Bury would have placed this incredible book, had he lived long enough to purchase it.

The audience's curiosity, as much as the author's, fed on novelty and strangeness. This appetite extended beyond the assorted tales of unusual human behavior and supernatural happenings to the beasts that, having escaped from maps and other manuscripts' margins, romp across the pages of the Travels and to Mandeville's stories about that fantastic Christian ruler in Asia, Prester John. Bestiaries must have provided Mandeville with models for many of the strange animals that dot his African and Asian landscapes, but except for the phoenix, which was undeniably "lykne … vnto God" (34), most of his creatures amble by without symbolic trappings. Like the pictorial zoos that crowded the medieval world maps, and like the vulgar oddities Bernard objected to, Mandeville's beasts no doubt had the straightforward appeal "of the strange and the wonderful, the appeal to the imagination of men who … had not ceased to dream of marvels at the far corners of the earth."³⁸ The legendary Prester John, whose mighty armies European Christians once expected to crush the Saracens boldly from the rear, had the same imaginative appeal. Karl Helleiner has suggested, in fact, that stories about this figure affected medieval readers much as science fiction affects modern readers; both audiences "derived vicarious pleasure from visualizing fantastic accomplishments and experiences of a race of superior beings."³⁹ If so, then Mandeville's further speculations about the inhabitable lands lying eastward beyond Prester John's domain (chapters XXXIII, XXXIV) would have been all the more appealing to the imagination.

Mandeville's tale-telling, added to his interest in exotic animal life and in the lore surrounding Prester John, reflects the same "awakening desire to know more of the great world and its secrets beyond the limits of the local patria" that G. R. Owst has documented in English sermon materials of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁴⁰ (Mandeville would have well understood the plan of a later Jerusalem-bound English pilgrim, the humanist John Tiptoft, to take an artist along on board to make accurate drawings of any strange birds, animals, and scenes he might encounter in the East⁴¹— the kind of project naturalists of later centuries routinely carried out on voyages.) A passion for the strange or new identical to Mandeville's pervaded the writings of the important group of fourteenth-century English friars whom Beryl Smalley considers incipient humanists. Curiositas "was devouring the minds of educated clergy and laity alike"; it led scholars like Thomas Waleys and Robert Holcot to indulge their taste for tales from history and mythology with such enthusiasm that the sacred matters under consideration became obscured by all the profane embroidery. To these men of Mandeville's generation, almost anything "nova et inusitata" was worth repeating.⁴²

Storytellers like Mandeville thrive on novelty, and as the range of their experience widens, their repertoire becomes richer. But at the same time their sense of the differences among the accumulated items of that experience forces them to examine the meaning of human diversity. "Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right," Gulliver comes to realize (for a time, anyway), "when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison."⁴³ From the very beginning of his book Mandeville is aware that the world is composed of "dyuerse folk and of dyuerse maneres and lawes and of dyuerse schappes of men" (3). This fascination with diversity is present all through the Travels; the curious man who makes his home in the climate of the moon feels compelled to immerse himself in the "dyuerse weyes and to sechen strange thinges and other dyuersitees of the world" (120). Toward the end of the Travels Mandeville will speak of the fundamental unity of all men; but, being curiously disposed, he is at first more concerned to make discriminations between cultures and religions. He appreciates the diversity of languages (as did Chaucer), and he senses the need (as did Bacon and de Bury) for all westerners, not just pilgrims, to become more aware of them. Patiently, although not too accurately, Mandeville describes the alphabets of the Greeks (14), Egyptians (38), Hebrews (79), and Arabs (104), treating us in the last instance with a short lecture on linguistics:

And iiii. lettres thei haue more than othere for dyuersitee of hire langage and speche, for als moche as thei speken in here throtes. And wee in Englond haue in oure langage and speche ii. lettres mo than thei haue in hire abc, and that is þ and Ʒ, the whiche ben clept thorn and yogh.

An English traveler of the fifteenth century, William Wey, compiled handy (and more reliable) English-Greek, Greek-Latin, and Greek-English glossaries for pilgrims going to the Levant, but Mandeville's alphabets would have been of less real value to pilgrims.⁴⁴ They were, in both the medieval and modern senses, curiosities, and Mandeville put them in for anyone who wished merely to "knowe the difference of hem and of othere" (38).

Morton Bloomfield has pointed out that Mandeville's sense of cultural diversity—shared by Chaucer and by very few other English contemporaries—owed something to the thirteenth-century schoolmen's attempt to prove that a belief in the existence of God was implanted in all men by the light of natural reason. "The far-reaching implications of this attempt led to the belief that all men could arrive at some concept of the truth. This in turn involves the belief that to some extent other cultures are worth some consideration."⁴⁵ In a passage Bloomfield singles out, Mandeville writes:

And yee schulle vndirstonde that of alle theise contrees and of alle theise yles and of alle the dyuerse folk that I haue spoken of before and of dyuerse lawes and of dyuerse beleeves that thei han, yit is there non of hem alle but that thei han sum resoun within hem and vnderstondynge-but yif it be the fewere-and that han certeyn articles of oure feith and summe gode poyntes of oure beleeve; and that thei beleeven in God that formede alle thing and made the world and clepen Him God of Nature … (227)

In a slightly earlier passage Mandeville makes the same point but with even more feeling.

And therefore alle be it that there ben many dyuerse lawes in the world, yit I trowe that God loueth alweys hem that louen Him and seruen Him mekely in trouthe, and namely hem that dispysen the veyn glorie of this world, as this folk don and as Iob did also.… no man scholde haue in despite non erthely man for here dyuerse lawes, for wee knowe not whom God loueth ne whom God hateth" (214).

It is wrong, I think, to argue from these sentiments, as some have, that Mandeville doubted Christianity's superiority over other religions.⁴⁶ Rather, it seems that in these moments of reflection and summary his aim is to remind other Christians that they should love their neighbors—and also tolerate and try to understand them, Moslems and Mongols as well as Greek Orthodox. As Chaucer put it in the Troilus, "ecch contree hath his lawes" (II, 42). At any rate, Mandeville's interest in the strangeness of other religions follows as a corollary from his perception of cultural diversity.

This broad moral viewpoint rests heavily on Mandeville's firm belief that the earth is not only round but inhabitable "vnder as above," and is inhabited everywhere. His lengthy proofs for this idea, which are set forth in chapter XX, spring, he says, from observation, scientific calculation, and intuition. First, he asserts what most knowledgeable men had believed since classical times, that "the lond and the see ben of rownde schapp and forme" (132).⁴⁷ For Mandeville it follows that if men found the right passages they could "serchen the world … be schippe alle aboute the world."⁴⁸ So positive an assertion was astounding for a mid-fourteenth-century man. Nicole Oresme in the 1370s went only as far as to say that a man might be able to circumnavigate the earth (though he was quite sure of the time it would take: four years, sixteen weeks, and two days).⁴⁹ Mandeville says he would have been curious to undertake such a voyage himself "yif I hadde had companye and schippynge for to go more beyonde" (133). He may also have felt that inquisitive men could go around the world as easily as their governing planet the moon "envyrouneth the erth."

But having said the round earth is circumnavigable, a statement that had a profound impact on Renaissance voyagers⁵⁰ and on Renaissance geographers like Toscanelli,⁵¹ Mandeville cannot escape the theologically unsettling conclusion: sailing around the earth one "alleweys … scholde fynde men, londes, and yles als wel as in this contree [Lamary]" (134).⁵² Few men before or during his time would have suggested that the earth was inhabited all over or expressed the opinion so forthrightly. In 1410 Pierre d'Ailly was still reluctant to deny the authority of the Bible and Augustine and admit the antipodes were populated; and that curious pilgrim, Felix Fabri, expressed the same reservations in the 1480s.⁵³ Such hesitation was understandable, for all humankind, it must be remembered, was thought to reside only on the three joined continents, which were surrounded by the wide Ocean Sea and cut off from any other hypothetical land masses. Mandeville's notion thus undercut the traditional belief that all peoples were descended from Adam and Eve and, furthermore, that the Gospel of Jesus had been able to reach all men (Romans 10:18).⁵⁴ Mandeville does not grapple with the theological implications of what he has just said; instead, he proceeds to support his theory with an anecdote about a man who did circumnavigate the globe-twice.⁵⁵ The inference he draws is really an observation on human nature that will become the foundation for his ideas about diversity and tolerance. "For fro what partie of the erthe that man duelle, outher abouen or benethen, it semeth alweys to hem that duellen that thei gon more right than any other folk" (135). Good Christians, especially pilgrims, rightly focus their eyes on Jerusalem, the sacred midpoint of the world; but explorers who look with care and curiosity to the world beyond Christendom come to adopt a perspective on the ways men live and worship that the true Christian pilgrim would be uninterested in sharing.

Mandeville's recognition that there is great diversity and contrariety between "this half and beyond half" is important because it underlies the total principle of organization in the Travels. M. C. Seymour has allowed that the work "has an obvious autobiographical beginning and end, and there is a sufficient number of cross-references and statements about the need for conciseness to show that the author was working to a general design," but his opinion is that "overall there is no intense preoccupation with the form of the book."⁵⁶ Intense it may not have been, but Mandeville did have a definite sense of the form of the book, a conception of its organization that depended chiefly on his dual role as pilgrim and explorer. Structrally, he separates the goal of pilgrimage from the other distant goals of exploration.

So the book divides easily into two sections: the first comprises the principal and secondary pilgrimage routes from England to the Holy Land, and the second is a longer account of travels through other parts of the world. En route and at its destination, the pilgrimage of chapters I-XIV pauses at points of Christian worship, while the wanderings of the rest of the book take Mandeville and the reader through regions made marvelous by secular and non-Christian news. Pilgrims find their goal at Jerusalem where they adore the land their Savior favored as the center of the world; their pilgrimage done, these men are free to "turn soon home." After a chapter (XV) full of information about the crusaders' enemy, Mandeville invites us to follow him on a journey to other destinations. In the words of a thirteenth-century traveler to Asia, it is like "stepping into another world."⁵⁷ By chapter XXII we are among one-eyed, headless, and flat-faced peoples; in this looking-glass land, as Gulliver later found, there is a race of pygmies who employ normal-sized humans to labor for them. "And of tho men of oure stature han thei als grete skorn and wonder as we wolde haue among vs of geauntes yif thei weren amonges vs" (152). Farther on in this topsy-turvy region we meet the most powerful king on earth, the Chan, whose round and walled palace-city contains inside it other palaces and a hill on which sits still another palace (154-55). Going still farther, we encounter the gloriously Christian Prester John. And, at last, somewhere near the extreme eastern edge of the Asian continent, we approach the Terrestrial Paradise.

If Prester John's existence was thought miraculous and the Chan's domain unbelievably marvelous (159), then Eden is both at once. It is protected by fire "so that no man that is mortalle ne dar not entren" (220); surrounded by a wall (depicted as a golden O in the duc de Berry's Tres riches heures⁵⁸); it rests on the highest point of the earth—"like a woman's breast," thought Columbus, who believed he had found it in South America and tried to enter.⁵⁹ For Mandeville the moon-driven traveler, the earthly paradise—which "toucheth nygh to the cercle of the mone, there as the mone maketh hire torn" (220)—has turned out to be his true destination. With other Christian pilgrims he went to Jerusalem, and of course he hoped some day to reach the heavenly paradise. But being an earth-bound curiosus he also sought, like Alexander before him, to find the terrestrial one: a place located (medieval tradition had it) at the pole exactly opposite Jerusalem.⁶⁰ Mandeville never gets inside the garden, but even in defeat his curiosity prevails:

Of Paradys ne can I not speken propurly, for I was not there. It is fer beyonde, and that forthinketh me, and also I was not worthi. But as I haue herd seye of wyse men beyonde, I schalle telle you with gode wille. (220)

Mandeville's inquisitiveness produced not the promised guidebook "specyally" for pilgrims but a small compendium concerned mainly with earthly regions most pilgrims would never enter. The Prologue advertises a pilgrimage and something more, but by the final chapter it is the curious journey and Mandeville's curious speculations that have dominated the book. One last time he affirms that all he has written is true and that he has told it all because men enjoy hearing strange new things. Indeed, his desire to obtain a papal imprimatur and have his confession heard by the pope (228-29) may reflect some momentary worry about much of what he put in this unusual book.⁶¹

Mandeville's curiosity asserted itself most noticeably once he advanced beyond the Holy Land. All the concomitants of the explorer's curiosity—his pilgrim fondness for tales, his appreciation of human diversity, and his acceptance of cultural relativity—became increasingly evident with each stride into the unknown. Along the pilgrimage roads he only occasionally doubted the veracity of miracles; for the most part he held his tongue and took on faith what a Christian had no business questioning. Beyond the Christian pale, however, he allowed his speculative urges fuller rein, continually testing with his senses the workings of magic, the inferences to be drawn from the sphericity of the globe, all the phenomena of nature. His accounts of saints, relics, and events of Christian history mostly echoed received opinion, but his narration of Asian experiences depended on the claim of having seen and heard everything at first hand. There was no end of the tales to be collected and passed on about the lands of the East, and indeed the climate there brought out the best in Mandeville. Informed by the natives of Caldilhe that a particular fruit contained edible animals, he matched them with "als gret a merueyle," a description of the fruit in "oure contree" that becomes flying birds that men catch and eat. He seems to have won that exchange, for the natives thought his story so amazing "that summe of hem trowed it were an inpossible thing to be" (191). Medieval and Renaissance travelers consistently worried that readers would not believe some of their stories or discoveries, and in the process of denying that they were lying they often only confirmed the wary audience's opinion. In responding to the Caldilheans with his own barnacle geese tale, Mandeville offers us a little parable about this whole problem of credulity toward the unfamiliar. The reader may believe or disbelieve the natives' story, or Mandeville's, or both; the final effect is to broaden the mind, to encourage westerners to become as open as curious Mandeville is to the possibility of the improbable—in short, to share Mandeville's sense of the cultural diversity of man. The curiosus thrives on the implications of multiple points of view. Two hundred years later, Walter Ralegh reported that he had located a tribe of people in Guiana with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests: just such a people as Mandeville imagined in the Travels. Ralegh was forced to admit that "Such a nation was written of by Mandeville, whose reports were holden for fables many years; and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible."⁶² Ralegh tried; Mandeville—by trading the flying birds for the animal fruits and making us decide—succeeded.

Mandeville's strange, improbable world, the unknown half of the globe, however, has meaning only when gauged against the known. The pilgrimage in the first fourteen chapters of the book must of necessity come first because it provides, as it were dramatically, the background and norms against which any intelligible judgments about the non-Christian world can be made. To make a convincing case for the plenitude of the world and for his forward-looking belief that the world is more mysterious and exciting than most of his contemporaries thought, Mandeville chose to prepare them to accept the improbable by reminding and summarizing for them the understood Christian world. Thus, for example, unfamiliar eastern religious practices can be explained in terms familiar to the western Christian audience: the pagans chant prayers like ours (143, 225), they have orders of holy men and leaders corresponding to our monks (148), friars (150), bishops (103), and pope (224). Saracens kneel before the sultan's signet-ring as Christians genuflect before the "corpus domini" (60-61), and the people of Milke—one of the several cannibalistic nations Mandeville visits—gladly drink human blood "whiche thei clepen dieu" (143). Sometimes Mandeville compares non-Christians with Christians to criticize failings of the latter. The natives of Calamye in India revere the arm and hand of Saint Thomas the Apostle and let it adjudicate all "doubtable causes"; they also make pilgrimages to a gilded idol "with als gret deuocoun as Cristene men gon to Seynt Iames or other holy pilgrimages" and endure so much self-inflicted punishment "for loue of hire god. … that a Cristene man, I trowe, durst not taken vpon him the tenthe part the peyne for loue of oure lord Ihesu Crist" (128-29). The familiar world of Christian pilgrimage must precede the new, unpredictable, curiously seen world which follows.

Medieval readers and librarians variously responded to Mandeville by shelving his book with other works on eastern travel, or with romances, or with moral treatises and social criticism. It was bound once with Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe (which opens with remarks on the diversity of speech and learning in the world before describing the workings of Mandeville's favorite instrument); once it was put with the book of another curiosus, Richard de Bury's Philobiblon. ⁶³ The Travels had a many-sided appeal. Moreover, it gave evidence of having been shaped out of older materials for a particular reason. Mandeville's readers could have learned much of what he told them by turning to Vincent of Beauvais or any number of Holy Land itineraries or eyewitness reports of travelers like Polo, Odoric, Carpini, and Rubroek—as in fact we know Mandeville had turned to them. But Mandeville's ingenious yoking of the two kinds of journeys offered his countrymen a different perspective on the "newe thinges and newe tydynges" they enjoyed hearing. As far as I know, it is the first "travel book" of its kind to combine a pilgrimage itinerary with an account of worldly exploration. The two worlds, two sorts of journeys, and two kinds of travelers embraced by the Travels and its author finally complement rather than oppose each other. Pilgrims, inevitably and historically, develop into curious wanderers: pilgrimage converts to exploration.

Christopher Columbus, the last medieval traveler, consulted his copy of Mandeville before sailing out to find China; Ralegh had it in mind while writing about Guiana; and Frobisher took along a copy of the book on his search for the northwest passage in 1578.⁶⁴ Throughout the centuries the Travels continued to be read, though less as an authority on Asia and more as a source of entertainment—for what Thomas Browne called its "commendable mythologie"⁶⁵ or for what one dull contemporary of Browne's called an idle man's waste of time.⁶⁶ Thomas More and Jonathan Swift were influenced by the book; Renaissance travelers quoted from it, authors of Renaissance romances and plays drew on it.⁶⁷ Samuel Johnson, facetiously or not, recommended Mandeville as a valuable guide for a friend going to China in 1784.⁶⁸ It is likely that medieval audiences read it for both amusement and instruction. As the curious John Leland said, John Mandeville was England's greatest traveler: Britain's "Ulysses," he called him.⁶⁹ Scholars of this century and the last, suspicious that "I, John Mandeville" may not have been the actual historical person he claimed to be and irritated by his unmodern habit of "plagiarizing" from earlier writers, have generally judged the book and its author to be frauds.⁷⁰ If the mysteries of "John Mandeville's" identity are ever cleared up, the facts may turn out to be of some interest. Such investigations could substantiate the theory that the Travels was written by someone with a different name or prove that a real John Mandeville was a great traveler. But would it not be as easy to argue that the "I" of the narrative had simply an intended fictional existence: that he was a character, a persona, like Chaucer the pilgrim, or the "I" of Troilus and Criseyde, or the "I" of another book of travels, Lemuel Gulliver?⁷¹ It does not matter what the author's name was, for, finally, it is our awareness of this narrator's presence that holds us to the book, and what we sense is his inquisitive fascination with a world he wants to make us imagine. Mandeville was a reader (and perhaps, to an extent, a traveler) who wrote for other readers, not really a returned world traveler, immobilized by "gowtes artetykes," writing for other travelers. Even the tactic of worrying about whether his audience will believe his accounts (159, 191, 229 et alia)—whether the worry was serious or playful—works to keep us alert, to keep the readers (like Ralegh) as curious as the writer about what is possible and imaginable. Should a historical "John Mandeville" be turned up one day, it might happen that in discovering him we will lose another, equally valuable Mandeville.

The modern resolve to discount the factuality of the Travels is, moreover, a condescension to the medieval reader as much as a rebuke to the author. To say Mandeville was a deceiver is to imply that his readers were gullible and that he somehow possessed an intellect superior to theirs. In truth, Mandeville's book is no more susceptible to the charge of untruthfulness than Isidore's etymologies, or the bestiary's zoology, or the oddly outlined medieval maps of the world, or the selective techniques of medieval chroniclers. His and their conception of history and truth was different from ours, and not as rigorous. Etymologies, Mandeville knew, were intended to convey more than linguistic origins (and therefore "Ham" gives us "Chan"), animals had symbolic meanings that were sometimes more important than the factual ones, mappaemundi were artistic enjoyments for the eye and not charts meant for navigators,⁷² and interest more than relevance was the criterion historians normally abided by in arranging their materials.⁷³ So for the same reasons that Mandeville made no solid distinctions between what we would think of as fact and fiction, his readers would have been unperturbed by the thought that the author might not really have been everywhere he claimed and might have written it all out of other men's books. He was, as John Updike somewhere says of Marco Polo, a "mental traveller," and he dreamed a world more and more medievals were ready to realize. As one medievalist has remarked in explaining the attitude toward fact and fiction shared by a contemporary of Mandeville's,

If Holcot could attach exempla to real authors with no justification, may he not have invented authors as well as exempla? He used a medley of classical and medieval sources, medieval commentaries on classical texts in particular. The borderline between what he read and what he invented must have been thin.… Holcot not only pillaged antiquity and improved on it, but invented ancient tales and ancient authors when it suited him. He had the qualities of a historical romancer.⁷⁴

Whether Mandeville copied his book from other men's books or whether he traveled as he said (and, of course, he could have done both) remains a partial mystery, but it does not pose an obstacle to our understanding of the Travels. The narrator and character John Mandeville had been to all those places, as much as Gulliver had been to Lilliput, risked devils in the Valeye Perilous, measured the earth, and come home to tell about it; his story would be read alongside other romances, for his exploits were as entertaining as any romance hero's. And then, as for the unknown author who must lie behind this adventurer, we still know very well what kind of man he was. Like de Bury inside his study and Chaucer inside his book of fictive pilgrimage, Mandeville was the armchair curiosus, whose satisfaction was gotten vicariously. Like Petrarch, who rejected an offer to accompany a friend on a Palestine pilgrimage but agreed to write a guidebook for the man (a nobleman with the curious name of Giovanni di Mandello), Mandeville chose "not to visit those countries a single time by ship, on horseback, or on foot—interminable journeys!—but to make many brief visitations with maps, and books, and imagination."⁷⁵

It is odd that scholars have labored so long to prove that Mandeville's Travels was not a tale of an actual journey, that its author was a fake; and that at times other scholars, hoping to discover Chaucer's interest in pilgrimage, have stressed that Chaucer lived in Kent, must have been to Canterbury, knew the route well, and so forth. One almost wishes the facts of Chaucer's life were unknown and that a full biography of a Sir John Mandeville of St. Albans existed. What is important is that both men knew what pilgrimage had meant traditionally; and although they seem to have had different opinions on the matter, both knew that pilgrimages in their day had become vehicles for curiosity— an urge that could be socially and institutionally detrimental or valuably enlightening. And what is important in reading the Travels is to be able to see the world, a new world, through the eyes of a blissfully curious pilgrim-explorer. Mandeville's broad humanist perspective on this world is finally that of the following generations of thinkers and voyaging discoverers; as Elisabeth Feist Hirsch has said of them, "The humanists, it becomes clear, thought of Christian unity in different terms than did the men of the Middle Ages. For them the idea of one Christendom exploded; they put in its place a Christian world composed of varied elements."⁷⁶

The fellowship de Bury shared with his beloved books and colleagues is not unlike the larger fellowship Mandeville encourages his audiences to see among the "varied elements" of east and west, a fellowship of understanding and tolerance based on the love God holds for all creatures on the water-linked land mass. Chaucer's pilgrims lack fellowship, partly because of their individual curious urges; but perhaps each one of them, given the chance to travel alone and as far as Mandeville, would reach the goals de Bury, Mandeville, and Chaucer himself sought in their separate intellectual endeavors, in their readings and writing, in their travels and intersecting associations with Italy, St. Albans, and Avignon. Possibly one more Chaucerian invention—say, an unthinkable hybrid of learning and wayfaring called "The Clerk of Bathe"—would best typify the feeling for nature, interest in new scientific discoveries, sense of the past, and curiosity about new lands and peoples that characterize the kind of fourteenth-century English world the humanist bishop, the poet, and the explorer reveal to us. With them we are in the great age of poetry, learning, and discovery that has already dawned.

Notes

1. Hugo Lange, "Chaucer und Mandeville's Travels," Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 173 (1938), 79-81; Josephine Waters Bennett, "Chaucer and Mandeville's Travels,"MLN, 68 (1953), 531-34. These articles were superseded by the discussion of Chaucer's and the Gawain-poet's debt to Mandeville in Josephine Waters Bennett's The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York: MLA, 1954), pp. 221-27. Bennett's book, for a time out of print, has been reissued (New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971).
2. Marianne Mahn-Lot, Columbus, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 54.
3. The Cotton version of the Travels is found in British Museum MS Cotton Titus C. xvi. It was first printed in 1725 and has been edited in modern times by A. W. Pollard (1900; rpt. New York: Dover, 1964; modernized spelling); by P. Hamelius, EETS, O.S. 153 and 154 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1919 and 1923); and by M.C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Seymour, who has become the current authority on the textual problems associated with the Travels, is presently preparing an edition of the so-called Defective Version, which was made in England before the Cotton version. The fullest treatment of manuscripts and editions is to be found in Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 265-385; Seymour, pp. 272-78, condenses Bennett's enormous amount of information into a convenient list. See also Seymour's "The English Manuscripts of Mandeville's Travels," Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4 (1966), 169-210.
4. In his edition (p. xiii) Seymour says that the Travels was written originally in French on the Continent and "probably" not by an Englishman; in his introduction and notes and in articles on various manuscript versions of the Travels he has discussed his reasons for believing "Mandeville" was a name made up by the author, who (for some reason Seymour has not yet divulged) wanted to convince people he was English. Bennett, who believes that Mandeville was probably English, discusses earlier theories of the author's identity and nationality, pp. 89 ff. J. D. Thomas, "The Date of Mandeville's Travels;' MLN, 72 (1957), 165-69, concludes that the work was composed between 1356 and 1366. Arpad Steiner, "The Date of Composition of Mandeville's Travels," Speculum, 9 (1934), 144-47, had put it slightly later, between 1365 and 1371. Seymour, in his new edition of The Metrical Version of Mandeville's Travels, EETS, 269 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. xvi, repeats his belief that the book was first composed on the Continent, c. 1357, and that the first copy of the work probably appeared in England about 1375. On the sources of the Travels, see Bennett's plentiful treatments, Seymour's commentaries in his 1967 edition, and Malcolm Letts, Sir John Mandeville: The Man and His Book (London: Batchworth Press, 1949), esp. pp. 29-33.
5. In addition to Bennett's and Letts's books, see Donald R. Howard, "The World of Mandeville's Travels," YES, 1 (1971), 1-17; and C. W. R. D. Moseley, "The Metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville," YES, 4 (1974), 5-25.
6. Rediscovery, p. 53.
7. Hamelius's notes to his edition are replete with suggestions that Mandeville merely copied from other travel writers. The remark by C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography (1897, 1901, 1906; rpt. New York: Peter Smith, 1949), III, 320, is rather typical of the way geographers and historians of travel have viewed the Travels: " … except for the student of geographical mythology and superstition, it has no importance in the history of Earth-Knowledge." Zoltan Haraszti, "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville," The Boston Public Library Quarterly 2 (1950), 306-16, speaks of "the deceitfulness of the author." J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (New York: Mentor Books, 1964) admits that the book "did more to arouse interest in travel and discovery, and to popularize the idea of a possible circumnavigation of the globe" than any other medieval travel book, but it was still a collection of "lying wonders" which had little value for serious explorers (p. 24).
8. Various scholars have commented on the two-part structure of the book, usually to stress that the pilgrimage portion is worthwhile and credible while the rest of the book is fanciful nonsense; see, for example, Kenneth Sisam, ed., Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose (1921; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 94. But Howard, "The World of Mandeville's Travels," has detected significant, purposeful reasons for the author's decision to juxtapose the two parts.
9. Parry, p. 24. C. W. R. D. Moseley is currently preparing a lengthy study of the strong influence Mandeville had on Renaissance voyagers.
10. I use Seymour's edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) and cite page references (in Arabic numerals) and chapter references (in Roman numerals) within parentheses in the body of my text.
11. B. G. Koonce, Chaucer and the Tradition of Fame: Symbolism in The House of Fame (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 152-53, treats some of the medieval associations between Jerusalem and the centrum or medium of the world. He cites Bersuire's gloss on Joel 3 which sounds very much like Mandeville's remark about publishing news from the middle of a town.
12. Aziz S. Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (1938; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1965), ch. VIII.
13. Ibid., p. 163.
14. The popularity of such criticisms is demonstrated by G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), pp. 287-331. Mandeville berates the nobility for their sinful lives often in the book, but the sermon he says he heard from the sultan (100-102) is probably the strongest statement of this sort in the work. And when the sultan has finished, Mandeville adds some more complaints of his own. For evidence that the Travels was looked upon as a moral treatise and was often bound with such works, see Bennett's appendix on MSS and editions, pp. 265 ff.; and Seymour, "The English Manuscripts," 172-75.
15. Rediscovery, pp. 51-52. In their critical notes, Hamelius and Seymour cite reports of eye-witnesses who saw the apple in the statue's hand; also see the long note on the matter in The Buke of John Maundevill, ed. George F. Warner, Roxburghe Club (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1889), p. 158. The notes in Warner's edition of the Egerton MS are invaluable.
16. It is difficult to say when the Latin words malum and pomum began to mean apples specifically and not just fruit in general; at least by the twelfth century the forbidden fruit had been translated as meaning apple (as in the sculpture of Eve in St. Lazarus Cathedral at Autun). The metaphor of the fallen world as an apple could only occur once the fruit Eve and Adam ate had been understood to be an apple. Richard of St. Victor relates lust of the eyes to the apple (Sermo 43, PL 177: 1015). Nicholas Bozon (c. 1300) says the world is like a cedar-apple-sweet on the outside but bitter within; see Les Contes Moralisés de Nicole Bozon Frère Mineur, ed. L. T. Smith and P. Meyer (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1889), p. 109. The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS, O.S. 217 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942) equates the apple with the world and opposes it to heaven (p.80). Mandeville, like Bozon, mentions the apple that is bitter within from the cinders God rained down on Sodom (74). In Piers Plowman we are told that "Adam and Eue eten apples vnrosted" (B, V, 612); see also St. Erkenwald, 1. 295; Cleanness, 1. 241; and Pearl, 1. 640.
17. There is a succinct explanation of the growth of this popular medieval legend by Hugo Rahner, "The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries," in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, ed. Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXX, Vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 369 ff., esp. 384-85.
18. These features are found variously on the Ebsdorf and Hereford maps. Seymour (Cotton edition, p. 258) mentions some other maps that may have been available to Mandeville in Rome during his supposed visit there. There are good reproductions of the Ebsdorf and Hereford maps in Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography, rev. by R. A. Skelton (London: C.A. Watts, 1964), plates E and XXIV. Letts, Sir John Mandeville, ch. xi, has drawn a number of parallels between pictures on the Hereford map and certain descriptions found in Mandeville.
19. Mandeville's preoccupation with round objects and the roundness of the earth may have been an esoteric concern of some significance to him. There is a strange story that comes down from the sixteenth-century antiquarian, John Leland: he said that he saw an undecayed apple enclosed within a crystal orb among the relics at Becket's shrine at Canterbury and was told it had been a gift from Mandeville (Commentarii de Scriptoribus, ed. Antonius Hall [Oxford, 1709], I, 368).
20. In his edition (p. 236) Seymour says Mandeville was sharing a popular European "credulity" which genuine travelers (who reported the pyramids to be tombs) did not hold to. However, in my reading I find that a great number of medieval and Renaissance travelers, many of them otherwise reliable observers, called the pyramids the granaries of Joseph; among them were an anonymous 1350 traveler, Marino Sanuto, Frescobaldi, Sigoli, and Pero Tafur.
21. For a summary of the places usually visited in the Holy Land, see John G. Demaray, The Invention of Dante's Commedia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), ch. 1.
22. On the various associations of the three known continents with the Trinity, see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought: The Biblical Experience of the Desert in the History of Christianity and the Paradise Theme in the Theological Idea of a University (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 169-71. G. R. Crone, The World Map by Richard of Haldingham in Hereford Cathedral circa A.D. 1285 (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1954), p. 24, says the tripartite division of the earth was not a biblical concept but began with the Romans, perhaps Sallust.
23. See Eleanor Simmons Greenhill, "The Child in the Tree: A Study of the Cosmological Tree in Christian Tradition," Traditio, 10 (1954), 323-71, and esp. 335-37 on the idea of Jerusalem as the navel of the world; and Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), ch. 1.
24. Half of this passage is missing from the Cotton MS and what I have quoted here appears in another version of the Travels, the Egerton MS. I quote from Pollard's edition, which includes it (p. 83); the spelling has been modernized.
25. Fra Mauro's world map dates from the mid-fifteenth century; in placing Jerusalem off-center, he apologized for abandoning the ancient tradition; see G. R. Crone, Maps and Their Markers: An Introduction to the History of Cartography (1962; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), pp. 54-55. On Bianco's map and its implications, see R. E. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston, and George D. Painter, The Finland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 124-26.
26. Bennett, Rediscovery (p. 9 n. 14), says "Wyclif, Gower, and Higden all comment on the Englishman's love of travel, and Chaucer gives his knight that characteristic, but all of these comments were written after the Travels had begun to circulate." She does not describe the love of travel as curiositas.
27. Polychronicon, ed. Churchill Babington, Rolls Series (London: Longman and Co., 1869), II, 169.I quote from Trevisa's translation of Higden.
28. The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, EETS, E.S. 81-82 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900-1901), 11, 253.
29. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), p. 109.
30. The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W. J. B. Crotch, EETS, O.S. 176 (1928; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), p. 108.
31. The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 10.
32. M. C. Seymour's edition; see note 4 above.
33. C. W. R. D. Moseley notes that the inclusion of phrases like "I John Mandeville" occurred with more frequency as the work became more popular and more copied—although he admits that the sense of an authority addressing us is present already in the earliest versions; see "Sir John Mandeville's Visit to the Pope: The Implications of an Interpolation," Neophilologus, 54 (1970), 79.
34. Mary Lascelles, "Alexander and the Earthly Paradise in Mediaeval English Writings," MÆ, 5 (1936), 39.
35. Atiya, p. 165.
36. On Mandeville's familiarity with Alexandrian romances, see the notes in Seymour's edition (1967), pp. 209, 211, and 254.
37. Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 83-84. Polo's travel account was composed with the aid of a professional romance-writer, who may have added romance material to Polo's factual record.
38. Grover Cronin, Jr., "The Bestiary and the Mediaeval Mind-Some Complexities," MLQ, 2 (1941), 196.
39. "Prester John's Letter: A Mediaeval Utopia," Phoenix, 13 (1959), 56-57. The best recent study of the impact Prester John had on the medieval European consciousness is Vsevolod Slessarev, Prester John: The Letter and the Legend (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1959).
40. Literature and Pulpit, pp. 173-76.
41. R. J. Mitchell, The Spring Voyage: The Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458 (London: John Murray, 1964), p.42.
42. "Thomas Waleys O.P.," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 24 (1954), 74-76. The phrase "nova et inusitate" occurs in a fourteenth-century moralist's attack on curiositas in sermons; see Th.-M. Charland, Artes Praedicandi: Contribution à l'Histoire de le Rhétorique au Moyen Age (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), p. 316.
43. Gulliver's Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert David (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), II, 71.
44. The Itineraries of William Wey, ed. G. Williams, Roxburghe Club (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1857), I, appendix.
45. Morton W. Bloomfield, "Chaucer's Sense of History," JEGP, 51 (1952), 310-11.
46. Hamelius was convinced that Mandeville's book embodied a running attack on the papacy, and he argued that Mandeville was possessed of a covert unorthodoxy; see his commentary and notes, passim. Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and Its Social Foundations (Warsaw: Panstwowe W. Naukowe, 1956), p. 196, finds in the Travels a deliberate burlesquing of the Christian religion. See Howard, "The World of Mandeville's Travels," for another theory of what Mandeville was trying to do in polarizing Eastern and Western religions.
47. For a short summary of classical and medieval opinion on the shape of the earth, see Charles W. Jones, "The Flat Earth," Thought, 9 (1934), 296-307.
48. Bennett observes: "Mandeville's assumption that the laws of nature operate on the other side of the world is a fundamental part of his belief that it is possible to sail all the way around it" (Rediscovery, p. 36).
49. Nicole Oresme le livre du ciel et du monde, ed. Albert D. Menut and Alexander J. Denomy, trans. Albert D. Menut (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), pp. 576-77.
50. See Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance, p. 24, Bennett, ch. 15, and Moseley's forthcoming study.
51. Toscanelli corresponded with Columbus (who read Mandeville); Columbus also was stirred by d'Ally's remarks (c. 1414) that the ocean might be navigable, if winds were fair. On the indirect influence of Mandeville and late-medieval geographical thinkers on those of Columbus's generation, see Thomas Goldstein, "Geography in Fifteenth-Century Florence," in Merchants and Scholars: Essays in the History of Exploration and Trade, ed. John Parker (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1965), pp. 9-32.
52. See Arthur C. Cawley, "'Mandeville's Travels': A Possible New Source," N&Q, N.S. 19 (1972), 47-48; he finds in Macrobius a likely source for Mandeville's comments on the antipodeans (ch. XX).
53. Imago Mundi by Petrus Ailliacus, trans. Edwin F. Keaver (Wilmington, N.C., 1948), ch. 7; The Wanderings of Felix Fabri (London: Palestine Pilgrims' Text Society, 1897), III, 376.
54. For a full explanation of this problem, see Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 54-55; Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1949), pp. 113 ff.; and Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 233 ff.
55. Scholars have not pinned down the source of Mandeville's tale of the Norwegian who twice circumnavigated the globe, although it has been suggested that Adam of Bremen (or some other writer who mentioned accounts of early voyagers) could have reminded Mandeville of Viking sailors. Any number of sources, oral or written, might exist. I am currently preparing a study on the probable influence of Gautier de Metz's Image du Monde on Mandeville's notions and especially on Mandeville's anecdote. It may be that the now lost Inventio Fortunatae, a written account of a voyage by an Englishman (possibly Nicholas of Lynne) to the Arctic area during the mid-fourteenth century, was known to Mandeville and influenced him on this whole issue of circumnavigation.
56. Seymour, introduction, p. xvii.
57. The phrase occurs in an account contained in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, ed. Christopher Dawson (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 93.
58. For a convenient representation, see plate 89 in D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer : Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962).
59. Relations des Quatre Voyages Entrepris par Christophe Colomb …, ed. M. F. de Navarrete (Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, 1828), III, 32.
60. On the tradition that Eden lay opposite Jerusalem, see Charles S. Singleton, "A Lament for Eden," in Journey to Beatrice: Dante Studies 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 141-58. For a summary of traditional views about Eden as a remote or nonexistent spot, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), ch. 1; and on Mandeville as representative of the medieval view about terrestrial Eden, see Howard Rollins Patch, The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 164-73.
61. See Moseley, note 33 above. Whatever the "tretys" was that Mandeville says he showed the pope on the way home-and assuming he might have stopped at Avignon, if not Rome-it obviously was not the finished version of the Travels. It is clear from the Prologue and the last chapter that while the work may have been sketched out by the man during his journeys (and perhaps shown to the pope in some rough draft), the complete book was, as Mandeville says at the end, "fulfilled" later. Of course, if the author never traveled or never visited the pope, all this is just more of the apparatus of the fiction.
62. The Discovery of Guiana, in Voyages and Travels Ancient and Modern, ed. Charles E. Eliot (Boston: The Harvard Classics, 1920), pp. 359-60. See Bennett, Rediscovery, p. 245.
63. Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 82-84; Seymour, "The English Manuscripts of Mandeville 's Travels," 200 (the Travels bound with Chaucer's Astrolabe); and Bennett, Rediscovery, p. 299 (the Travels bound with the Philobiblon).
64. The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Vilhjalmur Stefansson (London: The Argonaut Press, 1938), II, 77.
65. Pseudodoxia Epidemica, in The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), II, 54.
66. See Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (1947; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), p. 86.
67. See Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 237-38 (on More), pp. 255-56 (on Swift); see W. T. Jewkes, "The Literature of Travel and the Mode of Romance in the Renaissance," in Literature as a Mode of Travel (New York: The New York Public Library, 1963), pp. 13-30; C. W. R. D. Moseley, "Richard Head's 'The English Rogue': A Modern Mandeville?" YES, 1 (1971), 102-7; and Moseley's "The Lost Play of Mandeville," The Library, Series 5, 25 (1970), 46-49.
68. Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. George B. Hill (New York: Harper & Bros., 1897), II, 387.
69. Commentarii, pp. 366-67.
70. The name "Mandeville" and the various dates mentioned in the manuscript versions continue to be major targets for those intent on figuring out the author's identity. Beazley (III, 320-2 l)-apparently following a suggestion of Warner's-remarked that perhaps the name Mandeville was derived from a satirical French romance, Mandevie, written by one Jean du Pin about 1340. Seymour repeats this idea and also notes that the date Mandeville gives as his time of departure from England—Michaelmas Day (September 29), 1322—was probably taken from the itinerary of William of Boldensele, another fourteenth-century traveler (introduction, p. xvi).
71. Letts, Sir John Mandeville (p. 125), notes that in one eighteenth-century edition of the Travels the date 1372, which appears in some fourteenth-century versions of the work, was inadvertently altered to read 1732; and there is a remark in that edition to the effect that "Mandeville is turned into another Gulliver." Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726, the year after the famous first printing of the Cotton MS version of Mandeville.
72. Lewis, p. 144.
73. On this point see William J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), ch. 2.
74. Smalley, "Robert Holcot O.P.," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 26 (1956), 82.
75. Letters from Petrarch, trans. Morris Bishop (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1966), p. 261.
76. "The Discoveries and the Humanists," in Merchants and Scholars, p. 40.