[In the excerpt below, Seymour comments on style and structure in Mandeville's Travels and places the work in the context of medieval literature.]

Mandeville's Travels was written in French on the Continent, possibly at Liège and probably not by an Englishman, about 1357. Nothing else is known, and little more can be inferred, about the immediate origins of the book. None of the various attempts to pierce the author's anonymity, which began in the fourteenth century at Liège and which have successively associated the book with Jean de Bourgogne, a Liège physician (d. 1372), and Jean d'Outremeuse, a Liège notary (d. 1399), as well as with the author's adopted name, will bear critical examination.

The book was immediately successful. Approximately 250 manuscripts survive to attest its tremendous popularity. Within a hundred years it had been translated, often many times, into Latin, English, High and Low German, Danish, Czech, Italian, Spanish, and Irish; it had been abridged and epitomized for widely differing audiences, and even turned into an English metrical romance; and in almost every part of Europe successive editions began to appear as soon as printing presses were set up. In England alone five distinct versions are known to have circulated in manuscript, alongside one French and four independent Latin versions, and Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde printed at least four separate editions in the reign of Henry VII.

The fascination of Mandeville's Travels is not hard to understand. In an easily digestible form it made available the newly discovered wonders of the East and, plentifully supplied with fable, it satisfied without wearying both the seeker of knowledge and the lover of marvels; as the author rightly claimed (p.228), 'men seyn alleweys that newe thinges and newe tydynges ben plesant to here'. Moreover, a large part of the book is concerned with a description of the Holy Land, a perennial source of interest as the author noted (p. 3), and his essential Catholicism, at once pious and tolerant in the best medieval tradition, must have seemed especially attractive to a world divided by self-interest and heresy. This many-sided appeal is reflected in the various abridgements which appeared in the fifteenth century; for some the book was a fascinating storehouse of fable, for others an apparently genuine guide to the Holy Land, for others a theme for moral exhortation, while in England especially the romantic interest attaching to a seemingly historical knight adventurer (who perhaps served as the model for Chaucer's verray parfit gentil knyght) rivalled the popularity of the traditional heroes of romance. At all points the book touched contemporary life—indeed, in a very real sense, it is itself an epitome of the later Middle Ages—and it furnished a splendid and spectacular example of God's plenty.

It is perhaps ironical that this exotic book should over-shadow the popularity of Marco Polo's Divisament dou Monde, and that the genuine and truthful traveller should be dubbed Il Milione, a liar who described everything in millions, while the fictitious 'Mandeville' should be believed by all. For Mandeville's Travels is a compilation at second-hand of other mens' travels and contains a sufficient number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies to make it extremely improbable that its author ever left his native Europe.

The chief source of Mandeville's Travels was a series of French translations of genuine itineraries, completed by Jean le Long, monk of St. Omer, 150 miles from Liège, and justly styled 'the Hakluyt of the Middle Ages', in 1351. The major works in this huge compilation were the account of the Holy Land by William of Boldensele (1336), the description of the East by the Franciscan missionary Odoric of Pordenone (1330), and Haiton's Fleurs des Histoires d'Orient (before 1308); of which Jean le Long followed Nicholas Falcon's Latin translation. These travellers were factual and accurate observers and 'Mandeville' copied large extracts from their writings (slightly distorted by scribes and translators) into his own book.

'Mandeville' used several other sources, particularly the medieval encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1250), which was based on earlier compilations (such as those of Solinus and Isidore of Seville) and preserved verbatim lengthy quotations from classical and earlier medieval writings. The reverence for the written word was such that virtually any account could be uncritically transcribed and believed, and thus the monsters of classical antiquity (the dog-headed men, the basilisk-eyed women, and the rest) found their way into Mandeville's Travels. Perhaps the most curious example of this uncritical repetition is the description of the 'isle' in the land of Prester John (p. 208) where the incestuous inhabitants derive, by way of Vincent of Beauvais, from the ancient Britons described by Caesar. And elsewhere this unwary approach is responsible for two descriptions of Ceylon, variously called Silha (p. 144) and Taprobane (p. 218) in different sources.

Yet, given the intellectual climate of the time, 'Mandeville' himself cannot be harshly criticized for reproducing these absurdities. And when due allowance is made for such exceptions and for those scribal contaminations which distort all medieval books, it may be fairly claimed that Mandeville's Travels accurately incorporates much, indeed most, of medieval knowledge of the world. The belief that the world is round, for example, a doctrine that had been reborn in the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, and which 'Mandeville' did much to popularize, is explained in great detail (pp. 132-7), and many of the marvels which more cynical generations have mocked, such as the annual running of spawning fish (p. 141), have a substantial basis of fact. Thus, the reputation of the father of lies' which 'Mandeville' has enjoyed since the eighteenth century is misleading. Though there is much in the book which may not be credited, such as the author's statement that he drank at the miraculous Well of Youth (p. 124), it is incontrovertible that 'Mandeville' himself and his contemporaries believed implicitly in the wonders that he recorded.

To support this structure of marvellous fact 'Mandeville' chose to erect an entirely fictitious framework. He tells us that he was born and bred at St. Albans, that he left England on Michaelmas Day (29 September) 1322, and that, having served both the Sultan and the Great Khan and visited most of the known world, he wrote his book from memory while incapacitated by arthritic gout. And throughout the work this engaging fiction is supported by a number of personal avowals, disclaimers, and protestations, most notably perhaps his acceptance of the justice of the Sultan's strictures on evil-living Christians (pp. 100-1). None of this is true. The date of departure is taken from William of Boldensele's letter of dedication to his patron, Cardinal Talleyrand-Périgord; the name 'Mandeville' is probably borrowed from the satiric French romance le Roman de Mandevie, written about 1340; the service in the court of the Great Khan is copied from Odoric; and so on. The pretence is skilfully maintained by brief references to England, and even today exercises its force on the unwary. In its own day scribes and translators felt its fascination and cheerfully interpolated a horde of spurious detail, such as a dedication to Edward III and the story of the visit to the Pope at Rome (pp. 228-9).

This marrying together of medieval fact and fiction seems at first sight a monstrous paradox, which critics have been at pains to explain. Some have seen 'Mandeville' as a deep and mocking satirist, others as an arch/heretic seeking to undermine the power of the Pope, others as a consummate artist bent on creating a literary masterpiece, others as the creator of prose fiction, and others as the perpetrator of the biggest literary hoax in history. All these views are purblind. Any critic who ignores the essential accuracy of the book betrays a naïveté more than medieval. The spur of fame and prosperity is not relevant to the writing of an anonymous work in the Middle Ages, and though it is possible that the author was inspired by the example of some genuine traveller, Marco Polo for instance, it seems most probable that Mandeville's Travels was designed as a popular encyclopaedia where the narrator should, like the Dreamer in Piers Plowman or Dante Alighieri, hold together the various threads of knowledge. The idea of the fictional narrator was slowly maturing in the European consciousness and in the later Middle Ages was used increasingly, in and out of the pulpit, to teach wayward man the road to wisdom. As the Nun's Priest says, in a pointed paraphrase of Romans xv. 4,

For Seint Poul seith that al that written is
To oure doctrine it is ywrite, ywis,

and however personal his immediate motives might be, every medieval writer was vividly aware of this essential purpose.

In such a context the problem of the anonymity of Mandeville's Travels, which has bedevilled literary criticism of the work for far too long, is no longer crucial. In a medieval community to make available a vernacular and easily read abridgement of diverse accounts of the wonders of the world was a charitable office which was its own reward, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the author's final prayer: 'Wherefore I preye to alle the rederes and hereres of this boke, yif it plese hem, that thei wolde preyen to God for me.' A close and illuminating parallel is provided by Caxton, whose Preface to Le Morte Darthur, for example, attests both the piety and the concern for the common good, expressed by the same quotation of St. Paul, which are the hallmarks of medieval literary endeavour.

The structure of Mandeville's Travels is eminently suited to an edited selection of other men's writings. The book 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. There are even moments of sustained personal drama, in the colloquy with the Sultan and the journey through the Valley Perilous (pp. 100-1, 203-5) for example. But over all there is no intense preoccupation with the form of the book. The author's sense of control is easy and unobtrusive, perhaps for the most part even unpremeditated. He chose from his sources what seemed to him to be of most interest; the routes to the Holy Land, for example, are described in much more detail than those to the East; and the final impression of the book is one of natural selection. To praise this naturalness as consummate artistry, as some have done, is misleading. The author frequently copies lengthy verbatim extracts from his sources and rarely, if ever, moves far from his authorities, even though this restriction leads him at times into repetition and confusion. If the book pleases, it is because its contents appeal to the reader in exactly the same way as they appealed to the educated and gentle author. There is no more studied artistry in Mandeville's Travels than there is in, say, Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Both are, within their general framework, and mutatis mutandis, the spontaneous productions of lively minds, which speak across the centuries with an engaging and stimulating freshness.

The style of Mandeville's Travels reflects this ease and unobtrusiveness. Just as the author journeys from land to land and from story to story with little more than geographical direction, so he writes in a simple, unselfconscious manner, entirely free from rhetorical ornament and stylistic device; in both cases offering a close parallel to Huckleberry Finn adrift on the Mississippi. Where the reader finds 'Mandeville' obscure or contorted, even in passages like the calculations of astrology which determine the size of the globe (pp. 133-7) by concepts and terms unfamiliar today, it is always because of distortion by scribe or translator. Yet here also it is misleading to think in terms of a conscious and independent artist deliberately reshaping his material. 'Mandeville' wrote in the familiar descriptive idiom of his time, the doulz franceys justly admired throughout fourteenth-century Europe for its precision and grace, and he was untrammelled by, and probably unaware of, any need for allegorical or stylistic conceit. He was, it is true, always concerned with an immediate clarity, at pains to explain the unfamiliar, and carefully glossing exotic words and phrases; but his explanations are exactly phrased in the terms of his sources (themselves often derivative and generally in translation). Thus, when he appears most vivid, for example in the description of the crocodile (p. 144)— 'and whan thei gon be places that ben grauelly, it semeth as though men hadde drawen a gret tree thorgh the grauelly place'—he is most derivative. In the same manner as Robert Burton, whose habit of incorporating extensive and unacknowledged quotation from earlier writers into the Anatomie of Melancholy has betrayed more than one critic into absurdity, 'Mandeville' sweeps his drag-net across the styles of many men and many centuries. The clarity and freshness of Mandeville's Travels are undeniable and are often reflected in the many non-French versions of the book, but they are essentially the characteristics not so much of the author as of his age.

In England this caveat is especially necessary. Though he is no longer praised as 'the father of English prose', 'Mandeville' is still in some quarters held in high repute as a stylist. In fact, the earliest English translation (an abridged text known as the Defective Version) is a workmanlike rendering made before 1400, but in no way superior to any other contemporary translation from the French, such as the Book of the Knight of the Tour Landry; and the conflation based on it, the Cotton Version (which has held the field since 1725, and is printed in this edition), is decidedly inferior. The conflator had an unhappy command of French idiom and produced more mistranslations and clumsy renderings of gallicisms (as the Textual Commentary shows) than any of his contemporaries whose work is still extant.

None the less, Mandeville's Travels is a deservedly popular and entertaining book. More than any other work, it popularized many of the facts and fictions of our classical inheritance—the representation of the True Cross in the banana, the weeping crocodile, 'the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders', and a hundred other colourings of popular imagination, draw their strength from Mandeville's Travels; and in Thomas East's 1568 edition of the Defective Version, which maintained its dominance for two centuries, it fertilized the minds and kindled the hearts of generations of poets and playwrights. Inevitably and perhaps reluctantly men have had to bid farewell to the griffon and the hippocentaur and the other monstrous inhabitants of the isles in the Great Ocean Sea, and Mandeville's Travels has become something of a fairy tale in consequence. It is a sad fate. The great Eastern travellers of the Middle Ages, Marco Polo and Friar Odoric and their fellows, made possible the great sea voyages of the Renaissance, and 'Mandeville' was, more than any other, their trumpeter. When the Santa Cruz sighted land on 12 October 1492, a copy of Mandeville's Travels lay beside Marco Polo's book in the admiral's day-cabin, a not ignoble destiny for a work designed as a popular encyclopaedia, and one which might well give pause to those tempted to dismiss it as 'a fanciful narrative of superstitious ignorance'. For as in its own day Mandeville's Travels was the most popular secular book in circulation, so it remains one of the most endearing monuments of medieval civilization.