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• 1 media/Screen Shot 2021-05-31 at 12.22.29 PM.png 2015-06-18T14:51:14-07:00 The Book of John Mandeville 19 image_header 2023-05-08T17:08:26-07:00

  The Book of John Mandeville (c. 1356-1360)
  
  Compiled in the mid-fourteenth century, the notorious Book of John Mandeville had a lasting effect on European understanding of world geography well into the eighteenth century.
  
  This medieval bestseller was translated into English, Latin, Spanish, German Dutch, Bohemian, Danish, and Gaelic. The oldest surviving copy, written in an Anglicized French, is dated to 1371. As with the Letter of Prester John, the Book of John Mandeville resists easy generic classification, with readers describing the text with terms including 'livre', 'geste', 'romant', 'tractatus', 'itenerarium', 'voiage' and 'trauayle' (Niayesh, 160). 
  
  Written from the persona of an almost certainly fictional English knight, "Mandeville" relates a highly imaginative journey from England to the gates of the Earthly Paradise and back (for "Mandeville" understood the world as round). Round as Mandeville's world was, the spiritual and geographical "center" remained in Jerusalem, often quipped to be the "navel" of the world during the European Middle Ages. As Rosemary Tzanaki (p.11) writes, The Book of John Mandeville depicts a "religious geography" with Jerusalem at its center, "stressing the unity of this world through its very diversity." 
  
  In his journey to the locales furthest away from Jerusalem, approaching that Earthly Paradise from which "Mandeville" finds himself barred, he journeys through Pantaxore, his name for the realm of Prester John. Referencing the theory of the antipodes, "Mandeville" comments that this land of Pantaxore lies "foot agaynst foot to Englonde." 
  
  Mandeville's version of the Prester John legend integrates the European knowledge of the Mongol Empire into the story of Prester John, even inventing a ceremony in which Prester John's daughter is ceremoniusly wed to the "grete Chane" and vice versa. 
  
  In the early seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas, an armchair traveler himself, declared Mandeville "the greatest Asian traveler that ever the world had" (qtd. in Silverberg, p. 148). The renowned British geographer Richard Hakluyt, a contemporary of Purchas, referred to Mandeville in his Principall Navigations as "eruditum et insignem Authorem" [erudite and distinguished author]  (Brooks, p. 88). 
  
  Although a highly dubious travel tale, the influence of Mandeville's geographical lore on European cultural understanding of the wider world is immense: Niayesh, referencing the text's immense influence on later travelers, dubs the Mandeville character as the "knight of transmission" (155). Above all, this text remained impactful for its skillful weaving together of earlier travel narratives and its contention of a global Christendom. 
  
  Mandeville casts Prester John as the famed figurehead of an unknowable realm through which the belief he clearly inspired may persist. The book clearly cribs from earlier travel narratives and encyclopedias--including the writings of Vincent of Beauvais, John of Plano Carpini, Ascelin of Lombardia, William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, and Odoric of Pordenone-- but often expands on those accounts through a clear desire to entertain. Though the literary value of Mandeville’s text itself has been debated, its influence on later medieval literary texts cannot be denied.
  
  Mandeville returns Prester John to his former glory, as detailed by Heng (p. 134):

  An influential travel romance like Mandeville’s Travels, which strategically prefers to emphasize the older, nostalgically legendary aura of Prester John, also shrewdly prefers to underemphasize the Nestorian character of the Christianity anchored into place by the localization of the Prester John story in preceding thirteenth- and fourteenth-century historical accounts. While allowing for some variation of doctrine and practice from the Latin Church, in Prester John’s empire, the Travels vigorously underscores the ultimately universal principles of Christianity shared in common with John’s people—the most important commonalities of faith and devotion— and celebrates the piety and virtue of John’s folk: “This emperor Prester John is a Christian man, and the most part of his land also, if all be it so that they have not all the articles of our belief so clearly as we have. Nonetheless they believe in God, Father and Son and Holy Ghost; and full devout men they are and true each one to the other, and there is neither with them fraud nor guile.

  By emphasizing the devout Christianity of Prester John’s people, and winking at their Nestorian difference, then, the Travels is able to present John’s empire, in its Christian ideality, as a heterotopian mirror for Europe: a mirror in which Europe might see an exotic version of itself,  dressed up as a successful Christian empire that happens to be located elsewhere. Simultaneously John’s domain is also conspicuously partnered with the Khan’s imperial domain in such a way as to suggest that John’s realm functions as a kind of Christian threshold to the Khanate, a counterpart-in-empire that mimics the Great Khan’s vast imperial enterprise" (281).

  The history of the Mandeville text is complex and, for many, there is no one preferred edition. The most complete edition probably remains Malcolm Letts’ edition and translation of the Egerton text.
  
  For a succinct summary of the publication history of the Travels, see the first footnote in Moseley.
  
  For more on the text, see Kohanski and Benson’s introduction to the TEAMS edition, available here.
  
  Read the Middle English text online.
  Read a modernized translation online.