John Mandeville - The travels of Sir John Mandeville

When Leonardo da Vinci left Milan for France in 1499, he had an inventory made of his library. His books reflected his wide interests, and the depth of his reading. He owned several books on natural history, on the sphere, on the heavens. But out of the multitude of travel accounts Leonardo could have had, in MS or from the new printing press, the list records only the one: Mandevilles Travels. At about the same time, Columbus (according to Andrs Bernldez Life) was treating Mandeville with great seriousness as a source of information on China and the East while he prepared for his voyage; and in 1576 a copy of the Travels was with Frobisher as he nosed into Baffin Bay. The number of people who relied on the Travels for practical geographical information in the two centuries after it first appeared demands that we give it serious attention if we want to understand the late medieval and Renaissance mental picture of the world. But in 1605 Bishop Joseph Hall can speak of whetstone leasings [lies] of old Mandeville; in 1640 Richard Brome can hang a satiric comedy (The Antipodes) designed for the popular theatre entirely on the book which suggests just how widely it was known and assume (rightly) that virtually nobody then would regard it seriously. The dismissive attitude to it that prevailed through most of the last century descends from this later tradition; but the Travels astonishing popularity (continuing even after it had ceased to command respect as a work of information) can be shown to depend on genuine merits. Ironically, both the earlier uncritical acceptance and that later dismissal are based on a distorted view of what the author seems to have been trying to achieve.

The Travels first began circulating between 1356 and 1366. Originally written in French, by 1400 some version was available in every major European language; by 1500, the number of MSS was vast including Czech, Danish, Dutch and Irish versions and some three hundred survive. (For comparison, Polos Divisament dou Monde, of c. 1298, is represented in about seventy.) The many early printed editions, incunabula, indicate both the importance attached to it and its appeal to printers seeking profit in the new trade.

The MS history is extremely complicated. Briefly, the MSS divide into two groups, a Continental and an Insular version. (The Anglo-Norman variety of French was still current in English aristocratic circles.) The Insular version does not mention a story in the Continental which links the author with one Dr Jean de Bourgogne (author of an extant treatise De Pestilentia) and a wordy, industrious Lige notary, Jean dOutremeuse. There is no serious doubt that dOutremeuse handled a text and considerably influenced the scribal tradition of the Continental version, but there is not a shred of evidence to compel the conclusion that Mandeville was either de Bourgognes or dOutremeuses nom de plume, as was confidently suggested at the end of the nineteenth century. If dOutremeuse is unreliable (as we know him to be from elsewhere) and if the references to de Bourgogne depend on dOutremeuse, one might be inclined, with proper caution, to regard the earliest MSS of the Insular version as closer to the authors original. (The parent MS from which the Insular Version derives could of course have been written on the Continent.) But here is not the place to go into this complex matter.

So who was Mandeville? Despite much scholarly ingenuity, nothing is known of the author apart from what he tells us or may be deduced from his book and he is certainly creating a fictional