Mandeville’s Travels,[1] now largely forgotten, or, at best, dismissed by most people as quaint, was for several centuries beyond question one of the most read, and one of the most respected, secular books of the later Middle Ages. But such are the vagaries of time and taste that I have to assume that few who read this essay will have read the book before they read that last sentence.
The author taking leave, in pilgrim garb, of a king of England. (Livre de Merveilles, BN fr 2810, ca. 1403; accessed 31 July 2021).
Ostensibly a record of a journey to the Far East by an English knight in the middle years of the fourteenth century, by 1500 it had been translated from its original Anglo-Norman French into pretty well every European vernacular, into Latin several times, and reworked in many forms, from picture book to poem—even to drama.[2] Well over 300 MSS survive from before 1500—more than three times the number surviving of Marco Polo’s account of his 20 year sojourn in China. Polo, as it happens, had a century’s start and was the only other major account of the East available to the period. With the advent of printing copies of the Travels not only multiplied exceedingly but acquired an even wider distribution, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in England at least, it was, with Chaucer, Gower and Piers Plowman, one of the very few mediaeval non-religious vernacular books frequently, indeed regularly, re-issued.[3] Printers do not print for fun: there was money in those books.
I have been reading Mandeville’s book—we may as well call the author that— and the many versions—isotopes, in Ian Higgins’ striking and perceptive image[4]—of it for many years. Its demonstrable influence on readers as widely spaced as Bohemia and Iceland and as different as Columbus and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Richard Frobisher, make it a major cultural phenomenon. But interesting, engrossing, as that afterlife may be, I keep returning to the earliest versions we have,[5] drawn back time and again by the dry wit and wisdom of the book. I wish I had known its author, which is always a good test of a book.
But who was he? In St Albans Cathedral, on a pillar of the north arcade of the nave, there is a memorial to one Sir John Mandeville. It is not early, and is in fact a seventeenth century memorial to a probably mediaeval memorial which once stood there to Mandeville the traveller. It reflects a tradition of this man as the author of the Travels which was certainly current there in 1405, when Thomas Walsingham mentions it in his chronicle. But in the church of the Guillemins (demolished in 1904) in Liège, there was another memorial, which tells a quite different tale, involving a certain doctor Jean de Bourgogne (whose treatise De Pestilentia survives), and residence at Liège until his death in 1371. In 1921, Paul Hamelius[6] stated roundly that John Mandeville was a pseudonym of one Jean d’Outremeuse, a notary of Liège with literary ambitions, who certainly is in some way connected with one major strand of the MS tradition of the Travels. But Hamelius gave no evidence, or motive, for such an author to pretend to be noble, and English… And there has been speculation and academic quarrelling ever since. For nobody, despite the best efforts of Josephine Waters Bennett and many others,[7] has been able finally to produce the body and agree on who wrote the book.
It may well have been written in Flanders, and its author certainly had the resources of a very good library. He may well have been a cleric.[8] But while hunting authors may be fun, and a pleasant donnish pastime for a wet afternoon, who really wrote it matters actually not a jot. What does is that nobody for nearly 400 years doubted the substantial truth of the St Albans memorial, or the references the author makes in the book to himself as an English knight—plausible enough, for in the fourteenth century the class of milites literati was growing rapidly. For all that time “Mandeville” was real enough for all his readers.[9] Indeed, so little being known of him made it possible for William Warner to build a sugary romance of disappointed love round him, in a book printed in edition after expanded edition celebrating Englishness and English achievements.[10]
But someone, a real man, did write it. I find myself often thinking about him, long dead. I think about the physicality and difficulty of writing a very big book, wondering what drove him, and how he was responding to the tumultuous events, bitter ideological quarrels and epistemological doubts of his dreadful century. If “who” is too much to ask for, can we think about what he might he have been? I wish I could get inside his head as he sat, perhaps in a cloister where the sun would warm the wall by his shoulder—after all, daylight matters as there was no artificial light to speak of—at a tall desk, which sloped steeply so that when he wrote the ink did not run off the quill and blot. I think of him making his own ink of iron gall and copperas, sharpening his scratchy quill with the penner hanging at his girdle. I think of the parchment on its cushion giving ever so slightly to the pressure of the feather, rebounding slightly as the quill was lifted after each word. He would have been cold as the days cooled towards autumn: and he says he was an old man and had arthritis.
He read and borrowed a vast amount—nearly all (not quite) of his book can be shown to be derived from others[11]—but that his material already existed in other books does not mean that it does not become new when in a new context in a new book. Such research does not of itself rule out real experience of travel, at least as far as Outremer. After all, many people of all ranks did so travel in the period, and just as Polo and Mandeville used material from other people’s books to flesh out their own work, so Mandeville’s was used by later travellers we can actually name.[12] To the Utter East, though? Highly unlikely, not wholly impossible, but by no means as easy it had been for the Franciscans in the previous century at the apogee of the Mongol Empire. But, once more, it hardly matters: the fact that for centuries people believed he had done makes a truth of a sort, and it is the authority of a supposed eyewitness that matters in the book. It is that narrator who gives unity to the vast amount of disparate material and whose discreet asides and comments construct a believable personality to which one can relate and whom one can trust. Yet that may be an issue.
Something must have been pretty imperative to make him write, and I make a few unprovable suggestions at the end of this essay. If he was a layman, he had a lot of energetic legwork in libraries to do before he could sharpen a quill. If he was a Benedictine, vowed to stabilitas loci in a place with a good library, his usual writing task would have been to make copies of Scripture or Classical authors or commentaries. His book is none of these. What was he trying to do? Forget profit—that does not work in a patronage culture, and, if the authorship is fictitious (even if it is not), forget fame. Why pretend (if pretence it is) to be English, and a knight, and from St Albans? No clear answers are ever likely. All we have is the book.
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But for the time being let’s forget all that, and go back to the story the book tells and which for 300 years people of all walks of life substantially believed (things began to change around 1600).
This book is certainly encyclopaedic: the author made it as full and as up to date an account of knowledge of the world as he could. It is a magnificent piece of haute vulgarisation, whatever other claims it has. It offers also (at least in part) a sort of prospectus for pilgrimages to the Holy Land.[13] But very unusually it is cast as a convincing first-person pilgrimage narrative, where the subtly characterised narrator engages in discussion with people he meets about what he does not understand—or about what he thinks he does! This wholly believable personality—persona—gives the book not only its unifying device but also its unique (not a word to be used lightly) charm. There is nothing else like it in mediaeval literature in any language.
Mandeville opens conventionally and informatively enough with the ways to the Holy Land and the need for Europe to pull itself together and for its princes to stop quarrelling, and recover the Holy Land from Islam—which, as it happens, the narrator stresses could teach Christians a thing or two about charity and devotion. The crusade—which is after all an armed pilgrimage—is still very much a live issue in the period. In the Holy Land—a land of Book and myth, where the remote happened for all time—the book does the utterly expected thing of itemising the sites, with their Biblical events, the relation of each to each, and the benefits from visiting them.[14] But on the way thither Mandeville gives a pretty sympathetic account of the Jacobite/Nestorian and Greek Orthodox churches, and quotes verbatim the peremptory and telling reply that the latter supposedly made to John XXII’s demand for their submission to Rome.[15] More unexpectedly he also includes stories, some with an element of the enchanted in them, all of which could have come out of any romance. All of them he makes into some sort of understated moral test. And not only does he give one of the least rabid descriptions of Islam I know of in the period, but also an account, again supposedly verbatim, of the withering reply the ‘Sultan of Babylon’—Cairo—made to the narrator’s own description of the behaviour of Christian Europe. This trope is not new,[16] and it will run and run at least until it finds a home in Brobdingnag when Gulliver calls. But in context it rounds off what has so far been only implied: European, Latin, Christians—we are after all talking about Christendom—are very ready to see themselves as superior to other confessions, cultures and faiths, but the tables can most certainly be turned when all is Said and done. At the centre of the book he tells the story of Job, who “was a paynim” (p.115) but whom “God loveth”—and near the end of the book (p.180) we have another mention of that virtuous pagan. That mere repetition may well suggest unease with the doctrine, Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus,[17] made de Fide by the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 and confirmed a few years before Mandeville’s stated year of departure (1322 or 1332, depending on the version) by Boniface VIII (1302).
In the second half of the book we are Outside. Of this remote part of the world very little was known directly in Europe, and Chinese whispers made even the few first-hand accounts of China from the Franciscan travellers (and the occasional merchant like Polo) into a very odd picture indeed. On that remote Outside, the macrospace as distinct from the well-known microspace nearer home and real experience, could be inscribed of all sorts of fables and stories, and in a mentalité where no story was not moral, no creature not symbolic.[18] We are in the world of Mappaemundi, like the one that survives at Hereford Cathedral (c. 1300), a moral, symbolic, map[19] inscribed with the Mirabilia Mundi traditional since Pliny and Solinus.
The Hereford Map (ca. 1300), in Hereford Cathedral (Wikimedia Commons).
Such maps are narrative, illustrating the legends of the Trees of the Sun and Moon that spoke to Alexander the Great and the Gymnosophists who gave him his come-uppance, the realm of the legendary Christian Emperor in the Utter East, Prester John, and the land of the Great Khan of Cathay in those “isles,” as Mandeville calls them, beyond the sunrise. All of them populate the Hereford Map. But Mandeville also gives the first European popular accounts of the Juggernaut, the Gobi Desert, of Tibet, and grand material for the fantasies of generations of artists and engravers and illuminators it all is. Mandeville’s book would not have been taken seriously had he not included what we would see as the merely fantastic legends of the far East: for Polo, who really had been there, felt that to be taken seriously he too had to include the traditional Monsters of Men—sciapods, astomi, hermaphrodites, cynocephali––and yet he was still called a liar when he gave actual details of China. Mandeville does not, however, merely relate familiar marvels. He does something very unusual with them.
From Sebastian Munster, Cosmographia (Basel, 1544): left to right, a sciapod, a female cyclops, conjoined twins, a blemmy, a cynocephalus. (Wikimedia Commons).
Are the Monsters of Men human, or simply lusi naturae? If the former, they have souls and are redeemable; if the latter, not. Augustine had made rationality the test of being human, so if these strange folk have reason, they too are Adam’s kin despite their palpable difference from ourselves. That raises theological and moral issues, disturbing then as now. For societies, groups, too often identify, reassure themselves by “othering” another group.[20] That opens the road to the expulsion of the scapegoat, it builds the railway to Auschwitz. If they look different, so much the better. But these traditional monsters, like the dog-headed men, Mandeville stresses, are “reasonable and full subtle of wit”[21]—and therefore human, therefore redeemable. Similarly, Mandeville describes societies where all Europe’s values are upended—complete sexual licence, polyandry, Amazon women running things rather well,[22] cannibalism, funeral rites in Tibet that seem a parody of the Mass[23]—and stresses that they are all are not only rational given certain other premises, but there may be Biblical authority for such values. Indeed, he goes further, stressing not only that the same nature rules everywhere, however strange things may seem, but also that while things in the East might seem weird to European eyes, exactly the same could be said if the positions were reversed.[24] As Aquinas remarked, Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur.[25]
In the end he returns home, sure that had he continued east he would have circumnavigated the whole globe, like a man to whom he had spoken. He had drunk “three or four times” from the fabled Fountain of Youth[26] (feeling afterwards “somewhat the better”), but even so he is old, has gout and arthritis. Yet he is still keen to see new things. Curiosity—so often seen as not a virtue in mediaeval moral thought[27]—has not left him.
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You can’t ignore Mandeville’s huge influence—on models of the world, on sixteenth century cartography, on the first descriptions to European readers of the strangeness of America.[28] A narrator telling of the strange land(s) he has visited becomes a regular satiric trope—for example in More’s Utopia (1516), Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (605), in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).[29] (Indeed, Swift’s progressively more radical satire—English politics, European civilisation, human folly masquerading as wisdom, the very idea of the superiority of the human to the beast—might well owe something to a similar intensification in Mandeville.) But none of that, however interesting, takes us to the heart of the book any more than you can enjoy a pudding by knowing what went into it, or how it was served. It is the engaging with a personality, fictitious or not, but convincing, that I find increasingly interesting.
The mediaeval courtly romance has a regular trajectory: the hero, usually a knight—which in the context of this discussion is interesting—leaves home, a place apparently of normality, safety, and goes far faring on some sort of quest to a place, or places, of challenge, uncertainty, testing. Nobody can predict what will happen once you get Outside—even if an audience used to the conventions will know (as the hero does not) that he will get back safe. He then returns, changed, and that earlier normality is forever gone. Mandeville’s knightly narrator follows pretty well this evolution, and that sort of quest journey is a radically unusual structure for a book of such encyclopaedic ambition. It allows him to personalise everything he found in his sources. He is careful to indicate where he is reporting what he claims himself to have seen and where “they say”—an alarm bell—is his only authority. In the second half of his book, he uses very extensively the narrative of Friar Odoric of Pordenone, but never mentions him. Instead, he constantly inserts himself into the account, frequently with some understated humour. When Odoric indignantly describes the people of Lamory as “an evil and pestilent generation,”[30] Mandeville quietly suggests that there might be a reason behind this apparent barbarism, that there is Biblical injunction for going naked and being promiscuous.[31] Even where children are bred up for the table—the ultimate human taboo on two counts—Mandeville comments, deadpan, “they say it is the best and sweetest flesh in the world.” Common is the opening, after the recounting of something strange or fantastic, “I asked them…” He asks the magicians at the court of the Great Khan how they achieve their effects, convinced that there must be a rational explanation, however marvellous their displays. He challenges the uniqueness of the Vegetable Lamb in Tartary[32] by saying (in not quite so many words), “Pooh! That’s nothing! In my country we have birds that grow on trees!”—which of course most people believed to be the case with barnacle geese until the end of the eighteenth century.
The Vegetable Lamb (fifteenth century woodcut) (Wikimedia).
He draws teasing parallels: the clergy in Tibet have a pope of sorts, to whom they are all obedient, “as our priests are to our Pope”[33]—this in the years of the Avignon Papacy! The rite sons perform for their dead fathers, drinking from their skull in their ritual memory, reminds us that to outsiders the heart of the Christian Mass with its doctrine of transubstantiation must seem equally shocking.
When he describes his talk with the Sultan,[34] he suggests not just an interview but relationship: he quietly says he has served in his army—which raises questions enough!—so well that the monarch offers him a wife of high status—"but I would not.” That modestly made boast occurs more than once: he has seen both the part of the True Cross in the Sainte Chapelle at Paris and that at Constantinople: and “…I have a thorn thereof, which looks like a hawthorn, and it was given out of great friendship”—a King’s ransom in a throwaway afterthought! (“…many of them have broken [off] and fallen down in the vessel… when men disturb the vessel to show the Crown to great lords and pilgrims…”; those pilgrims did not have a “great friend,” as he implies he must have done.[35]) He uses Odoric’s story of crossing the Vale Perilous (possibly the desert of Lop Nor). Odoric—who chanted the Credo while crossing—had seen it as a proof of his own sanctity. But Mandeville makes it a test of covetousness (for there was much tempting treasure lying about), and says two terrified Franciscans from Lombardy, who sought safety in numbers, tagged along with him. Sly: for while Mandeville nowhere acknowledges a debt to Odoric, and nor could he expect any of his readers to realise one, it is a fact that Odoric was from Lombardy… He describes the hippopotamus:
… there are many hippopotami, which live sometimes on dry land and sometimes in the water; they are half man and half horse. They eat men, whenever they can get them, no meat more readily.
“Whenever they can get them”… but as there are few men around, their gastronomic delight must be limited. This is part of a thoroughly engaging intimacy with the narrator, that persona who gives unity to the vast amount of disparate material and whose discreet comments construct a believable personality whom one can, it seems, trust. Or can we?
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Paul Hamelius called the book “an anti-papal pamphlet in disguise.” That gross oversimplification has a grain of truth. Mandeville is certainly cool about the Papacy on more than one occasion when he mentions it, but his agenda is much more profound than a mere attack on the Avignon papacy of John XXII,[36] even if that might be an implied corollary.
In the first place, one of the commonplaces of ancient and mediaeval writing is the notion of the Golden Age, when men “knew not the doctrine of ill-doing,” and peace and plenty smiled on the earth—the Eden of Genesis, Ovid’s golden Age in Metamorphoses 1. It is a cliché’d trope with which to bemoan current ills social, moral and political—Chaucer’s The Former Age, for example[37]—and to see the root of all the problems in pride and “couetyse” of which that age was innocent. In modern English “covetousness,” the word is coloured by a link to possessable things, to money, maidservants and asses, but in Middle English and French it was much closer in sense to cupiditas, which is radix malorum—the root of all evil, Pride, putting yourself first.[38] Right at the beginning of his book Mandeville makes this “couetyse” the cause of Christendom’s disarray and loss of the Holy Places, the Promised Land. In the utter East he recounts the stories of the naked philosophers, the Gymnsosophists to whom Alexander traditionally could offer nothing they could value, and of the wise “Bragmans”—Brahmins. Their societies reposition the lost ideal past into a distant present, by which the failures of Christendom are implicitly judged—as they are explicitly by the comparison with the Islamic world on the doorstep. But while Golden Age visions, literally anarchic, are all very well as absolutes, one of the constants in those myths is that they do not last: all end not in stability but fall. It was Augustine who argued that after the Fall rule and law and states were inevitable, in remedium peccatorum, to contain the effects of man’s fallenness. And so the structure of Mandeville’s book, highly critical not of Western ideals per se but of the failure to live up to them, demands that he set up models of good, united, government to set against the disarray of the West: the “royal estate of Prester John” (p.167f.) and of the Great Khan (p.141f.). Yet even here he is guarded: can any earthly Paradise ever be attained? The “Old Man of the Mountains” (p.171f.) set up a fake Paradise, drugged devout young men into believing in it, and sent them out to murder for his ends[39]: and the princes of the world destroyed it for the dangerous parody it was. Yet, in the uttermost East, the Hereford Map shows that the real Earthly Paradise still existed.[40]
Hereford Map, detail: Paradise and the four rivers. Note the Expulsion from Paradise, and the dog headed men to the right, and the Vegetable Lamb on the left (Wikimedia Commons).
Even so, says this man who claimed to have been almost everywhere on that map, “Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I have not been there” (p.184). No, and no living man can reach it, for the way by land is too hard and difficult, the rivers flowing therefrom of so strong a current no boat and survive, and the wall round it defended everywhere by ever burning fire.
Secondly, the book repositions the certainties and assumptions of Europe/Christendom into a more provisional frame—though it must be stressed that never once does the author question any of central doctrines of Christianity. His sceptical, ironic position demonstrates—“insists” would be out of character with the book’s subtlety—that truth and virtue, and good works, are not exclusive to Christians. I am reminded how later both William Langland’s Piers Plowman and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis suggest that killing Saracens is not Christ’s work, and long for the time when both Jews and Saracens will say the whole Creed and not just part of it.[41] So the book’s author must certainly be critical of the usual understanding of the doctrine of Extra ecclesiam nulla salus even though it is never openly mentioned. He stresses more than once that
…God loves them and is well pleased by their manner of life, as he was with Job, who was pagan yet nevertheless his deeds were as acceptable to God as were those of his loyal servants’(p180) men should despise no man for the difference of their laws. For we know not whom God loveth nor whom he hateth. There is no people which does not hold some of the articles of our faith. Even if they are of divers beliefs and creeds, they have some good points of our truth (p.188).
This in that century of prejudice, pogrom and persecution!
Thirdly, an increasingly noticeable subtext of the book, even when it is informing, relaying accepted “fact,” is the uncertainty of knowledge. Here the author has much in common with, for example, an almost contemporary writer like Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer’s witty, learned and hugely enjoyable Hous of Fame demonstrates the unreliability of authority, of partiality of “knowledge” and the uncertainty of certainty; his Troilus and Criseyde, a book explicitly made out of books, often in frustrated dialogue with its incomplete pretended source,[42] which confidently tells us things that the narrator could not possibly know, is a book which will become an authority, a truth, for the future, as Criseyde recognises: “alas, thise bokes wol me shende” (V. 1060). Like Chaucer’s, Mandeville’s is a book which subtly denies certainty, and stresses the provisionality of knowledge. As with Chaucer’s personae, one cannot overlook the ambiguity of this narrator, simultaneously authorising and de-authorising. Don’t believe all you are told—or read. Why should we trust Mandeville’s persona? Because we like him and we assume he is telling the truth? How do we know? After all, he is explicitly a traveller, and are not all travellers proverbially liars? Trust me, but don’t trust me: his book may be unreliable too: he says so —there is much he has not said and there will be people who will tell a different story:
… there are many marvels which I have not spoken of, for it would be too long to tell of them all. And also I do not want to say any more of marvels that are there, so that other men who go there can find new things to speak of which I have not mentioned (p.188).
But what is certain is that there is a world out there, that there is a journey to be done, and of that there is no conclusion except age and decay. And trust must be somewhere, or life is impossible.
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Whoever wrote the book, he had something pretty like genius, if only in creating so attractive and memorable a narrator—and it was at that time very unusual for an “author” to claim authorship by naming himself. But why did he write? The motive must have been compelling. After all, by any standards this book must have been a major undertaking demanding a huge amount of time not only in writing but in preparatory reading. Then we have to ask for whom he was writing. What connections, what social network did he have? Why did he write this extraordinary book in the way he did?
His choice of language is important, for he—I think we have to assume the author was male—was certainly thoroughly fluent in Latin, in which language he read widely. He writes in a clear and elegant French, with which language he was clearly at ease: and as French was the lingua franca, literally, of polite Europe, to use it must have been a deliberate choice that took his book out of any cloister and into the court, and opened it to lay folk, including women, of some status—in other words people who had leverage and power. This suggests some urgency in his mind about the importance of what he was saying.[43] Moreover, though it would not be an easy book to hear read aloud—though (p.189) he does suggest it might be—it does meld several well understood genres, some of which might indeed be so read, into something without precedent or successor:
1) romance—the knight going off on his journey quest;
2) the itinerarium to the Holy Land, a type of writing which seems on occasion to be have used as a devotional aid or aid to pilgrimage;
3) the liber mirabilium—but, the book implies, please don’t dismiss raree shows as simply raree shows: there is more in them than meets the eye;
4) “Complaint,” or satire of abuses—but that, done straight, was so old hat that its force was weakened, and matters had not got better—and after all, ecclesia semper reformanda;
5) the encyclopaedic Speculum Mundi—but no encyclopaedia was ever personalised, filtered through a sensibility, like this!
The author clearly intended a wholly unprecedented synthesis, and the mixed generic signals of this problematic and challenging hybrid destabilise the expectations of its contributing genres, challenging audiences to think outside comfortable boxes. For the book itself is what it represents, a journey to the exotic and unexpected.
Mandeville knew perfectly well that his audience would already hold certain attitudes which would affect their reception. For example, there is the cliché (deriving from Hebrews XI) of pilgrimage being an acted-out metaphor of the journey of life. But he cannot have been unaware of the ambivalent attitude of the Church to pilgrimages and what their effects might be on pilgrims. On the one hand, genuine devotion, and a major economic engine for the Church; on the other, as William Thorpe protested when examined by Archbishop Arundel in 1407, and as Chaucer demonstrates in the Canterbury Tales, “if these men and women be a month out in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be, a half year after, great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars…” And travellers are liars…Yet pilgrimage, with all its ambivalence, is the indispensable unifying metaphor of the book, qualifying its journey structure. Moreover, the author reinforces the metaphor’s origin in Hebrews XI by making his journey through Time as well as distance—Mandeville ends as an old man, who has not found the earthly paradise, but is subject to fleshly ills, and needs the prayers of his readers.[44]
But the author, however persuasive and credible his narrator as a personality, remains evasive. The few clues lead only to possibility. He must have moved in good company and had contacts, for while reception tells us pretty well nothing about authorial intention or agenda, it says quite a bit about readers and their agendas.[45] Reception seems from the very beginning to have been enthusiastic, reaching from the very top of civil society to well down it, and the book’s dissemination was remarkably rapid. That suggests an author who was not scribbling away in a garret, or whatever, but who was well-connected, with a network—that rules out neither a gentleman nor a cleric. It is important to remember that MSS, expensive things, were almost never written without an express commission: each marks that such a book was wanted. Within a very few years of that decade 1356-66 when the book started circulating, we see, in 1371, a very fine, very expensive, de luxe MS commissioned for presentation to Charles V of France—which strongly argues for it already being well known and valued. By 1410-12 the Travels is included in the superbly illustrated and fabulously expensive collection of material about the East made for Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, the Livre des Merveilles du Monde (BNF Fr.2810). By 1400 it is a standard work known all over Europe in Latin, French, English and German, the MSS varying from the expensive to the workaday. Most enigmatic and spectacular of all is the MS made in Prague around 1400, (BL.MS Addit. 24189),[46] which is devoid of text but has superb full page (140 x 185 cm) illuminations, with much lavish gold leaf, for the first section of the book. Pretty certainly unfinished, one can only speculate about its ultimate purpose and about its commissioner—who must have been of very high status indeed—but once again it indicates how highly the book was regarded.
We almost certainly will never be able to answer the questions about authorship fully, but we can make some suggestions. If he was a cleric, he might well have the material security to write without the stimulus or need of patronage. If really a knight, as he asserts, with economic security, the same applies: and we do know of nobles who wrote so, from Henry of Lancaster’s Livre de Seintz Medicines to Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de Chevalerie to the Book of the Knight of la Tour Landry. In these cases, his own agenda would be what mattered. A churchman, especially if of some standing, might well wish to disguise, ventriloquise, his uneasiness with some of the positions of a deeply compromised Papacy. But he would certainly have approved of the decision of the councils of Vienne in 1311 to set up chairs in Arabic and Tartar at Paris, Louvain and Salamanca, and would have applauded John XXII’s systematic organising of missionary endeavour in the Far East between the Dominicans and Franciscans in 1318, 1324 and 1324.[47] On the other hand, he is clearly sympathetic to the Jacobite/Nestorian position, not the Roman one, on auricular confession—as Wyclif would be—and stresses the value of Good Works: this is a century when the Grace /Works issue was rarely off the boil, especially in England where it has always been said Pelagianism runs deep. He seems to take up an Imperialist position vis à vis the papacy—though he never comes out into the open—not least in suggesting the good government of Emperor Prester John, and his alliance by marriage with the pagan Grand Khan, monarch of an equally well-ordered state. I think we have to locate the author, cleric or lay, well inside the intelligentsia, and the influential, of mid- fourteenth century society, and that means near to those who exercised power.
Is the book mainly about the East? No, though that came to be its reputation: its focus is, I contend, firmly on Christendom and its preoccupations. But what one really remembers, both when you put the book down and when you pick it up again, is the personality of its narrator. The sense of this man’s wonder at the world’s richness is palpable, and throughout the book is the perfectly serious stress that, as the Psalmist put it (psalm 24), all “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” The book is a plea for openness and tolerance as relevant and needed now as ever it was then. It is a restatement of the world as theophany, and a reminder that the greatest wisdom is to know one’s own failing in judgement and knowledge.
And I return, once more, after journeying through many books, to the shelves where my copies of his book repose. It is fifty and more years, and much thought and experience, since I first read this book, and like all good books it reads me as well as I it. What you bring to reading, as I think Mandeville knew, affects how you can read—which is why all good books ought to be read more than once. Books are not just texts on which to exercise our ideological, critical and linguistic cleverness, but human documents written by real people, who speak across time to us. We should do them the courtesy of listening.
From an Italian MS of Mandeville, 1459, in New York Public Library (Wikimedia Commons); Mandeville has the pilgrim’s scallop shell on his hat.
