The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Penguin Classics)

Whoever Sir John Mandeville was, the influence of his only known published work on the history of the world is undeniable. For centuries, Mandeville’s short survey of Asia and the Middle East was THE popular European guidebook and bestiary to the exotic east. Columbus and Da Vinci are among those influenced and inspired by Mandeville and his fanciful ramblings, with fanciful being the key word. Don’t expect to come away from this book with any real knowledge of 14th century Asia. Most of the territory Sir John covers, once he gets clear of the Holy Land, is based on dated or dubious sources from both the ancient world (Amazons, hippocentaurs, etc) and more recent Franciscan visits to Tartary (central Asia) and China. To some extent, Mandeville’s utility to his European admirers was as a compiler. He may not have been all places he claims, or seen all the things he says he saw, but, for the most part, someone did at some point claim to have seen or heard such things.The author claims to be an English knight and maybe he was, but the question of how much he personally travelled outside of Western Europe versus how much he borrowed from other lesser-known European writers is open to debate. I recommend the Penguin version/translation both because the introduction covers these types of speculations and “borrowings” in enough detail to satisfy the interested reader, and also because it uses the lengthier Egerton manuscript. This version includes some interesting digressions which provide insight into Sir John’s character and world view. Indeed, Mandeville has been called unusually tolerant for his era, though the modern virtue of tolerance-while questionable in and of itself-did not exist in the way we understand it in the 14th century. As De Maistre once wrote about the 18th century, “You consider it tolerance when they don’t shoot your priests” and this holds true for earlier epochs, as well. I will say, however, while Sir John is not quite a man of modern sensibilities, which is probably to his credit, he certainly had a sense of benevolent openess and curiosity toward the various peoples and cultures he claims to have come into contact with. He clearly wanted most people to make it into heaven, whether they were Christians or not, and he is not shy about favorably contrasting pagans to his co-religionists when he felt the situtation called for it. In short, he was a man with pious, if perhaps unorthodox, convictions and, if he maintained a natural in-group preference for his fellows in Western Europe, it did not prevent him from possessing an altogether charitable approach toward the foreign and the strange. His closing prayer, where he asks the reader to pray for him, is quite touching in its own way.In terms of the overall tone and flow of the narrative, Sir John reminds one of that boisterous friend or family member who enjoys telling long-winded, meandering stories, most of which are suspect in some way, with half probably being outright fabrications, and the others being only loosely based on actual events or derived from stuff that happened to other people. Like that old friend of ours, Sir John can also be pretty funny in his own way too, and it is clear there are times in the book when his tongue is planted firmly in his cheek.Highly recommended if you’re interested in the era or the Age of Exploration.

The question of whether Mandeville really did travel to these places or whether he even existed, is, from a literary perspective, inconsequential. As the wonderful introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley put it, if Mandeville didn't actually do any traveling, that only increases his literary value. But really, The Travels needs little aid when it comes to value. As a piece of literature, it is easily the best travel book to come out of the Middle Ages, saving perhaps the history of Marco Polo's travels. I could probably go so far as to include the eras following the Middle Ages, but having read very few travelogues from anything beyond the Middle Ages, I'm reluctant to do so. As a historical document, its importance is again, far reaching and cannot be over-stressed. Even after much of the more fantastical elements were winked at, the more serious notions were considered of great value by explorers.Now, like all travelogues I've ever read--fictional and non--it is hit or miss. The parts in which he is essentially naming city after city, monument after monument, and people after people in rapid secession is "unentertaining" to say the least. To a modern reader, it's relatively useless outside of academia. But his stories and asides are what bring the book to life. I never recommend a reader skip any part of a book--at least upon the first read--but especially not in a piece like this. Just when you think he's giving you another list that's just like the ones that came before, he'll throw in a little story or an aside that captures your attention and imagination. There's whole literatures bound up in some of his sentence long comments and stories. I'm still fascinated by the story he gave of a man who traveled farther and farther, seeing wonders increasingly great, until, the greatest wonder of all, he found an island where they spoke his native language; but due to lack of supplies, he was forced to turn back. While this story of an explorer's circumnavigation of the globe is unlikely to be true, its poetical value far outweighs any value we could derive from the truth of it. A metaphor for this book, perhaps?There is one last thing I'd like to address in this review. I've read in a couple of places that this book is full of racism and misogyny. I can't fully criticize a casual reader for not fully grasping a Medieval work, especially if they've not removed their own modern mindset--or, at least, learned somewhat about the Medieval mindset--but these claims are simply not true. The Travels is easily one of the most accepting and broad-thinking books I've read from the Middle Ages. For example, when he talks of the Brahmin, he discusses the notion that just because they don't hold to the Christian faith does not mean they're evil or doomed to hell, but rather takes what most would agree is a modern view, namely that "we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates." And for many of his first readers, his book may have been the first time where Muslims were not described as essentially devils in human form. In fact, the only time a "Christian" prejudice seeps into his writing is when talking about cannibalism, and I think we can all agree that it's not just Christians that have a prejudice against cannibals, even if it is unlikely that there were as many cannibals as he described. I think another reason why this has been misunderstood is that, to the casual reader, his subtle use of what we would call "sarcasm" is lost. A case in point, when he describes the burning of a man's wife at his funeral. He then briefly says that if a man does not want to, he does not have to be burned with his dead wife. There is a bite in his statement, and it was meant to have one.Of course, don't go in expecting a 21st century thinker. He was a 14th century man and you'll be hard pressed to forget that; however, even keeping that in mind, this book does show that a 14th century man was not as "unenlightened" as many would have you believe.

its good, a strange book but i expected that

Perfect condition, and fair price. No tears of any kind and no pages missing. Price was fair and did not feel like I was mislead at all.

This is the modern English translation. I needed middle English for my class but it saved me the headache of trying to understand what was going on. A very happy mix up.

Great!

A glimpse into the 14th century mind-set is an adventure in time-travel - see the basis of all subsequent literature involving utopian fantasy and social satire. The introduction is masterly!

Book was in excellent conditions.Good read and good modern translation.

This 14th century travel guide to the Holy Land and Far East was included in the libraries of Leonard di Vinci, Christopher Columbus and many others. The book obviously contains much that is fantastical and totally fictitious . Nevertheless, it was still fun reading it and speculating about where there were grains of truth in Mandeville's guide. Even more interesting were Mandeville's not so hidden criticism of European culture when he, for example, quotes the Sultan's criticism of Europeans of not being very Christian. His description of sexual practices in the lands he visited probably provided titillations for his readers in the Middle Ages. Finally, he provides a long explanation about why the Earth is a sphere and why a circumnavigation of the globe should be possible. This disproves the common fiction that people in the Middle Ages thought that the world was flat and ships would fall off the edge.This book was mentioned in a book I recently finished, The Cheese and the Worms, and was citied as one of the books that led to the miller's heretical thoughts.This Penguin edition provides a very readable version based upon the wide variety of extant texts and provides some useful footnotes to translate place names to their modern equivalents. The edition also has a very useful introduction and end notes.

Un libro de viajes que mezcla lo fantástico con lo conocido en la época, sin juzgar a las otras culturas que presenta.

Excellent product and service. The book was in very good condition and just as described.

Gadzooks! Has EVERYONE forgotten that this book (published on April 1st 1983) was the Penguin spoof that completely 'took in' Kenneth Tynan and ended his career with an echoing raspberry? Even if you don't 'get' the satirical pawky smugness of the academic introduction; or the elaborate Freudian subtext (women with snakes in their vaginas that bite men's penises!), have none of the reviewers here queried how a 'mediaeval' writer could anachronistically assert that the world is round and state its circumference precisely (only to then elaborately quintuple it in an act of playful stupidity!), or burble about the skiopodes found in Libya (a country founded in 1934)? Is it likely that a book which inspired Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan', Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' and Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels' (as well as being found in Leonardo Da Vinci's library) had no influence on Shakespeare at all? You believe all that?Well you should. Kenneth Tynan died in 1980. The Greeks figured out the world was a sphere and the Indians got its circumference off to a notch that most Mediaevals accepted. Libya was originally the Greek name for NW Africa. This is a fascinating book and its translator (from the Norman French) has beautifully judged the marriage of alternate texts and admirably preserved the unifying voice of 'Sir John'.I don't, though, think the other reviews here stress sufficiently that this is a travel book with a religio-political theme. The first half of it is devoted to biblical geography and much of the rest seeks to present the non-Christian world as a bunch of would-be apostates waiting for the Christians to get their act together and convert them. The mythical peoples and strange animals that provided blurb writers over the ensuing 600 years with alluring material are generally mentioned briefly. Paradoxically this is because the reverence in which their original sources were held (Pliny, Solinus etc.) meant that nobody would believe the book if it DIDN'T mention people with eyes in their shoulder blades, or whose ears hung down to their knees (and many others besides). Such a perverse necessity is a provocative commentary on the nature of credibility that (ok, if you must, arguably) still holds true for journalism today.While not a 'speculum', this is still a book that was conceived as a global summation. As the era required, it is substantially derivitive. It has no spirit of FICTIONAL exploration, there is none of the unresolved wonder you find in folk tales. For that I give it four stars. It's had a good run, after all...