Mandeville's Travels - by Sarah Salih & Tom White (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Mandeville's Travels was a medieval bestseller. Originally written in French in the mid-fourteenth century, it was translated into Latin and all the main European vernaculars, and survives in over three hundred manuscripts, some extensively illustrated. The book is a skilful translation and repackaging of existing travel and wonder narratives combined with original commentary, in which the probably fictitious English knight Sir John Mandeville recounts his journeys through Europe, the Holy Land and the Far East. It is a book of everything: a romance following a pilgrim-knight's journey, an encyclopaedic world-map in the form of a travelogue, a meditation on human religious, cultural and bodily diversity, an urgent enquiry into the trajectory of salvation history. It combines traditional wonders such as the Plinian "monstrous races" with an assessment of the geopolitical position of Latin Christendom in the wake of the failure of the Crusades to conquer the Middle East. Looking back to classical geography, it also, unknowingly, looked forward to the era of European colonial travel: Christopher Columbus took a copy with him when he sailed west across the Atlantic in 1492.

This collection offers new readings of Mandeville's Travels in its original historical context, in its textual history and in the present day; in particular, recent developments in medieval racial theory enable new analyses of Mandeville's post-Crusades arc in the long history of European colonisation and racialisation. Contributors reassess its accounts of Jews, the Mongols, the Islamic Mamluk Empire and the imaginary eastern Christian empire of Prester John, with particular scrutiny of the text's reputation for "tolerance" of racial and religious difference. They examine its entry into print culture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the interaction of its textual history with World War I and the aftermath of empire in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They also consider its resonance in the present day, enquiring whether this medieval Christian book can speak to our diverse and divided moment.