Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis concerning Relationships

Abstract

Of their nature, hypotheses tend to proliferate, and some justification for this addition to the ever-growing body of suggestions about late-fourteenth-century English letters is needed. I can best excuse my offering it by setting out a number of intriguing facts which demand some sort of explanation, even if at the end of the day my suggested explanation's absolute importance may be slight. 1. Mandeville's Travels, written probably in Anglo-Norman about 1356,1 was very popular in England and on the Continent; particularly after 1400, translations into Latin and the vernaculars of Europe and fresh recastings of it (in prose and verse) show that its vogue was great both as a work of lust and as one of lore. The huge number of surviving manuscripts prove its popularity, and borrowings from it are very common, particularly after 1400.2 The book's author seems to have been born in the Herts/Essex area, and the book itself may have been written there; the Abbey of St. Albans was certainly a center for dissemination of manuscripts. 2. This popular book, however, seems to have had in its early career a very oddly restricted public in England. I have combed the works of a large number of English writers in the late fourteenth century for signs of the Travels' use, and only Chaucer, the Pearl poet, and the poet of the alliterative Morte show indebtedness. Chaucer's close friend Gower, Occleve, Langland, and Thomas Usk, for example, though they touch on topics where the Travels would have been helpful, show no signs of having read Mandeville-and this negative result is, I feel, significant. 3. In one of the two places in Chaucer where I feel the Travels provided some material-The Squire's Tale3-Chaucer is clearly also using the opening situation of Gawain and the Green Knight,4 and, moreover, using his audience's knowledge