Writing East: The Travels” of Sir John Mandeville by Iain MacLeod Higgins

Abstract

fRfEVFEWS Iain MacLeod Higgins. Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. 336. $49.95 (U.S.) cloth. As most admirers of this unusual work now know, The Book of John Mandeville is a medieval encyclopedic pastiche of accounts of pilgrimages to Jerusalem and of travels to the Orient set down in French in 1356 or 1357. Within fifty years it was extant in nine other languages. Over three hundred manuscripts remain. Its popularity survived until well into the nineteenth century when doubts of the veracity of the writer, which had indeed been expressed in earlier centuries, were taken seriously. The realization that the author, whoever he was, had probably never travelled East at all and was not even an Englishman resulted in widespread denunciation of the work as fraudulent. Mandeville’s travels took place in his study. He utilized a vast amount of written matter, organizing it in a new form. While adopting an impersonal, factual tone, he nevertheless managed to impose devotional and exhortatory concepts on the fabric of the whole. At the same time the authoritative style is appropriate to such an encyclopedic work. Mandeville’s Trav­ els, as Donald Howard remarked in Writers and Pilgrims, is an attem pt “to write a new kind of work, a summa of travel lore” (58). It combined the authority of learned books and guide books with the eye-witness manner of accounts of pil­ grims, travel writers, missionaries, and merchants in the Ori­ ent. The compiler drew from many sources and his work is worthy of Higgins’s purpose, which he explains thus: Writing East “is an experiment in literary and cultural criticism, whose principal innovation is the attempt to read a historically signif­ icant medieval book in a manner responsive to the alterity of its multiple textual existence.” Various transcribers modified their texts; “Such inter- and intra- textual multiplicity,” states Higgins, “is the overwhelming fact about medieval writing, and ESC 25, 1999 ESC 25, 1999 yet it has not often affected the ways in which scholars make use of ‘olde bokes’ for literary, cultural, or historical studies.” The textual variants, if properly taken into account, enable us to see much that would otherwise be overlooked. He rightly claims to be using an approach that can serve as a model for reading medieval writing in its various forms of multiplicity. While medievalists may have been aware of The Book's plural existence, they have usually proceded as though textual schol­ arship had little bearing on their perception of the work. The textual history is complex, and Higgins produces diagrams to show how The Book of John Mandeville was transmitted. He describes numerous manuscripts, their language, and the source of each. The Book was familiar to medieval audiences in French, English, German, and Latin and in two major variants that Hig­ gins calls “original O and Ogier.” He states that the two last are “characterized especially by a series of interpolations about the Carolingean hero Ogier, the Dane, and differing more among themselves than do any of the ‘original’ variants.” Higgins explores various ways of dealing with The Book's textual multiplicity. One could choose “a best text” and pro­ duce a kind of diplomatic reading by considering the text of the original French in one of its surviving forms such as Deluz or in a relatively faithful translation like the English Cotton version; one could make a comparison of two versions in vari­ ous ways in order to produce an adapted rendering as a work in its own right; a third way would be to read two or more related versions of The Book with reference to their immedi­ ate sources and, thus, consider each as an individual response to a specific, received text — a kind of diachronic reading that tracks the textual transformations through time, space, and lan­ guages. Having remarked on these three methods of approach, Higgins chooses what he considers to be a more interesting and fruitful method: reading several versions at once and placing each in the complex network of transmission centered on the French versions, and, while doing so, reading against what he calls “the grain of habit...