Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction: Articulating Empire's Unstable Zones
- I Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
- 1 Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in The Book of John Mandeville (1357)
- 2 Naming the Other, Claiming the Other in Early Modern Accounts of First Encounters: from Mandeville to John Nicholl (1607) and Richard Jobson (1623)
- 3 False Play and Dumb Show in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628)
- 4 ‘Waterali’ Goes Native: Describing First Encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discovery of Guiana (1596)
- II Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
- III Stereotypes Undermined: Shifting the Self in the Nineteenth Century
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in The Book of John Mandeville (1357)
from I - Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Introduction: Articulating Empire's Unstable Zones
- I Fantasy, Wonder and Mimicry: Proto-Ethnography from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
- 1 Encountering Africa: Uses of the Other in The Book of John Mandeville (1357)
- 2 Naming the Other, Claiming the Other in Early Modern Accounts of First Encounters: from Mandeville to John Nicholl (1607) and Richard Jobson (1623)
- 3 False Play and Dumb Show in The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628)
- 4 ‘Waterali’ Goes Native: Describing First Encounters in Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discovery of Guiana (1596)
- II Distance in Question: Translating the Other in the Eighteenth Century
- III Stereotypes Undermined: Shifting the Self in the Nineteenth Century
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
This essay discusses one of the most important travel documents from the medieval English period, The Book of John Mandeville. The Book became the most popular travel narrative of the English Middle Ages, and describes the author's purported encounters with many different cultures. The Book first appeared in 1357, its author claiming to be an English knight born and bred in St Albans who left England in 1322 and travelled around the world for just over thirty-five years. The author's claims and descriptions of foreign lands were, for the most part, accepted without question, and the work came immediately to enjoy what Suzanne Akbari refers to as ‘extraordinary popularity’. Within a few short years it had been translated into almost every European vernacular. It was not until the late nineteenth century that comparisons with other contemporary texts proved ‘beyond question for the most part, that the author had in fact 'done it at Home’. No trace has ever been found of a real John Mandeville who might have written this book, and whoever wrote it never travelled to the places he describes. It is a compilation of several sources (both learned and anecdotal) whose author made several additions and changes to his sources, so that it forms a coherent narrative of his ‘journeys’ throughout the world. Iain Higgins reads The Book as multiple, as containing within the text several different genres:
a piece of intermittent crusading propaganda; an occasional satire on the religious practices of Latin Christians; an implicit treatise on the right rule in both Christian and non-Christian worlds (a kind of mirror for Christian princes); a proof of the earth's sphericity, the existence of the inhabited antipodes, and the possibility of circumnavigation; a demonstration that most non-Christians have a ‘natural’ knowledge of the One, True God; a framed collection of tales and diversities, both exemplary and entertaining; and the desultory memoirs – the travel lies, in fact, of a ‘verray parfit gentil’ English Knight Errant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- British Narratives of ExplorationCase Studies on the Self and Other, pp. 19 - 28Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014