Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival (article)

Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis concerning Relationships
By C. W. R. D. Moseley, for Modern Philology (1974)

This article makes some links between Mandeville and Chaucer and the poets of the Alliterative revival respectively. It attempts to explain why the early career of the Travels was limited in England to such an odd group of people, and how those writers may have used the Travels in their own writing.

In particular, Moseley names Chaucer, the Pearl poet and the poet of the alliterative Morte as borrowing from the Travels, though he comments that even in sections of their work that would make overlap and borrowing logical and easy, Mandeville is soundly ignored by Gower, Hoccleve, Langland, Usk and others. (Usk was a chump anyway.)

Useful points: a picture of the early importance of the Travels in English literary culture, including the suggestion that Mandeville’s images of the False Garden and the road to Earthly Paradise may have informed some elements of the visionary landscape of Pearl (184).