Who was Sir John Mandeville? A fresh clue.
by Isaac Jackson, Miscellaneous Notes
This is a short article and mostly irrelevant to my interests. It simply stakes the claim that Sir John Mandeville was a kin-murderer who fled England to escape justice, and that the specific construction of his identity within the Travels is meant, among other things, to construct an alibi.
I am not particularly interested in solving the mystery of Mandeville’s “real” identity. Maybe I am just not a responsible scholar, but for my purposes, the only “identity” that matters is the one he creates for himself in his narrative. The Travels are interesting to me because of the way they speak to the “home” culture as much as the “encountered” culture. Of course Mandeville can hardly be considered an unimpeachable ethnographic record of real encountered cultures – but he does represent within his work a popular and celebrated account of a European man’s reaction to otherness, and that, to me, speaks louder and clearer than any straightforward self-analysis or direct cultural commentary.
Still, as far as these things go, if there has to be some sort of enigma to resolve around Mandeville’s identity, props to Jackson for turning it into a British murder mystery. I hope that when they shoot the BBC miniseries, they have a vegetable lamb growing in the garden where the murdered man inevitably gets done in.
No comments:
Post a Comment