The Date of [Composition of] Mandeville's Travels (articles)

The Date of Mandeville’s Travels
By J. D. Thomas, for Modern Language Notes (1957)

and

The Date of Composition of Mandeville’s Travels
By Arpad Steiner, for Speculum (1934)

The Thomas piece is a brief article of fairly tangential relevance (to me). In it, Thomas presents a summary of the thoughts of critics (up until that point) on when the Travels might have been composed.

For my purposes, it is simply useful to note:
The actual date likes lies between “1355, the earliest year of authorship stated by any version” (Thomas 165) and “1371, the scribal date given in the oldest datable manuscript” (Thomas 165). Hamelius gives 1362 as the terminus a quo, with his likely date (accepted by some but by no means universally) as 1366 (Thomas 166).

The Steiner article, also brief, does not disagree with the above beyond setting the terminus a quo a bit later. It, predating Thomas by two decades and more, simply gives some historical background on different episodes in the Travels that can assist in the dating. Says Steiner, “the date of composition of Mandeville’s Travels may easily have been 1366” (Steiner 147), but certainly “the Travels were composed between 1365 and the early part of 1371” (Steiner 147).

Well: should anyone ask me when the Travels was written, I now have something to cover my ass.