Chaucer and Mandeville's Travels (article)

Chaucer and Mandeville’s Travels
By Josephine Waters Bennett, for Modern Language Notes (1953)

This article attempts to make links between Chaucer and Mandeville, and speaks in tentative tones that are later assured by Moseley’s article, I suppose (discussed in the previous post).

Essentially, Bennett argues for a borrowing from the Travels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. This is on the basis that (1) Chaucer’s “as tellen knyghtes olde” could be construed as a reference to Sir John Mandeville, the only popular author writing of the east who happened to be a knight, (2) the likely date for the writing of the Travels would have made the author a contemporary of Chaucer’s grandfather, therefore fitting the descriptor “olde” in the above-quoted line, (3) the wittiness of Mandeville in certain points of the Travels is akin to Chaucer’s, likely making the latter more disposed to think well enough of the former to borrow his work, and (4) the immense popularity of the Travels makes it a worthy cultural reference to make for Chaucer’s audience’s benefit.

However, as Moseley made clear in his article, at the time Chaucer was writing, the Travels was not yet popular in England. Would the merit of popularity on the continent make it a worthy cultural reference? Perhaps.

In any event, nothing to do with plants.

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).