Interlude

Reflective Interlude (because sometimes your stomach twists in a knot when you look at the daunting stack of articles on your desk, and you have to take a deep breath and dig down to find the roots of your interest and passion).

Throughout my childhood, I spent a lot of time with an amazing man by the name of Ed (“Pops”) Martin. Pops was a community icon, well known for his incredible ability as a master storyteller.

When my father migrated to Bella Bella thirty-five years ago from his home in Ontario, Pops was one of his first friends in this small indigenous community. In fact, Pops took him in and adopted him, under Heiltsuk law, as his son.

In our culture and under our law, the family links you forge through traditional adoption are strong as blood ties, and weave you into a whole family. So, Pops took in my brother and I, when we came along, as his grandchildren. I grew up listening to his stories.

Pops had a rough go under the residential school system, and when he returned to Bella Bella to pick up the pieces of his life, he put away our culture and our language in a place far from his daily life. Throughout most of his adulthood, he repressed them. It wasn’t until late in his life that he let them back in, and to everyone’s amazement (and joy), his powerful grasp of our traditional language and the First Generation stories that tell our history as a people remained intact.

Woven together with his own life’s story – his experience on the land as a trapper and in the variety of occupations he adopted in his life – his recollections of family moments and the history of our community – the traditional narratives and oral historical methods that helped him to preserve a piece of our culture we nearly lost – the greater story that Ed told, piece by piece, throughout his life, was compelling and beautiful to say the very least.

I remember him admonishing me, when I asked him why he was telling me the same traditional story he’d told me the day before, that we learn by repetition and reinvention. He never told stories the exact same way, though he told them dozens and hundreds of times in his old age. Sometimes an image or a phrase or an event would migrate from one story to another. Sometimes the sequence of events would change. Sometimes the raven would transform into a loon or a deer or a wolf. Sometimes the moral would be located in a different moment, a different sentiment, a different sentence.

And sometimes, it was hard to discern where Pops’ life left off and the storytelling began. Sometimes, in his stories, he was the trickster raven. Sometimes his fishing buddies in a fond recollection of the cannery days seemed pretty similar to the figures of myth and legend. But what it taught me was that our identity as indigenous people is inextricably linked to place, and the stories associated with those places. I am the places my people come from, and I am the raven and the wolf and the deer and the First Woman. And in the end, what I amount to is just a story (I hope it’s a good one).

Maybe what appeals to me most about Mandeville is the space he creates to wear him like a garment. “He” is a fabrication. There is no Mandeville, and everyone is Mandeville. He is not rooted to just one place, one origin – he uproots, and transplants himself in a diverse range of wild and beautiful places. And in doing so – through inventing an identity that is inextricably linked with a rambling concept of nature and place – by inventing a self that is reflects a compelling impression of the exotic – by inventing a story that is many narratives, all of them invented and true even if they are not real – in doing all these things, if you read them just the right way, he teaches you how to invent yourself through storytelling.

It’s the same thing, really, that Pops used to do. In their way, they were both trickster-figures. They both blurred the boundaries between invention and recollection, roots and imagination, culture and perception. It’s not about fact or truth. It’s about how you receive the story, how you adopt it, and how you pass it on. That’s why I don’t care, frankly, who the “real” author of the Travels might be. That’s why I don’t mind that people have proven (Heavens, no!) that the narrative contains invention and plagiarism. At the end of the day, don’t you fall asleep imagining yourself traversing those incredible landscapes? Don’t you wish you could sit down across the table from Mandeville-the-imagined-figure, put down a bottle of bourbon, and start swapping stories like a couple of old soldiers – like a pair of old friends?

I miss Pops. He’s one of those people whose loss can never be reconciled. It’s been years since he passed away, but when I close my eyes, I can still see every wrinkle with perfect clarity. I can still see his twisted, arthritic hands gesturing wildly to punctuate an enthusiastic story. I can still hear every nuance of his cracking voice. I think he would have liked Mandeville. I think, next summer, that I’ll take a copy of the Travels to his mortuary pole with a bottle of bourbon and share some Mandeville stories with him. I’m not very good at compartmentalizing – I’ll probably end up weaving in some threads of Heiltsuk lore, and even some fond recollections of special moments I shared with my Pops. But that’s fitting, isn’t it?

The truth about stories, huh.

Presents to Princes (article)

Presents to Princes: A Bestiary of Strange and Wondrous Beasts, Once Known, for a Time Forgotten, and Rediscovered
By Helmut Nickel, for Metropolitan Museum Journal (1991)

For starters, how cool would it be to have a name like “Helmut Nickel”? I wonder if the department/my thesis committee would let me adopt a really amazing nom de plume for my thesis (if I ever finish the f-cking thing).

Okay, so this article is a discussion of some iconic creatures that persisted in the Middle Ages, appearing as heraldic beasts, features in bestiaries, pets of (and gifts to) people of rank, and through various other cultural conduits. The article is full of absolutely gorgeous illustrations, and I only wish I could see them in colour. I wish someone would make a picture book of medieval beasts. Maybe someone already has. Time to tackle AbeBooks…

I will keep my tongue between my clenched teeth and ignore the disparaging remarks that Nickel makes about Mandeville. Nickel discusses Mandeville briefly in terms of his “colourful account of the Great Khan’s court” (135), and the red skins that hang on the walls, from animals that Mandeville calls the “panters” (variously translated as “panthers” and “pandas”). Nickel notes a level of detail in Mandeville’s description of the skins that surpasses “the sources happily exploited by Sir John to flesh out his own stories” (135). As Nickel comments, this may be taken as an indication that “Sir John was not just a bald-faced liar but had some traveling experience of his own” (135). An unnecessary and unscholarly dig, and a pointless inclusion given that the extra details could just as easily be attributed to pure invention and imagination.

Okay, I didn’t keep quiet, so I might as well just say it: Nickel, I liked your article, but I think you should leave Mandeville alone. Human storytelling around the world is built on a rich foundation of loving plagiarism. Mandeville’s popularity attests to his incredible power as a storyteller. Don’t be jealous!

Travels with Margery (chapter)

Travels with Margery: pilgrimage in context
By Rosalynn Voaden, a chapter in Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

Voaden’s chapter is concerned with Margery Kempe and the literary experience of pilgrimage from a feminine point of view. For Margery, claims Voaden, “Her restless nature resisted both spiritual and geographical boundaries, and she was prepared to face risk and hardship to respond to ‘the allure of the beyond’” (177).

Voaden (through Victor and Edith Turner) constructs pilgrimage as “a liminal period, when the participants are removed from their accustomed physical and social states and where a new kind of communitas, a ‘social antistructure’, can develop” (181).

For Margery, this is possible because her travels revolve around her partners en route and her interactions with them. Though Mandeville, at different points, mentions intermittent travel partners, his narrative is never mitigated by their actions, thoughts or characters. The Book of Margery Kempe relies on travel partners to help Margery enact the scenarios and pseudo-martyrdom that construct her character as that of a self-styled saint. Without their presence and actions, she could not act out the humiliation and suffering that allow her to feel she is imitating Christ.

Arguably, though, one might claim that Mandeville’s communitas is broader and more abstract – his predecessors and contemporaries in the genre of medieval travel writers, and his relationship to the culture and audience that received his book so favourably.

Voaden’s description of the organization and content of Margery’s text and of her reasons for traveling open a useful space for comparison with Mandeville. As Voaden points out, Margery includes no extraneous details in her narrative; all her text is devoted to bland, standard descriptions of well-known pilgrimage sites and Biblical places, and indications of her personal and deeply emotional (read: irrational and histrionic) reactions to those places. “This pattern continues throughout all her pilgrimages, and has caused some critics to wonder if she even went to these places, so marked is her lack of interest in her physical whereabouts” (185). Mandeville, conversely, is so invested in place that his encyclopaedic depth of interest and description is apparently too well-researched to be plausible. Go figure.

Anyway, an important distinction must be drawn between curiosity (curiositas), wisdom (sapientia) and knowledge (scientia) in medieval thought. For a strictly Christian traveler, curiosity is not a valid reason to travel. In fact, to some, “it was categorised as a vice. Indulgence in curiositas, it was believed, was morally dangerous, excited the senses and signified an unstable attitude of mind” (185). A devout pilgrim traveled in search of wisdom and knowledge, and for Margery, that means bare, literal descriptions of place that will not interfere with her response to what they represent – signals of Christ’s suffering, and the path to salvation. Mandeville, on the other hand, is a much more secular traveler. While he does have a religious bent, he also states explicitly at two distinct places and implicitly through the drive of his narrative that his intent in writing is to indulge the appetite of his audience for marvels and exotic things. He strikes a balance between morals and marvels, of course, but his taste for the fantastic means no man could happily call him a compass of proper devotion.

Voaden speaks thus of Margery’s experience of travel: “Just as a telescope brings distant objects into focus so that they become part of the immediate environment and enrich one’s perception of the world, so, for Margery Kempe, pilgrimage and travel for spiritual ends brought into her world distant lives and different devotional practices, diverse forms of spirituality and new ways to suffer for Christ. Travel therefore provided the lens through which she came to understand herself and her life, and consequently was of paramount importance in shaping her presentation of herself in her text as a visionary and holy woman” (191). Travel, I think, means something entirely different to Mandeville, who constructs himself as nothing more than a gout-ridden wanderer with a penchant for gripping tales and the spark of the fantastical.

But then again: Saint John of the Vegetable Lamb? Patron saint of storytellers, drifters, and hybrid half-nothings? That has a much better ring to it than Saint Margery…

The diversity of mankind (chapter)

The diversity of mankind in The Book of John Mandeville
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari, a chapter in Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

As with many of the articles I've read recently, this is only peripherally related to my interest in Mandeville, and then only in terms of Akbari's general observations about the Travels.

Still, I am glad to find one more person who lays this as the foundation of their work: what makes Mandeville important "is not the validity of the traveller's observations, but rather his readers' enthusiastic reception of this portrait of the world" (156). I am not super interested in the made-for-BBC mystery of Mandeville's true identity, or the scholarly catfight of trashing him as a plagiarist. Like Akbari, I'm interested in the text, and its "extraordinary popularity, which persisted well into the seventeenth century, illustrat[ing] the power of the text to capture the imagination and to intersect with a range of cultural currents: exploration, nationalism and even affective piety" (156).

Akbari is primarily interested in monsters, racial diversity and the use of Macrobius' concept of climatic zones to understand the appearance and character of different races in the medieval period.



In this system of thought, people located in the "frigid" zones (extreme upper and lower, yellow in this illustration) are large and healthy, though frigid and unable to conceive children easily; they are light-skinned, light-haired and their bodies reflect the bright, clear climate. People in the "torrid" zone (in the center of this illustration, represented in red) are black in colour and tend to be phlegmatic, with soft bodies and impaired digestion. They become intoxicated easily, and also conceive (and miscarry) easily. The heat and humidity make them sluggish and lazy. People in the "temperate" zones (the blue in this illustration) represent a balance of the elements in each extreme: heat and cold, moisture and dryness, and correspondingly, health and character.

Though this bears on some non-botanical aspects of Mandeville (he assesses some of the people he encounters according to this system) I don't find it particularly useful for my research. I just included it because I think it's cool, and because I wonder what medieval people would have made of us brown-skinned natives of questionable character at the east/west extreme of their virtuous "temperate zones".

In addition to the balancing of climates, "The wonders of the world are balanced as well: Mandeville describes an amazing fruit, found in farthest India. It looks like a melon, but when ripe, it opens to reveal a little lamb inside, so that people eat 'bothe the frut and the best'. But this marvel, far from being an anomaly uniquely found in the exotic Orient, is simply an example of the balanced diversity of nature: Mandeville tells his eastern guides about the barnacle geese, animals that grow on trees in the British Isles . . . Wonders are found at each end of the climatic extremes, balances in accord and harmony" (161).

Another general discussion by Akbari is of some interest to me: the distinction between mirabilia and miracula. This distinction is made elsewhere, of course, but since it's made here...I might as well write about it now. Says Akbari, "The medieval understanding of monstrosity is further illuminated by the distinction between 'mirabilia', things which cause wonder simply because they are not understood, and 'miracula', things which are actually contrary to or beyond nature" (167). And, "This . . . disctinction is crucial to The Book of John Mandeville, where the presence of a variety of monstrous races and marvellous phenomena generates in the narrator (and in the reader) a naive sense of wonder. That sense of wonder is widened by the discovery that a rule which should normally hold true appears to be violated in nature. Such discoveries extend beyond the experience of observing the monstrous races; they occur, for example, when the animal or plant life of a given location does not correspond to what that territory ought to produce, according to the predictions of the natural philosophers" (167).

Distinguishing between different categories of wonderment is always important in life and literature, huh? I'd rather be accurate than emphatic. The real encounter with the Other (and the experience of being received as Other in another culture) is a strange experience in its own right. And the incredible things one can experience beyond the bounds of what is known? Are marvelous, if you experience them right. No need to fabricate - just to pitch the perfect balance needed to communicate to people who can only experience vicariously through your words the sense of wonder and beauty captured in a moment, and in a place.

I'm pretending to be philosophical because dinner is ready (for once I didn't have to cook) and I don't have anything critical to say about this text. I'm not gonna lie, I like Akbari, but I'm past the point of being able to feign cogency and academic rigour. I'll try again later.

Craft and Idolatry (chapter)

Craft and Idolatry: “Sotylle” Devices in Mandeville’s Travels
By Scott Lightsey, from Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature (2007)

Lightsey’s interest in this chapter lies in the man-made mechanical marvels present in the Travels, namely the two golden birds in the episodes with the Old Man of the Mountain and in the court of the Great Chan of Cathay. Although I am not so interested in ornithology or machines, I think the arguments made by Lightsey here still speak broadly to the concept and understanding of nature and man’s relationship to it. Also, I share some of his sentiments about Mandeville’s authority and authenticity.

As Lightsey opens his chapter, he refers to SJM’s “spotty critical history with regard to his reputation for truth-telling” (137), but points out that “in the fourteenth century, his reputation for cataloguing the marvels and wonders of the east was unparalleled, and in both England and France his Travels was considered a worthy book of natural science and an unparalleled register of mirabilia” (136).

(Side note: I’ve noticed an astonishing number of scholars that don’t seem to care a whit about how repetitive they are. Really? You couldn’t think of any other adjective than “unparalleled”, and you absolutely had to use it twice in one sentence? Don’t tell me it’s stylistic, or for emphasis. You’re being lazy. Everything we do is art – don’t forget it.)

Lightsey continues, “Despite Mandeville’s dubious reputation among modern scholars, who find in his judicious compilation of source material a confabulated east never visited by the narrator, the popularity of his story was such that it proliferated in less than two decades into most major European languages, eclipsing the tales of Marco Polo and eventually finding its way, by the end of the Middle Ages, into the hands of Christopher Columbus. The text’s marvels are so choice, its descriptions so rich, that its pastiche rang more true than Rusticello’s story of the Polos’ actual voyages” (138).

But the marvels it contains are not mere embellishment. “These marvels are far more than static objects or window-dressing for the narrator’s fantastic journey; they are thematically integral to the structure and moral concerns underlying Mandeville’s work” (139).

The style of the writing points to one of its cleverest functions: “The author employs a first-person narrator to describe the wonders of his eastward journey, synthesizing varied source material into a seamless narrative apparently depicting personal experience. This style is calculated to invite reader participation in Mandeville’s journey of discovery” (140). However, while Lightsey intimates that readers are invited to participate primarily in a journey toward and through “Christian salvation history” (140), I don’t totally buy it. I think the comrades-in-the-journey tone calculated here speaks to a different moment in European history, when travel had become a more secularized experience and travel writers were expected to answer a taste for the simple exotic.

However, I agree with Lightsey’s argument that marvels in the Travels are “the token, the symbol, or term of exchange” (140) in the separation of east and west. And “What Mandeville’s journey offers, through his reports and observations of mirabilia, is a comparative look at the state of the author’s world” (140). It is through Mandeville that we can ably realize that “Marvels rehearsed in travel narratives and wonder-books were the intellectual currency of medieval European interest in the east . . . [and] contributed to the European taste for the exotic” (140). For the Travels in particular, “The exotic characters and geographies that so often draw critical attention . . . reflect the ways western audiences perceived the notion of travel or encounters with the unknown; in fact, it is through his mirabilia that one may find interesting avenues of access to medieval ways of thinking” (140).

In short, in reading the Travels, we receive not only a geography of marvels that maps the east, but also a “social geography” (142) that gives us incredible insight into the cultural imagination of the historical moment in which the text was popularized.

Interestingly, Lightsey also argues that “Mandeville’s wonder-filled journey eastward becomes a figural return to an earlier place and time, where European Christian values could be imagined preserved among the mirabilia of far lands. The terrestrial garden lying at the end of the journey signals hope for reform at home, and his portrayal of the false garden highlights the contrast between western life and eastern spirituality” (142-3).

I am going to skip over Lightsey’s extensive discussion of the mechanical birds in the Great Chan’s court, and look at some of his points around the “false paradise” Mandeville encounters. Lightsey’s purpose in looking at this false garden is mainly in examining the manmade marvels within it, but he does speak a bit to what it represents on a larger scale.

“Unlike the terrestrial garden formed by God to nurture prelapsarian humanity, this garden is an artificial paradise, contrived by the Old Man to pervert the wills of men to his murderous ends” (152). Within the Travels, this false paradise is also “the symbolic moral opposite of Prester John’s land” (152). Lightsey draws our attention to the “narratorial distance” (153) employed by Mandeville in this section, who foregoes his professed interest in strange wonders to give a quite perfunctory summary of the marvels in the false garden. Here, he lacks the curiosity displayed in the Chan’s court – whereas, there, he had an interest in understanding the means by which the marvels were created, in the false paradise the inherent evil of the artifice (designed not to titillate but manipulate) he shows no such inclination to examine and understand.

Lightsey makes two other brief points toward his conclusion that interest me:

-First, regarding the apple of Justinian in the statue at Constantinople: “This image [of the fallen apple] is understood as a token of Justinian’s, and by extension Christianity’s, loss of dominion over the territories of the earth” (156), but “the apple is also a dual symbol: its shape betokens the ‘world that is round’ about which Mandeville is concerned, and the apple is a symbolic reference to the Fall and the postlapsarian condition of mankind” (156). I like Lightsey’s reference to Justinian as “a sort of medieval Ozymandias” (156).

-Second, in reference to the small story about Seth traveling to paradise (near the narrative point where Mandeville is discussing the True Cross), Lightsey draws a parallel between Seth and Mandeville. Both seek terrestrial paradise – both are denied. And in their narratives, we find dual themes of loss and redemption.

Of smelly seas and ashen apples (chapter)

Of smelly seas and ashen apples: two German pilgrims’ view of the East
By Anne Simon, a chapter from Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

In this chapter, Simon follows two German travelers – Ludolf von Suchem (1350) and Hans Tucher (roughly 150 years later) through their pilgrimages to the east. As the chapter title indicates, both pilgrims write of the ashen apple that appears in Mandeville.

Says LvS, “. . . all the country round about is full of trees and great fruits, exceeding fair to see; but when these fruits are plucked and broken open, they are full of dust and ashes within, and for three days the hands of him who plucked them cannot be rid of a vile stench; for even all the country round about it is full of God’s curse” (196).

He’s writing of the land around the Dead See, of which HT writes similarly: “The stench by the Dead Sea is vile, yet many pretty trees are to be found there which bear fruit that is large, attractive and appealing, just like nice apples. However, when you pick them, on the inside these fruit are full of dust and emit an evil smell” (196).

Of course, the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah bordered the Dead Sea, and “Both authors explicitly connect the overwhelming stench of the Dead Sea and its inability to support life to the evil practiced in these cities” (196).

Simon offers the following interpretation of the moralized nature presented to us by LvS, HT and Mandeville, among others: “Apples recall Original Sin and the Fall of Man, or which the vice that led ultimately to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was but one manifestation. Given their deceptive appeal, they may also symbolise the vanity of all earthly appearances, especially in comparison with the eternal truths to which pilgrimage bear witness” (196).

What does Mandeville have to say on the matter? Quoting from the Penguin modern:

“By the side of this sea grow trees that bear apples of fine colour and delightful to look at; but when they are broken or cut, only ashes and dust and cinders are found inside, as a token of the vengeance that God took on those five cities and the countryside roundabout, burning them with the fires of Hell” (90).

Like other travelers, he includes this piece of information – whether as a means of moralizing, as a simple observation, or more likely because it had already become a standard feature in travel narratives mentioning the Dead Sea to which M. was compelled to conform. In any event, he is clear and vehement in his connection of the phenomenon to the fires of Hell. It is an interest token of moral nature that is of clear importance to European travelers. It does not concern Simon (her article is not actually about Sodom apples) but I am also interested in the real plant that medieval travelers likely understood to be an “apple of ash”, and on the prevailing use of the Sodom apple as a symbol in modern queer literature. If connecting Mandeville with Colm Toibin isn’t bizarre, I don’t know what is.

What Simon does is take us briefly through the travel narratives composed by each of these German travelers. This provides lots of interesting insight into the idea of travel writing and pilgrimage, the conception of audience, and the impetus for writing and communicating the experience of travel.

In no particular order:

-Simon mentions at a certain point, in relation to LvS, that he intentionally omitted details about things in exotic places that were commonplace there. That is, even if they are unknown to home audiences, the quality of being commonplace in their indigenous contexts struck down the worthiness of these objects in LvS’s narrative. So, in Famagusta, LvS states “I say nothing about spices, for they are as common there as bread is here” (200). I think that Mandeville is not so discerning, but it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which the personal qualities and prejudices of the author limit or mitigate the information received by the audience.

-Of the distinctly religious discourse in pilgrimage narratives from the Holy Land: “. . . missing from this and indeed many other pilgrimage reports is any explicit expression of personal piety or jubilation on finally seeing the places of Christ’s ministry so familiar from the Bible” (202). I think this is true of Mandeville and many other authors, any might be attributed to a desire to make it simple for the audience to experience the travel vicariously without feeling inhibited by the author’s own specific personal, emotional or spiritual investment. But I guess it depends on your purpose in writing. When I think back (with a small shudder) on Margery Kempe, I seem to remember nothing BUT passionate weeping at the firsthand experience of Biblical places. Then again, she was basically a self-styled saint who probably expected her readers to want to mimic and assume HER experience just as she mimicked and assumed that of Christ.

-Simon mentions LvS’s relative tolerance toward people of other religions (204). This is largely true of Mandeville but not, apparently, universally amongst medieval travel writers. (Is anything ever universally true?)

-LvS writes of the Bedouins in almost the exact same language as Mandeville. (Shit, is he a source used by Mandeville and I’m just forgetting? That would be embarrassing. Jessie: “Wow, these are super similar!” Committee: “Well, Jessie, that’s because ONE IS PLAGIARISING THE OTHER.”) Anyway, the point is made that they are swarthy, uncouth nomads who neither sow nor reap, and are therefore EVIL. (TruFacts: The proper term for this is “Disney Logic”. Or should be, anyway.) Says Simon, “Even if the characteristics singled out for description reflect the facts, swarthiness and ugliness are signs of the diabolic with which the genuinely strange and threatening are associated. Bedouins live outside regulated urban communities, dress differently, and enjoy a way of life that must have been completely incomprehensible to pilgrims” (205). I’d like to take this one step further and look at how their values regarding and interactions with the natural world are also read as an indication of their spiritual state.

-LvS apparently mentions barnacle geese in his narrative, at least according to Simon, and perhaps the vegetable lamb as well (though I’d think she’d have mentioned). But Simon has a fairly pithy summary of why the fantastical cannot be dismissed, even if we don’t find it plausible: “The for-us-unlikely is not questioned, possibly because in God’s Creation, everything is possible. The Bible itself bears witness to the existence of giants (Genesis 6:4); fantastic creatures were documented in classical and oriental travel literature and depicted on the margins of medieval mappaemundi. Besides this, the exotic was essential to the poetics of the Other, especially of the Orient” (206).

-On the practice of incorporating existing material into personal travel writing, Simon upholds Hans Tucher as evidence that it is not an unusual method – he had a particular “skill in integrating into the narrative material from other sources, including legendaries, chronicles, mythology, other pilgrimage reports, oral traditions and information passed on by monks, guides and local inhabitants” (209). Further, his sources are not acknowledged. So why does Mandeville get such a bad rap for doing the same, huh? Huh? Okay, there’s probably a good reason why that I’m just too tired to think of.

So, in sum: a useful commentary on some of the conventions of medieval travel writing with examples from outside of England/France that still show important commonalities with the texts I stare at balefully every day.

The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Mandeville (article)

The Marvellous Adventures of Sir John Mandeville
by A. W. Stiffe for The Geographical Journal

Given that this article dates to 1899, I feel like I have to be forgiving about how blatantly opinionated it is. There’s little sound basis given for most of the arguments, which are mostly comprised of a petty defense against scholars (particularly Yule, editor of Cathay and the Way Thither) who decry Mandeville’s character. It is an earnest attempt to rehabilitate Mandeville’s good name, but largely on Stiffe’s word that it is so.

The most (only) interesting part of the article to my mind is Stiffe’s compelling argument for admiring Mandeville as a “scientific geographer” first and foremost – someone with keen power of observation when it comes to nature, the world, the universe and man’s particular place therein. For all that is fantastical in Mandeville, and all that is commonplace – two necessary extremes – I am struck by that unique middle ground where he seems so ahead of his time in his scientific and philosophical thinking. For all those readers who can’t get past the question of his identity and originality, there’s a much greater question to be asked about Mandeville’s astute observations and keen, analytic thinking.