Writing East

No work revealed more of the mysterious East to statesmen, explorers, readers, and writers of the late Middle Ages than The Book of John Mandeville. One of the most widely circulated documents of its day, it first appeared in French between 1356 and 1371 and was soon translated into nine other European languages. Ostensibly the account of one English knight's journeys through Africa and Asia, it is, rather, a compilation of travel writings first shaped by an unknown redactor. Writing East is a study of how Mandeville came to appear in its various versions, and the series of transformations it went through as it reached new audiences in order to serve as both a response to previous writings about the East and an important voice in the medieval conversation about the nature and limits of the world. Higgins offers a palimpsestic reading of this "multi-text" that demonstrates not only how the original French author overwrote his precursors but also how subsequent translators molded the material to serve their own ideological agendas. Higgins views Mandeville not as fiction or fraud but merely as an example of the ceaseless rewriting characteristic of medieval text-making. By making Mandeville as a whole the object of sustained critical attention, he shows what its verbal world can tell us about itself, its maker and remakers, and the culture in which it was so frequently reproduced. The first book of its kind on Mandeville in any language, Writing East represents a unique experiment in literary and cultural criticism. An innovative case study of medieval text- and world-making, it makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the importance of literacy and printing and to our understanding of the medieval world.