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Literary Criticism Medieval

Writing East

The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville

by (author) Iain Macleod Higgins

series edited by Ruth Mazo Karras

Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Initial publish date
Mar 1997
Category
Medieval
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780812233438
    Publish Date
    Mar 1997
    List Price
    $55.00 USD

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Description

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's Travels came to appear in its various versions, explaining how it went through a series of transformations 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.

About the authors

Awards

  • Winner, Winner of the 2001 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America
  • Winner of the 2001 John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America