This is Maria Shmygol’s second blog post on Mandeville’s Travels; the first can be read here

Long considered a fount of geographical knowledge about the East, Mandeville’s Travels had a complex manuscript transmission history following its composition in the mid-fourteenth century, and went on to have a vibrant and interesting afterlife in print. In this blog I’d like to offer a brief consideration of how the Travels was made available to English readers in print from the end of the fifteenth century until the mid-1620s. Attending to the material properties and editorial apparatus of the English and Latin versions printed in this period will demonstrate the emergence of two rather different ‘types’ of Mandeville.

 The English-language editions (1496-1625)

In early modern England, the Travels was most frequently made available to readers in a vernacular translation based on an incomplete version of Mandeville’s narrative, omitting some material that scholars refer to as ‘the Egypt gap’. This omission arises from a missing quire in the original manuscript from which copies were made. Scholars have tended to refer to this version as ‘Defective’, but in a recent article Tom White has highlighted the need to reassess the terminology that we apply to this version of the Travels, proposing that ‘Common’ is a more appropriate term, which I apply here.^[1] At the end of the fifteenth century, it was this ‘Common’ version that was edited, cut, and printed by Richard Pynson in an unillustrated quarto (1496). Not long thereafter, the text was taken over and printed again by Wynkyn de Worde, this time accompanied by 72 woodcut illustrations.^[2] De Worde released at least three editions (printed between 1499 and c.1510), and many more were undoubtedly printed throughout the sixteenth century, although the next surviving editions are those printed by Thomas East in 1568 and 1582. These editions replicate most of de Worde’s woodcuts (either directly by using the same woodblock or reversed copies of de Worde’s stock that was presumably too worm-eaten or damaged for further use). Subsequent editions, printed by Thomas Snodham in 1612, 1618, and 1625, replicate this text and most of the same illustrations, with the occasional replacement of worn-out blocks copied in largely the same style as their originals.

Figure 1. Sig. L2v-L3r of the 1625 quarto edition printed by Thomas Snodham. [STC 17253] Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

While there is some variation in how printers physically organise the text and its paratexts (such as title pages, chapter headings, indexes, and positioning of the illustrations), the voice and authority of the narrator is unencumbered by editorial prefaces or substantial textual additions designed to shape readers’ interactions with the narrative. In these editions, Mandeville speaks directly to the reader in the first person, inviting them to follow him on his adventures and pause to consider the various instructive reflections on religion and cultural practices that pepper the narrative. That said, the presence and placements of woodcut illustrations highlight visually for the reader many of the more fabulous and sensational elements of the narrative, and can thus be said to constitute a type of non-textual intervention from the printer. Overall, these English-language editions appealed to a wide variety of readers who could choose how to interact with the textual and visual material in the publication, deciding for themselves whether to privilege the geographical, religious, marvellous, or monstrous facets of the narrative.

 The Latin versions: Hakluyt (1589) and Purchas (1625)

In 1589 Richard Hakluyt the Younger published a huge compendium of travel knowledge under the title Principall Navigations, Voiages and Peregrinations of the English Nation. Gathered therein were accounts of English exploration and travel from the earliest times to the present, published together in this way as a means of equipping the nation with a useful body of practical knowledge to be exploited for commercial and colonial purposes. Although by this time the credibility of Mandeville’s account had already come into question, the Travels was nevertheless included in the Principall Navigations. However, instead of reproducing the English translation that was already circulating in print, Hakluyt chose to include the ‘Latin Vulgate’ version, which supplied the ‘Egypt gap’ and which would have been unfamiliar to English readers. This version of the Travels had not received close critical attention until Marianne O’Doherty’s recent article, which illuminates both the Vulgate version of the narrative and Hakluyt’s editorial treatment of it.^[3] The printing of the narrative in Latin together with Hakluyt’s deliberate editorial interventions created a very different type of Mandeville than the one found in the English printed version.

In the Principall Navigations Mandeville is in dialogue, so to speak, with the other voices present in the compendium, and the reader’s interactions with the unillustrated text are shaped through a range of paratextual means, such as different types of marginal notations, headings, and Hakluyt’s emphasis on previous authorities who have engaged with Mandeville. For instance, information about the author gathered by the historian and churchman John Bale and the cartographer Abraham Ortelius precede the text. Hakluyt’s own voice too intrudes upon the material in his ‘brevis admonitio ad Lectorem’ (‘brief warning to the reader’). This warning follows Mandeville’s account and appears, like the preceding account, only in Latin, without an English translation, which is notable given that Hakluyt provides translations for all other non-English material in the Principall Navigations.^[4] In the ‘admonitio’ Hakluyt highlights the important role of critical editing as a means of restoring the text’s integrity and purging it of non-authorial additions and corruptions. But, given that so much fabulous material is central to the Travels, Hakluyt attempts to ‘excuse’ the presence of such stuff, noting that it will be up to learned men to judge his success as an editor. Hakluyt’s Mandeville—through careful editing, scholarship, and its physical layout on the pages of the compendium—offers a very different experience of Mandeville’s narrative than do the English illustrated quartos.

The Principall Navigations underwent a much expanded second edition in 1589-1600, which quietly removed Mandeville from its pages. The received critical speculation about this decision on Hakluyt’s part suggests that it was borne of a preoccupation with credibility and authority, although O’Doherty’s recent work offers more nuanced insights into the context surrounding the excision. In any case, the Latin Mandeville did not stay gone for long. Samuel Purchas used the textual material left by Hakluyt to publish his own compendium entitled Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), where he not only reinstated Mandeville in the form of textual extracts of the Latin version published by his predecessor, but also included a miniature portrait of Mandeville on the title-page.

Figure 2. Detail from the title page to Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625); Mandeville is in the middle of the third column from the right. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Purchas prefaces Mandeville’s account with his own thoughts on the traveller and the complicated entanglement of fact and fiction that characterises the text, warning the reader that what follows is:

some Extracts of our Countriman, that famous Traveller Sir John Mandevile, whose Geographie Ortelius commendeth, howsoever he acknowledges his Worke stuffed with Fables. For my part, I cannot but deplore the losse of such a Treasure, but know not how to recover or repayre it. (sig. M4r)

For Purchas, Mandeville is a national treasure who rightfully claims a place in the roll call of English worthies. The outlandish, fabulous elements of his travel account are blamed on later hands who have corrupted the material: ‘I suspect that some later Fabler … hath stuffed this storie; some of which, for a taste, I have here left remaining; not that I take pleasure in lyes, but that thou maist see, from what Fountayne I suppose this corruption flowed’. Elements of the fabulous, potentially ‘false’ material are thus left in by way of serving as an opportunity for moral instruction, so that readers can see the corrupting influence of ‘that mistie Age (when humaner learning was inhumanely imprisoned, and Divine Scripture was vulgarly buried, and Printing not at all borne’ (sig. M4r). The final part of Purchas’s comment implies that the advent of print has the potential to rescue important works from the hands of untrustworthy medieval scribes, perhaps highlighting the importance and legitimacy of Purchas’s own endeavour.

Two Mandevilles

In this way, we find two different characterizations of Mandeville’s narrative in print. One exists in the quarto editions dedicated solely to his narrative, presented in an English translation, furnished with illustrations that highlight the wonders and marvels he describes. The other, more scholarly one, exists in the Latin version published in the hefty tomes of Hakluyt and Purchas, where editorial and scholarly voices converge around his narrative to give it added credibility as a useful and relevant work of geography. These different approaches to presenting Mandeville in print highlight editorial anxiety about the textual authority of the narrative, but taken together all of the Mandeville publications noted here demonstrate the enduring importance and appeal of this ‘national treasure’, both as travel fact and travel fiction.

Title Image. Title page from Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) (Wikimedia Commons); title page and page detail from the 1568 edition of Mandeville’s Travels (British Library).

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[1] Tom White, ‘National Philology, Imperial Hierarchies, and the ‘Defective’ Book of Sir John Mandeville’, Review of English Studies (2019): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz140

[2] See Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘The Woodcut Illustrations in the English Editions of “Mandeville’s Travels”, PBSA, 47.1 (1953): 59-69.

[3] Marianne O’Doherty, ‘Richard Hakluyt and the “Vulgate Latin” Version of Mandeville’s Travels’, Viator, 50.1 (2019): 317-53. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.121365 I am grateful to the author for kindly sharing a pre-publication copy of this article.

[4] See O’Doherty, 338-340, and Mary C. Fuller, ‘Arthur and Amazons: Editing the Fabulous in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations’, Yearbook of English Studies, 41.1 (2011): 173-89.