Sir John Mandeville’s Travels was familiar to generations of early modern English readers. As noted in my previous blogs on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed quarto editions of the Travels, the ‘look’ of the text hadn’t changed much throughout this period; editions were printed mainly in blackletter type and featured many woodcut illustrations. The version of the narrative published in these editions was based on an imperfect manuscript copy of the Travels, which omitted a substantial part of the narrative dealing with Egypt. Thus, the most culturally familiar version of Mandeville’s travelogue was one that did not contain the fuller account of Egypt’s geography, customs, and landmarks found in many manuscript copies of the Travels. This remained the case until the publication of a radically new octavo edition of Travels (London, 1725), which I briefly explore here. 

Rather than replicating the textual and paratextual content of the previous editions, both the ‘look’ and the substance of the 1725 edition were shaped by editorial interventions founded on concerns with textual authority and correctness typical of eighteenth-century literary editing.¹ So what exactly did the 1725 edition do differently? Did it offer a more ‘correct’ version of Mandeville to readers? The most immediately striking set of differences is a visual one: the edition is printed in roman and italic type instead of archaic blackletter, and there are no illustrations. Instead, a different, more scholarly set of paratexts furnish the text, namely footnotes and an index of ‘obsolete words’. Importantly, the edition also includes an anonymous ‘Editor’s Preface’, which mediates the text for the reader. 

[Image] Anon., The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt (London, 1725). Google Books

In the Preface, the editor tells the reader that this never-before-printed English-language version of the Travels is ‘published from a Manuscript in the Cottonian Library’ (Titus C. XVI; now at the British Library), which ‘appears to be genuine Work of the Author’, unlike the previously printed English editions, which are ‘are so curtail’d and transpos’d, as to be made thereby other Books’ (sigs. A2r-v). The manuscript that the editor takes as his copy-text for the edition is not ‘curtail’d’; it contains the fuller account of Egypt. The editor describes a scholarly approach to verifying the integrity of the narrative as found in the Cotton manuscript, noting that this version has been collated (i.e. closely compared) with seven other manuscripts (in English, French, and Latin) and four printed editions (in Latin, Italian, and the ‘Common’ English version). The footnotes and collation notes that appear throughout the book make references to these other textual witnesses. This textual apparatus is not as consistent and extensive as, for example, one might find in eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, but it nevertheless aligns the 1725 edition of the Travels with developments in literary editing, because the editor has sought out the ‘best’ available version of the text, which is compared against other versions.

Previous English editions presented Mandeville’s narrative uncritically to their readers, leaving it to their own judgement whether to treat the Travels as fact or fiction, a book of marvels or a travelogue. The considerable difficulty of negotiating between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ in Mandeville’s travel account haunts Richard Hakluyt’s inclusion of an abridged Latin version of Travels in the first edition of Principal Navigations (a huge compendium of travel narratives published in 1589; see my previous blog). Mandeville’s narrative is included in Hakluyt’s ambitious publication on account of his historical importance as an early English traveller rather than on the currency of the information contained in his account. Whereas in Principal Navigations Mandeville was situated specifically in the context of travel knowledge, the 1725 edition of Travels is less concerned with travel credentials than it is with the Travels as a historical document and with historiography more generally. When commenting on the outdated, fabulous elements of the Travels, the editor asks, ‘if old Authors must be rejected for putting strange Stories and Improbabilities into their History, what will become of Venerable Bede, Gildas, Geoffry of Monmouth, and the rest of our English Historians?’ (sig. A3v-A4r). The editor thus places Mandeville into a wider context of important medieval authorities whose writings—outmoded as they might have been by 1725—were an important part of English history. The editor, aware that Mandeville’s Travels was by this time largely seen as a collection of tall tales, draws attention to Mandeville’s historical importance and asks, ‘Why then should not this Author have his due Place and Regard, amongst the Writers of the Age he liv’d in[?]’ (sig. A4r). By implication, the only suitable way of giving Mandeville his due place and regard was by means of establishing a reliable text to replace the crude and unreliable editions that went before it. The vexed issue of ‘truth’ and credibility is thus displaced from the trustworthiness of the details found in the Travels onto the soundness of the textual witnesses in which the narrative comes down to the reader. 

So how successful was this radically new edition? Perhaps the anonymous editor had hoped that publishing an account of the Travels from a more authoritative and ‘complete’ manuscript copy would supplant the ‘common’ version that had undergone so many editions in the preceding two centuries. Or else, the aim might have been to offer a competing, more scholarly edition for the discerning reader, providing an alternative to the cruder illustrated editions. In any case, evidence would suggest that the 1725 edition was not a commercially successful one in its own time; copies did not sell very well and were reissued with a new title page two years later, and no subsequent editions of this text were printed in the eighteenth century. However, in the nineteenth century the text of the 1725 edition was reproduced by editors such as J. O. Halliwell and John Ashton, who took it as a given that the anonymous editor had done a thorough job of transcribing the Cotton manuscript version of Mandeville’s narrative.² It was not until A. W. Pollard produced his own edition of the Travels in 1900, working directly from the Cotton manuscript, that it became evident how compromised the ‘authoritative’ 1725 edition actually was. Pollard calls his eighteenth-century predecessor a ‘deliberate as well as a careless criminal’ on account of the omission of words and sometimes whole sentences, the introduction of capital letters, and the silent excision of ‘difficult’ material in the manuscript.³ For example, the Cotton manuscript provides the phonetic ‘names’ of ‘Saracen’ letters and reproduces the letters themselves (they actually look more Glagolitic than Arabic). The editor of the 1725 text omits this section, presumably because it was impossible to reproduce the ‘Saracen’ alphabet typographically. Incidentally, Pollard’s own edition also does not reproduce the characters of this alphabet; its place is represented by an ellipsis: ‘And these be the names of their a. b. c. Now shall ye know the figures. … ’ (p. 96). Even by 1900 editors were struggling to accommodate some features of Mandeville manuscripts in print, even if they were somewhat more honest about their limitations.

Even though the 1725 edition of Mandeville’s Travels was not a commercial success, it is nevertheless an interesting and useful example of how eighteenth-century interests in literary editing touched upon an important and hugely popular historical narrative. The edition’s afterlife in subsequent centuries demonstrates how later editors inherited the text of this edition, reproducing it uncritically as an ‘authoritative’ version until its shortcomings were unmasked by Pollard’s return to the original manuscript. The commercial ‘failure’ of the edition in its own day suggests that perhaps Mandeville’s cultural and bibliographic status was too deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination to accommodate this type of pseudo ‘scholarly’ shift. However, the general principles that informed its conception anticipated the more rigorous standards of textual editing developed in the centuries that followed.

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Bibliography

[1] See for example Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

[2] J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundervile (London: Edward Lumley, 1839); John Ashton, ed., The Voiage and Travayle of Sir John Maundeville (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1887).

[3] See A. W. Pollard, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: The Version of the Cotton Manuscript in Modern Spelling, with Three Narratives, in Illustration of It, from Hakluyt’s “Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries” (London: Macmillan, 1900), p. vi.