Mandeville, JEHAN DE, the name assumed by the compiler of a famous book of travels, written in French, and published between 1357 and 1371. Versions in Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Walloon, German, Bohemian, Danish, and Irish are found, and the number of MSS. amounts to at least 300. Many have maintained the priority of the Latin text, which exists in as many as five independent versions, but it seems much more probable that the French was the earlier. The earliest edition of the French text was printed at Lyons in 1480. Indeed, it is most probable that the book was written under a feigned name by the physician Jehan de Bourgoigne, otherwise Jehan à la Barbe, who is stated in an early Latin edition to have met Mandeville first at Cairo, and again at Liège, and to have persuaded and helped him to write his travels. There can be little doubt that this statement of Bourgoigne's was merely an ingenious blind, and that he alone was the author of the book. But a statement has been discovered that Bourgoigne revealed on his death-bed his real name of Mandeville to Jean d'Outremeuse, explaining that he had had to flee from his native England for a homicide. We are told further that this physician, who died in 1372, had practised his profession at Liège since 1343. And it is apparently quite certain that in the 16th and 17th centuries a tomb was shown at Liège, with a Latin inscription stating that Mandeville died there in November 1372. A French version was made from a defective French manuscript at least as early as the beginning of the 15th century, and two extant independent revisions of this followed within a quarter of a century. The original defective form was printed by Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde (1499); the editions of 1725 and the well-known reprints by Halliwell (1839 and 1866) represent one of these later revisions; that first printed for the Roxburgh Club in 1889 is an admirable edition of the other. But the glaring errors of translation render it impossible that either of these forms of the English version can be from the hand which wrote the original work, in spite of the statement in the preface, which has been too easily believed, that it was made by Mandeville himself. None the less it remains an admirable monument of English, but the name of Sir John Mandeville should now disappear from histories of literature as the 'father of English prose.'
In the preface the French compiler describes himself as a knight born at St Albans, who left his native country in 1322, travelled by way of Turkey, Armenia, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, Amazonia, and India, often visited Jerusalem, and who wrote in Romance as better understood than Latin. In the course of the book we are told further that he had served the sultan of Egypt against the Bedouins, and the emperor of China against the king of Manzi; that he had seen the glory of Prester John and drunk of the Fountain of Youth at Palombe (Quilon on the Malabar coast), and returned home unwillingly owing to arthritic gout in 1357.
By far the greater part of the book has now been proved to be borrowed, with interpolations, usually extravagant, from the narrative of Friar Odoric (written about 1330); from Hayton, an Armenian who became a Premonstratensian monk, and dictated at Poitiers in 1307 a book about the East in the French tongue; from the work of the Franciscan Carpini; from the well-known Epistle of Prester John, widely known in the 13th century; from Albert of Aix, Brunetto Latini, Peter Comestor, Jacques de Vitry, Vincent de Beauvais (Speculum Historiale and Speculum Naturale); from the 12th-century Latin itineraries of Palestine, and from the work of the German knight William of Boldensele, written in 1336. A small portion of the book may still represent actual travels and personal knowledge, especially in the part relating to the Holy Land; but this does not re-establish the honesty of the writer, who claims himself to have travelled in the remotest regions described, and to have seen with his own eyes the wonders enumerated, while he never mentions Odoric, from whom he conveyed by far the greater part of his book. Among these wonders we find stories of fabulous monsters, such as anthropophagi, and men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders, the phoenix, the vegetable lamb, the weeping crocodile, the garden of transmigrated souls at Cansay (Hang-choo-foo), and the Valley Perilous. Of the Terrestrial Paradise, however, the writer is candid enough to say that he had not been there.
See the article by Colonel Yule and E. B. Nicholson in vol. xv. (1883) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and the latter's letter in the Academy for April 12, 1884; Dr Albert Bovenschen, Quellen für die Reisebeschreibung des Johann von Mandeville (Berlin, 1888); and the Introduction by G. F. Warner to his edition for the Roxburgh Club (1889), in which the views of Dr Vogels and Dr Carl Schönborn are also discussed.