The Book of John Mandeville

The work now known as Mandeville's Travels- a fictive traveler's account of journeys through the East, both Near and Far- was a late-Medieval bestseller, more popular in its day than Marco Polo's Travels. The original French version, essentially a synthesis of excerpts from over 1,000 (genuine) travel books, was quickly translated into eleven languages, and over 300 manuscripts have survived. In the process of being so often copied and translated, the "original" text was often altered, sometimes drastically, and the changes introduced by the copyists and translators reveal a wealth of information about the Medieval European mind and its views of the "other."