The Book of John Mandeville: With Related Texts

The work now known as Mandeville's Travels -- a fictive traveller's account of journeys through the East, both Near and Far -- was a late-Medieval best-seller, 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". In addition to a fresh, vibrant translation -- the first from the Middle French original since the fifteenth century -- this edition of the Travels offers a succinct, broad-ranging Introduction to the work that touches on the question of authorship, the sources on which the text drew, and the transformation and reception of the work down to the present day. Also