Galia Halpern, Ph.D.

Candidate
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Paper presented: Sept. 1, 2010

Royal Geographical Society International Conference
‘Terra incognita’? Making space for medieval geographies.

Mandeville’s “Eye” and Experiential Landscape in the Late Middle Ages

Drawing as he did upon a cornucopia of geographic material available to travel writers

in the mid-fourteenth century, the author-narrator Sir John Mandeville penned the exploits of

his purported 34 year travels through the diverse known and imagined regions of the world.

An extant illustrated copy of his Travels dating from the 1470’s initiated my current

investigation into correspondences between late-medieval verbal and visual representations of

the globe. In what ways were textual formats in dialogue with authoritative mapping practices

in the Mediterranean and early-Atlantic theatres? How might the historically derided

eyewitness authenticity with which fourteenth and fifteenth century audiences credited

Mandeville’s text reflect on syncretistic aesthetic principles between imagining the world in

word and image? 1

The illustrations in Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Vienna ms. Cod. 2838 are a

unique set of watercolors which graphically describe Mandeville’s route [Images 1-2]. Shown

here in rapid succession are the blemmey, cannibals, and hermaphrodites that Mandeville

reported encountering along his journey. They are linked along a unidirectional, continuous

landscape. The direction of travel is reinforced by the horizontal stroke of brown earth

1
George Warner, Introduction to The Buke of John Maundeuille, (Westminister: Nichols & Sons, 1889) V,
footnote 1.

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framing the rhythmically rolling grass knolls upon which the races cavort. The line eventually

angles upwards and to the right, leading the eye towards a depiction of the subsequent culture

Mandeville encounters in the text - that of the cynocephales. The continuous landscape

evidenced in the double-page spread follows a distinct linear movement through space,

reflecting the direction of writing and pulling the viewer from left to right through landscape

and pages alike.

The linear progress of the eye continues as one turns the pages [Images 3-8]. Here we

discover that the manuscript’s illustrator utilized diluted colors, directional brushstrokes, and

the blank space of the page to indicate sustained forward movement in sweeping arcs along

multiple spreads. His representation of the landscape gives visual form to Mandeville’s

textually described passage over the surface of the globe. It reveals how a linear travel path

worked to link otherwise disparate bits of geographical, cultural, and historical data.

The linear linkage of discrete episodes in the Travels attends to an aspect of the book’s

received geography which has long been debated. While late-nineteenth century scholars

derided Mandeville’s geography as bearing “no importance in the history of Earth-

Knowledge,” 2 the book has more recently been applauded for providing the necessary

“imaginative preparation” for the Age of Exploration. 3 How it did so, according to Josephine

Bennett, was to give “form and color to interesting matter, shaping and arranging and

proportioning it...” 4 Christian Zacher added this insight to the palpable landscape of

Mandeville’s book: “Mandeville [is] all eyes.” 5

2
Charles Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography v.3 (London: H. Frowde, 1906) 320.
3
Josephine Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) 236.
4
Ibid., 216.
5
Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth Century England
(Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1976) 7.

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 Zacher emphasized that these eyes are shared by narrator and readers alike as they

uncover “the cultural and religious diversity of the world – a world gradually seen to be

larger, stranger, and more deserving of investigation, the world that in the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries thinkers and travelers (often inspired by this book) began to uncover.” 6 To

achieve this end, Mandeville deploys the singular first- and second- person voice throughout

the text. He engages the reader directly, inviting “you” to participate in the act of traveling,

and he indexes geographical truths according to the inclusive, literary “I” of an “impersonal

Everyman.” 7

The book’s perceived observational veracity has thus been framed as the collective

European imagination working to invest the East, South, and future Atlantic with their

material substance. Prior to Mandeville’s century, men and women with the heads of dogs

were assigned a marginal geography within a Christological cosmology, rather than a directly

observed and encountered location. Their physiognomies once symbolized a lack of

knowledge in Christ. They inhabited the estranged Elsewhere of Latin Christendom, dwelling

along the periphery of the world in elusive lands beyond the geographical and spiritual reach

of central Jerusalem. 8

It seems that what Mandeville had accomplished, then, was to manipulate these

monstrous legends of the distant East by locating them within new webs of discourse. In

lifting the bulk of his material from earlier written accounts of the East, Indies, and Africa,

Mandeville did not so much invent a new content for the world as he imbued established

content with a new sense of physicality and contemporaneity. The content of Mandeville’s

6
Ibid., 132.
7
Donald Howard, Writers and Pilgrims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) 56-58.
8
John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2000) 37-58. Also, Naomi Reed Kline, Maps of Medieval Thought (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2001) 150-
164.

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travelogue was taken very much at observational face value by its subsequent audiences. It is

this “reality” factor of the book’s reception in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that

Charles Beazley, and before him, George Warner and Henry Yule, bemoaned.

My contribution to the long-running dilemma over the Travels’ early reception stems

from the format in which the content of its world takes shape – namely a book in which

described locales demand the primary attention of the reader in their respective passages. It is

a book that provides the experiential pathway through the diverse geographical and cultural

matter of the world. It confers upon that matter its realistic coherency, structured around the

simultaneous turning of pages and embodied perspective of its travelling narrator. We can see

that the steady procession through pages and locales is how the Vienna codex structures its

world.

Mandeville’s connective pathway unfolds over turned pages and is implicit in his use

of “thence,” “and afterwards men go,” “and then to the city of,” and so forth. These verbal

links exploit the forcefully present narrator’s prolonged linear movements to unify the

heterogeneous geographic material that comprises the global landscape. It yields forth the

taxonomic system that homogenizes information which Mandeville compiled from scores of

religious, secular, and encyclopedic tracts, spanning numerous centuries, forms, and original

authorial intentions. 9 Regardless of their original context, Mandeville has seen them

personally - in the present. He’s been there, he’s done that.

The traveler-narrator’s mediation of a landscape made palpable has been the focus of

recent scholarship. 10 Mary Campbell went as far as to applaud the insertion of the Mandeville

9
Ian Higgins, Writing East: The ‘Travels’ of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), 6-12
10
Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic Travel European Travel Writing, 400-1600 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989) 9.

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narrator as the author’s most savvy intervention into imaging the world. Via his steady

movement through space, and his constant expositions on objects and cultures observed, the

new genre not of realistic prose, but of “realistic prose fiction,” was born. 11 Mandeville’s role

in mediating the global landscape in this way elucidates a geographical model that, I argue, at

once reflects both late medieval textual and visualization practices, as well as an emergent

way in which the earth was becoming known through secular mapping at the time.

One of the Travels’ contributions to understanding the history of Earth-Knowledge

lies here, not so much in the factual reality of the matter of the East, but rather in how

authoritative construction of the world was derived from seeing that matter through a

communally constituted subjective eye. Mandeville’s linguistic manipulation of this particular

form of collective witnessing has been analyzed by David Ruddy. Ruddy argued that

Mandeville’s book turned away from the encyclopedic tradition’s ‘closed’ system of “highly

literate and linguistically restricted…textual references to past authorities.” 12 Instead, it

gained its authority through Mandeville’s personal experience, along with his audience’s

ability to supplement and challenge the book’s eyewitness observations. 13 In the exordium,

Mandeville implies that the knowledge in his book is compatible with encyclopedic authority

and could have been written in Latin. Yet, he adds, “I have put this book out of Latin into

French,” so that, “other noble and worthy man that con Latin but little, and have been beyond

the sea…may redress it and amend it.” 14

11
Ibid., 122.
12
David Ruddy, Scribes, Printers and Vernacular Authority: A Study in the Late-Medieval and Early-Modern
Reception of Mandeville’s Travels (Dissertation: University of Michigan, 1995) 113.
13
Ibid., 113.
14
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1964), 6.

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 Mandeville’s invocation of corrective personal observation is here manipulating a

dimension of the late medieval production of knowledge which was collective. 15 For Ruddy,

Mandeville’s plea for a collective observation of global matter lends the text its authority and

exposes the “open” nature of manuscript culture at the time. What today we tend to consider

scribal corruption among derivative copies of a given text does not accurately reflect what

role manuscript alteration played historically. Texts opened “outwardly, inviting later hands to

collaborate in their production of knowledge.” 16 In Mandeville’s case, the scribes are invited

to add information to the landscape; it is what I call an “Open Geography,” continuously and

collectively re-imagined with each copy of the manuscript, and visually ordered around an

individual’s observational pathway through its topographies.

The veracity of Mandeville’s collectively constructed geography stems from his

manipulation of a ‘poetics of utilitarian movement’ – “other men, who manage to travel to

where I have and have not been, may appropriate my authoritative voice to add to the text’s

geographical content.” He alludes to bodily mobility over the globe’s surface, defined by

one’s physical ability to pass through a succession of desired coordinates. The linking of

clearly delineated regions and cultures by a system of connective straight lines permeates the

cartography and secular travel accounts of the period under examination. [Images 9-10] It

differentiates these travel descriptions from their dogmatic and symbolic predecessors. It also

shares with Mandeville’s adoption of the secular vernacular an aesthetic of common, open

application that distinguishes it from the internally referential system of the learned Latin

forefathers.

15
Ruddy, 70.
16
Ibid., 10.

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 A ‘poetics of movement’ as I use the term here, refers to the many visual and literary

tropes which invoke the gradual movement through space of individuals as a means for

structuring the landscape. It is not the fixed perspective of the eye established in earlier

mappae mundi [Image 11]. Nor is it the locus sanctus well known in medieval architecture

and literature wherein an encountered building, relic, and image, or even a location, may

signify another holy place and time. 17 Rather, it is an experience of the world structured

around embodied movement through it, visually encapsulated in maps for example, in the

quiet inclusion of padroes that trace years of Diogo Cao’s southern tracking along the west

coast of Africa in the 1480’s [Image 12]. 18 Suzanne Akbari has conducted a study into the

particular dimension of bodily movement as it pertains to traversing rivers in Mandeville and

Marco Polo’s texts. In it, she concluded that while Mandeville fights currents in his steady

eastern migration towards the unobtainable Earthly Paradise, Polo rides his currents out, in a

steady migration towards very obtainable money. 19

By ‘utilitarian movement,’ I specifically mean an aesthetic that takes as its primary

basis the present conditions of a route that could sustain common passage. After all,

Mandeville never physically obtains Eden. 20 According to Ruddy, “Mandeville’s travels and

his book were firmly fixed in time,” and for his audiences “this specificity was considered to

be an essential aspect of his account...” 21 When Mandeville enters Constantinople, for

example, he comes across the statue of Justinian sitting on a horse. Justinian used to hold an

17
Richard Krautheimer, “Introduction to an ‘Iconography of Architecture’”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, v (1942), 1-33.
18
Brian Lasataer, The Dream of the West, 2.2 (Morrisville, Lulu Enterprises, 2007), 295.
19
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Currents and Currency in Marco Polo’s Devisement dou monde and The Book of Sir
John Mandeville,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2008), 110-129.
20
Mandeville, 185.
21
Ruddy, 120.

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apple in his hand, “but [now] it is long since fallen out of the hand.” 22 A functionally

navigable landscape such as Mandeville’s is marked by clearly delineated travel pathways,

and it was ushered in visually by the mid-thirteenth century with the toleta and rhumb-lines of

charts like the Carte Pisane [Image 10].

While seemingly insignificant, Mandeville’s provision for a functional route through

the diverse regions of the world differs dramatically from the ways in which his geography

has previously been described. Often, it has been compared to a theological mappa mundi,

most notably by Stephen Greenblatt during the quintcentennial celebration of Columbus’s

crossing of the Atlantic. Greenblatt argued that the rim and Holy Center of a mappa mundi

underpin Mandeville’s geography, and that they play a pivotal role in Mandeville’s

subsequent negation of the theological relationship between center and periphery. 23 Stripping

the world of centripetal forces, Mandeville turns away from the Holy Land and begins to

discursively wander over the rim of the distant East in, “a reverie of free movement in a world

that is paradoxically at once materialized and disembodied.” 24

While an apt description of the “linguistic collage of translations” 25 held together by

Mandeville’s tortured syntax, for me there remains a tension between the “at once

materialized and disembodied” world of a mappa mundi and the fact that Mandeville’s route

reconstitutes the disembodied world along the linear movements of the narrator. At the root of

this tension is a conflict between two underlying geometries of the world, and what different

geometric structures may have signified to the Book’s readers. The circle and the line result in

22
Mandeville, 46.
23
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1991) 29.
24
Ibid., 38.
25
ibid., 49.

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vastly divergent experiences of the global landscape, and each form derives from different

systems of knowledge.

When one looks at a mappa mundi, all heterogeneous geographic, cultural, and

historical material is rendered accessible to the eye at once [Image 11]. The viewer is faced

with a fixed unit of information that is imprinted in the mind, the discrete parts of which can

be viewed simultaneously, in any number of combinations, in order to generate meaning

within the memory. Such an approach to the gaze reflects an earlier form of medieval visual

experience, which was “momentary” and akin to “the glance.” 26 However, according to

Cynthia Hahn by the thirteenth century this form of seeing had been eclipsed by the less

passive metaphor of sustained reading. In the late Middle Ages there emerged instead a

“prolonged gaze apprehended as an interactive experience.” 27

As an alternative, therefore, to the concentric circles of the mappa mundi, I would like

to suggest a way of thinking about the Book’s geography that more accurately reflects the

prolonged format of the book, the forceful presence of the narrator, and the interactive

visuality of the later Middle Ages: it is the compass circuit. 28 This alternative model better

reflects systems of open, collectively produced geographical knowledge and it structures the

landscape around embodied linear movement. In addition, the compass is a more historically

contemporaneous form of mapping the world during the peak of Mandeville’s popularity

between 1360 and 1470. As is often overlooked, mappae mundi were becoming obsolete

outside of highly theological works by this time, and what world maps that were being

26
Cynthia Hahn, “Viseo Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169.
27
Ibid., 169. My italics.
28
Eva Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art (New York: Abelard-Schuman Limited, 1957), 113.

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produced, had already begun to incorporate the content and style of portolan charts. 29 We

should remember at this point that like Latin encyclopedias, even if Mandeville is invoking

such theological maps, his text did not draw its popularity and authority from their internally

referential forms. Like French, one might suggest that the portolan chart was the vernacular

cartography of its day.

The original Lo Compasso de Navigare comes down to us from the 1230’s, over a

century before Mandeville picked up his pen. The compass in its simplest form provided the

port-by-port bearings and distances of a clockwise circuit around the Mediterranean basin. 30

The Compasso begins, “First, from Cape St. Vincent to the mouth of the river of Seville, 150

miles (bearing) between east and south east. From the said mouth as far as the city of Seville

is 60 miles by river..,” and so on. 31 It shares in common with Mandeville the method by

which, despite its underlying circular structure, cities are linked along a continuous line, a

logical succession of movements in fixed directions and distances. 32 Landmarks of principal

harbors are described, and these could be updated by new eyewitness accounts in the

successive copies of the Compasso to accurately reflect present conditions of a city or port. 33

For example, Genoa harbor had, “a cape to the west called Cape Faro on which is a high

white tower on which they put a great light at night.” 34

This descriptive circuit found its way visually into the portolan charts of the thirteenth

through fifteenth centuries [Image 9]. Here, interlaced compass roses overlay the place-names

29
J.B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., History of Cartography, v.1. (Chiacgo: University of Chicago Press,
1987) plate 16. Also, John Block Friedman, “Monsters at the Earth’s Imagined Corners: Wonders and Discovery
in the Late Middle Ages,” in Monsters, Marvels, and Miracles: Imaginary Journeys and Landscapes in the
Middle Ages, eds., Leif Sondergaard and Rasmus Thorning Hansen (Odense: University Press of Southern
Denmark, 2005) 48.
30
Taylor, 104.
31
Ibid, 105-106.
32
ibid.
33
ibid., 107.
34
ibid.

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of cities written at perpendicular angles to the coast. Unlike the fixed eastern orientation of

mappae mundi, one had to keep rotating the map in various directions in order to read the

location names. At the same time one had to use the lattice of rhumb-lines to establish one’s

relative, not absolute, direction from port to port. 35 This relative orientation established in a

portolan is also a component of the Mandeville text. Greenblatt observed that Mandeville

wavers between locating the Earthly Paradise east or west of the Empire of Prester John

depending on one’s approach to the region. 36 Mandeville’s orientation and movements are

subjective and embodied, reminding us in no small part that for Columbus west could be east

relative to the coordinates of the Santa Maria.

Seen here in the Angelino Dulcert map of circa 1339 [Image 13], each city’s location

remains relative to its neighbors, and as each name enters the proper orientation to be read, it

assumes the primary attention of the reader. Coming upon their descriptions while spinning

the map is comparable to arriving at their descriptions in the passages of a book, or seeing

them unfold along the meandering pathway of the Vienna illustrations. The attention each

port warranted in portolan charts was expounded upon by colored inks to distinguish degree

of importance, and by heraldic flags which bore the emblems of rulers. 37 These visual

embellishments could be interpolated with the descriptions of new ports. They are the

equivalency of descriptive amplification in a text.

Scholars have already established that this compass circuit and the visual framework

of the portolan were in dialogue with travel literature in the mid-fourteenth century.

Specifically, they have established that the Spanish El Libro del Conoscimiento de Todos los

35
ibid., 113.
36
Greenblatt 42.
37
Taylor, 113.

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Reinos was likely composed with the aid of a world map from the Catalan Dulcert-group. 38 In

turn, the Libro’s description of the west coast of Africa might have informed the mid-fifteenth

century Este World Map, 39 revealing how syncretic visual and verbal structures encouraged

slippage between representation and fact in travel descriptions. 40

A second pseudo-travel book, the Libro was written within years of Mandeville’s

Travels, and we should not be surprised to discover that it was also written in the first person

voice. “I departed Roma and went to Romana and through the land of the principality, and I

entered the Kingdom of Napol, a very luxurious and abundant and temperate land…” 41 Like

charts, the anonymous author of the Libro used graphic descriptions of both known and, as in

the device of Prester John, imagined coats of arms. 42 These shields served as coordinates to

fix the locations of cities along his circuit [Images 14-15]. He ultimately arrives full circle in

Seville. 43 Likewise, Mandeville comes full circle, arriving at his point of departure from St.

Albans in order to rest his aged body. Turning to his audience, he makes one final plea that,

“those who say devoutly for me a Pater Noster… may God grant a share in my

pilgrimage…” 44

38
Nancy Marino, Introduction to El Libro del Conoscimiento de Todos los Reinos (Tempe: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1999) xxviii-xxxi.
39
Ibid., xxi.
40
ibid., xvi
41
El Libro del Conoscimiento de Todos los Reinos, 27.
42
Marino, xxxv.
43
Libro, 109.
44
Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 189.

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Mandeville’s “Eye” and Experiential Landscape in the Late Middle Ages
Images 1-15:

Images 1-2: Ms. cod. 2838, fols. 102v-103r. c.1470s.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
Images 3-8: Vienna Ms. cod. 2838, fols. 103v-106r.
Image 9: Detail of Portolan Chart, Angelino Dulcert, Res Ge. B 696. c. 1339.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Image 10: Carte Pisane. Res. Ge. B 1118. c. 1275. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
Image 11: “Psalter World Map,” Add. MS 28681, fol.9r. c.1265.
British Library, London.
Image 12: ‘Guinea Portugalexe,' Edgerton ms. 73. c. 1490. British Museum, London.
Image 13: Portolan Chart, Angelino Dulcert, Res Ge. B 696. c. 1339.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
 Image 14: Shields of Kingdoms, from
El Libro del Conoscimiento… Trans. Nancy Marino.

Image 15: Detail from Petrus Vesconte

Atlas Maps, Vat. Lat. 2972. c. 1321.
Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome.