THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by ELAINE TREHARNE WILLIAM GREEN OXFORDCHAPTER 31 PILGRIMAGES, TRAVEL WRITING, AND THE MEDIEVAL EXOTIC JEFFREY JEROME COHEN A fictional account of an English knight’s voyage to the Holy Land and the alien realms beyond, the Book of John Mandeville was a medieval bestseller, and possibly ‘the most popular travel narrative ever composed. A kind of fourteenth-ces odors Guide to tng but a compencium of cultural detail, pious histories, marvels, and exotica an array of sources, Unflaggingly congenial yet quietly treacherous, the x Mandevill masks its recalctzance beneath what postcolonial theory calls ‘sly civility” Bearing a reassuring resemblance to traditional accounts of pilgsimage and travel, zs well as to classical ethnoggaphy (descriptions of exstoms and peoples), the text seems companionable enough, Its easygoing narrative of foreign marvels and distant travels late seaders into enthusiastic encounter... but {hank the audience a the Southeast Medios] Aesaciton meting ia St Lou for their cathusiam for his pret. Np cllegues Jonathan Hy an! Rober Fan Paterson of Washington Univers gave vlaatefvabecl * ‘iy elit ia concept btewed fom Tn sha, who debs the phenome nate ref to sats the ealaniesnaestie demanc” throgh what appear to be polite aseement- On loser inspection such asent ras out to bea deco or recon of any alter a amano ‘courion, See Bhabha (9948-101).6xa_TRFFREY JE2OME COHEN then leaves them to wonder if the motion-filled and unsettled world it brings into being wort exode the stability of their own. The Book of john Manderifteis, in @ word, unsettling. Its volatility derives from the fact that, strictly speaking, it does not exist there is no Book of John Mandeville, no single or originary version, no ‘complete’ source from which textual variants sprang, just a volatile multiplicity of texts ‘masquerading as a unity? ‘The nonexistence of the Book as object, as thing, has serious consequences for its analysis. We'll always be chasing after what was supposed to remain where we placed it, something that keeps moving just beyond that skyline ‘where terra cognita curves to harbour incalculable ilan« In honour of its peripatetic subject, this chapter follows a meandering path. But 1 don’t want to lose you. Here isthe rough itinerary well use to pursue this ever- in-transit collection of texts filed with wonders, miracles, and motion. This chapter ‘will attempt to ma 1, How the work transforms itself from a typical account of Holy Land pilgrimage based apon William of Boldensele’s Liber de quishusdam ultramarines partibus (an account of the German knight's journey through Constantinople to Palestine in 132-3) toa bocndary-defying ethnography capable of almost circling the round, earth, 2. Hovr the Book populates its woelds with bodics in motion—so much so that things that ought to be utterly immobile (rocks, ruins, graves) are possessed of magnetism and motility, alluring or radiative effets that medieval writers called virtus 3. How the constant forward motion of the text never arrives a its destination (the globe is circumnavigable only in cheory; the world cannot in the end be contained within a circle’s enclaspment) How for all the Boo’s dreams of a cosmos where bodies constantly move, impediments (Japidary narratives) nonetheless serve to interrupt the text's restless itinerary, transfixing the Book to small identities like English. Even if imaginary or fictive, these identities are nonetheless a powerful counterweight to the embrace of otherness found elsewhere in the work 5. Finally, how the Book is ultimately less of a text than an event: how it performs its own content, becoming itselfa marvel, a body in perpetual motion, 4 ‘Though aumerous editions of the Book of John Mandevile exist in Prench and in English, 1 will be cuoting from the version known as Defective, an appellation this group earned beccuse ‘missing’ a section know as the Egypt Gap. The Defective version possesses the best claim to be ‘the English Mandeville? and Mandeville’ potential national identity will be one of my themes. This supposedly ‘unfortunate name’ of Defective also captures something profound about the text's openness, about why the Book should possess such enduring vitality* Several versions of the 2 The Rook’ mulls i wa-steseddnoughout an Macleod Higgins magiserl book secalso 1999) 9 Hanna (984 23) + Keane and Reno (2071) All quotation in Mile Eng are fom ths extkings into inaword, not exi complete’ of texts hing, has supposed at skyline path, But this ever- is chapter ilgrimage rtibus an lestine in he round satthings vagnetism ition (the contained ly move, he text's Byen if terweight forms its hand in ition this Defective deville’ fortunate rpenness, ns of the rook (997 PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIO 613 Defective text are extant. I have chosen the recently edited London, British Library, Royal 17 C. xxwvii, a ‘highly. individualistic’ treatment that, even if ‘somewhat compressed, nonetheless contains most of the richest material found in other ver- sions.” This version also contains some fine illustrations, especially of buildings and mountains, As enduring markers along the pilgrimage trail or as marvels in them- selves, such rocky architectures, monuments, ruins, and fragments of stone populate the narrative throughout, providing the Book with its sturdiest and yet its most strangely mobile substance. In THE MyDpeL ‘The Book of John Mandeville narrates a miraculous journey during which a traveller might encounter professional visgin deflowerers (the gadiybyriens, p. 87). or her- maphrodites who know the enjorments of both sexes (p. 71), or an island where a lady still awaits the kiss that will free her from her dragon's flesh and reward with Wealth, ttle, and lands the man so brave as to brush his lips against hers (Hippo- crates’ transfigured daughter, pp. 29-30). Travel narratives, like medieval bestiaries and romances, allow their readersto enjoy pleasures ordinarily withheld, to consume fantasies otherwise precluded.* Karly in the Book Mandeville reaches Sataia, a “greet cit that ‘sanke adoun’ when one of its residents could not resist opening a ‘grave of ‘marble’ and being with his beloved one last time. Just as subterranean Satalia renders the paths Wat crons above its burled towers ‘parolous passages’ (p. 32), 80 the Book of Toln Mandeville ikevrise possesses its own perilous passages, marble tombs that when opened could divert pilgrims from their certain and orthodox roads. Pilgrim- age is supposed to bea journey towards a known and reverenced destination, not an ‘erantry that enables haphazard encounter with the inexplicable, the dangerous, and the obstinately exotic. For despite the salacity of some of its eventual destinations, the Book of John Mandeville begins as a personalized version of a venerable gente: a conventional account of pilgrimage to the Holy “and.” Labelled itineraria ‘accounts of journey’ or ‘verbal roadmaps’), this gente of Christian writing traces its history back to at least 40 333, when an anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux composed a laconic report of his voyage to Jerusalem, the Itinerarium Burdigalense. Based upon Roman models, Christian itineraria tend to be terse records, providing some information on how to 2 Bid yas, the forbidden, ee Cohen (2008), The culturally normalizing function that fantasies ofthe exotic other could serve are thexoughly cxamined by Geraldine Heng fs her Enpire of Magic (2003). destination of lrwsalem is in other words, wholly orthodox. The place is known in svance: i we've read evens fraction of wit the book’ shor has, we have ready in away boen there We are edo expect no surprises on this plgimage that ll serious medieval tourists eventually take,oy ¥ JEROME COHEN JeEPRE get to the Holy City and a catalogue of sites to behold upon arrival. Visited locations and encountered objects are tied through scriptural citation to whatever biblical event gives the building, well, town, mountain, altar its significance, Thus the Pilgrim of Bordeaux writes of some artefacts he beholds: Here is also the comerof an exceeding high tower, where our Lord ascended and the tempter si ¥0 ‘Him, ‘If how be the Son of God, cas thyself down from hence’, .. Thereisa great corner-stone, of ‘which it was said, "The stone which the builders ejected is become the head of the comner.* Even when a crumbled ruin is all that remains of the structure that provided the setting for a biblical story, that narrative nonetheless comes fully to present life by invocation, An ‘exceeding high tower’ suddenly looms in a place where a pilgrim beheld its only extant comer. The bodies that once moved across these stages might Ihave perished or risen heavenward long ago, but stones abide the silent centuries to offer lasting testament to the histories that unfolded nearby. ‘To journey through this revered landscape is to traverse sacred time:a pilgrim arrives at the rock of Calvary, and there meditates upon the Passion as i Jesus and the two thieves were still hanging on their -rosses. Pilgrimage is a kind of time travel, the terminus of which is absolution atthe site of the resurrection. Travellers might partake of some side excursions (Jericho, the river Jordan, Bethlehem), they might immediately retum home, but in a way the pilgrim is forever stuck at that place of revelation and redemption, There isno compelling sory to tell afterwards, because the itrerarium was never about its narrator in the frst place. The Holy Land persists in its timelessness as ‘te traveller (whose soul is now similarly wrenched from the temporal) quickly ends the tale? Pilgrimage is @ one-way movement. Even ifthe sketch of a homeward journey is. provided, doctrinaly speaking there is no return from Palestine. ‘Although known for its peregeination without certain destination, the Book of fohn Mandeville likewise almost becomes transfixed here in the middle of the world. Tue Rock IN THE Myp OF THE ERTHE John Mandeville, the knightly narretor of the book that bears his name, provides his readers with several options for artiving in the Holy Land, both by land and by sea, 4th ext anus tars excelsisie,ubi doainas ascent t dist i, qui termpabat eum, eat ce domiinas ton tempiabisGomiaam devs ttm, sed sot eras, Ib est taps angular angus, {ecuo dictum ext lapider, quem reprobanerantaedifcants, hie fctas ext ad caput angal’s Tnivrartan Buraiglense 390, hit crisusrexorg/wwwsofinpigefoordhoBordoaMapEur itt This general observation has its obvious exceptions the plvim of Bordeaux eg. acknowledges that Emperor Coostantine has but abasic 't present to commemorate thesite ofthe Hoy Sepchre ‘Yersach acknowledgement ofa peesen teme in the Holy land—of the Living. contemporaneous ibabitation ofits expanses—tends to be both ace and marginal to the pgimage islPILGRIMAGES AND THR EXOTIC 615, 2d locations | He also details some unanticipated sights to enjoy along the way, including thet -ver biblical 1 Princtss in dragon form and the city sunk below the earth for its necrophilac the Pilgrim resident mentioned earlier." Bodily presence is foregrounded from the start. The Holy Land, we ae told, was y-halwed? by the corporedlzation and physical touch of : Chast (In the which londe hit Liked Hym to take flesh and blood of the Virgyn Marie baseloni : and to honoure that lond with His blessed foot, p. 21). Why it pleased him to take Seen body in this particular place is also explained, Palestine is best among geographies because “vertu of thyngs is in the myeldel” and Jerusalem isin the middel of the rovided the | worl (p28). At the very centeof this centre is the Church ofthe Holy Sule, ssent life by within which is enclosed the rock of Calvary, upon which was set the cross of Christ, “ea pilgrim i atop which Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac, under which was found in a crack tages might | the head of Adam. A sign in Latin and in Greek announces that we have arrived ‘in centuries to the myd ofthe erthe’(p. 38). Ground zero—the middle of the middle—is to be found nearby, ‘in the myddel of this cherche’, within a ‘compass’ (circle) drawn by Joseph of agrim arrives : Arimiathea. Here was placed the corpse of ‘Outre Lord’ after he was taken down from and the two i the cross: ‘And that compass, men seyn, hit is in the myddel of the world’ (p. 39). 2 travel, the | ‘The pivot of the earth, Jerusalem is central geographically, theologically. and ight partake historically—a place where the literal and the metaphorical are indistinguishable, mmediately where sign is thing. We find oarselves within the Holy Land, within the walls of relation and | Jerusalem, within the church ofthe tomb, within Joseph's compass: within, that is, a erariwm was series of ever shrinking concentric circles that announce, once we can get to no more aclessness as medial a site, that we have arrived at the locus where time and space are one. For just ‘ly ends the i as we can move no further geographically, so temporality itself seems arrested: we are journey is witnesses with Mandeville of events that occurred thirteen or fourteen hundred years before a living history caught in eternal loup. Thus st wily can we glimpse the red oe John stains of Christ’s blood upon the mortice that secured his cross, but the chains that held him to a pillar when he was scourged. Not far from Joseph's compass was the «ross itself entombed, placed ‘under a roche’ by Jews. Almost every step of this sacrosanct expanse brings to mird a story from the Bible, brings sacred narrative into the present to unfold once more. The centre of the earth would seem a place of i profound stasis, inscribed with a history so holy that the very stones retain its crimson imprint, Except that these precincts ate inhabited, and not by Joseph of Arimathea or Abraham or the Virgin Mary, ‘This lond of Jerusalem hath y-be in hond of diverse >rovides his | nacions, Mandeville observes, groviding an extensive list of the peoples who have and by sea come and {in most cases) gone: ‘Jewes, Cananeus, Assizienes, Perces, Medoynes, Massydoyns, Grecis, Romayns, Cristen men, Sarasyns, Barbaryns, and Turkes, and many other naciouns with hers’ (p. 37). The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is aris angus, : alls "© Unanticpate. at leas, inthe Lites de quisbasdam stmamarines paribus ofthe German Dominican Mapuche Wiliam of Boldenstle the foundation txt for the Books narratives of Constantinople and travel to anowedges | Palestine. Higgins (19g: 83) wits ofthe Hippocrates daughter epzade and the necrophilia at Satelia ‘oly Sepulchre | {neither found in Wiliam) that they have in comroon a theme of eros gone ary that they detve fom “neous “the shadowy word where romance couples with flHlore’ and thit--snce they sem so oot of pace | within the didactic narative—they havea ‘repuscalar quality)616 _ JEFFREY JEROME COHEN Constantinople's addition to the Levantine landscape. A Muslim Sultan now owns the building, and he has built a fence around the tomb of Jesus to prevent pilgras from chiselling souvenir pebbles. Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin, and other crusaders who hheld but could not keep the city are buried nearby. The cross of Christ and the nails that secured him to its wood were longago discovered and carried away, the latter now ‘possessed by ‘paynems and Sarasyns, Within the church that has engulfed this sacred region in stone, the priests who say themasses do not use a familiar liturgy, Rocks and tombs that once held secrets—subterranean or stonework spaces that had enclosed bodies and relics and kept them transfixed—have all been opened, emptied. In the ridale of the world, history carries on, Clergy go about their business indifferent to Roman changes to the mass, colonizers and tourists of various faiths come and go, the Sultan who owns the place remodels with his own architectural additions. Turee ToMBs ‘We immure bodies beneath or within stone because we possess no weightier material. Lithic heaviness keeps the body in its place, marks the hope that some trace will there endure even as the dead are lost to us. Christ rose because he could not be kept by such stone; death could not still his divine body. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is in Jerusalem, not Satalia—Satalia, that sueldenly subterrancan metropolis where a mysterious and unnamed ‘yong man’ loved so ardently that he opened the marble tomb withholding the body to which he was devoted. Nine months later a voice commanded ‘Go to the tumbe of that womman and opene the tumbe and byhold ‘what thow hast gyte on here’ (pp. 30-1). The youth unseals the stone for a second ‘time, and a flying head swoops out, -estless progeny of a corpse not surrendered to mortuary immobility. The airborne head circles his habitation, and ‘anoon the cité sanke adoun’: the earth swallows Satala in its entirety."" The marble grave here was not empty but too full: with a body not yielded to stillness, with forbidden pleasure, swith the monstrous product of a passion that transgressed the limit of death. Compare a tomb that comes just « bit earlier in the narrative, that of St John the Evangelist interred at Ephesus (p. 29). We are told two irreconcilable stories about this apostle’ resting place: cither Joha’s body was translated to heaven and the grave filled with manna; or that he entered -he tomb while still alive, where he still remains, awaiting the Day of Judgement. ‘Men may se, asserts Mandeville, ‘the erthe of the 1s According to M, C. SeymaouySatlia or Adalla is modern Antalya, whence Pal sailed to Antioch fase version ofthe Gergon’s Read myth combined with that of Callrachus dant Drusinia of Ephesus, but writes that he immediate source is unknown? (Seymour 2003: 1). fale does beer clement ofboth taese marstives it stands clare: this snot a story the ‘Mandevile-author took wholesale fom anotver known tex.owns the ims from ders who the nails atternow nis sacred rocks and enclosed adn the flerent to rndgo, the + material. will there e kept by ‘pulchreis 5 where & be marble aad byhold ca second ndered to om the cité cc here was 2 pleasure, ath, ‘John the sries ebout the grave Lzemains, -the of the ita Antioch iimachus PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIC 617 ‘tumbe many tymes stire and mese, as ther were a quyk thing ther under’ (p. 28) ‘What has the unholy passion of the young man at Satalia to say to this tomb of restless occupant? Or to the narrative of Christ’s Passion in the book of Mark, where the three women coming to anoint the body of Jesus find that the great rack sealing his tomb has been rolled away?!” A mysterious young man (juvenem) has already entered the tomb, and he decrees the vacancy of the place: ‘Be not affrighted: you seek. Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified: he is risen, he is not here, behold the place where they laid him?” The Holy Sepulchre is empty, and the message of the tuntenanted tomb is that death itself has perished. Necrophiliac Satalia sinks to the underground; Jerusalem, a place to which every approach is (in Mandeville’s ac- count) uphill, remains the earth's pinnacle. Could the contrast be more star Three tombs, three possibilities: revelation, mystification, boundary-crossing exploration. ‘The tomb of Jesus enjoins the pilg-im who has reached the earth's omphalos to return home, the trajectory of a convent onal itinerarium. Who can blame the toutist who ‘wants to chip a piece off the grave to remember its revelations? But the Sultan who regulates the church no longer allows its rocks to be transported. “The tombs at Satalia and Ephesus, tombs that interrupt the journey to the Holy Land, hint at perilous routes and dangerous dalliances. They suggest in advance that Mandeville will not be content to turn back afier reaching Jerusalem, Mandeville’ ‘movement beyond the city does not necessarily take away from its centrality. [don’t think that we witness here, as Stephen Greenblatt argued, ‘the abandonment of the dream of a sacred centre. As Iain Macleod Higgins has shown, the Mandeville- author stresses Jerusalem’s middleness more than any other medieval writer, a literal as well as symbolic placement of the city that permeates the Book! This world otientation and its consequences are not going to be abandoned by leaving Jerusalem. behind—and indeed, the Book will return to its status as centre much later, when Mandeville details the sphericity of the earth, Yet at that point of return, as Mande- ville describes the potential circumnavigability of the globe, Jerusalem seems to be the top of the world rather than its centre. The flatness of a mappa mundi possesses a ‘middle: Jerusalem, source-city of history, can be emplaced like the umbilicus of the body of Christ. Yer the Book of cin Mandeville repeats, obsessively, that the world is not a disc buta globe: the people ofthe Isles of ester John walk beneath English feet (‘they ar under the erthe to us, p. 92), but so far away that their patter is impossible to discern, A dedicated and God-protected traveller could, by always moving forward, “comme right too the same countrees that he wer come of and come fro, and 50 go aboute the erthe’ (p. 92) Spheres do not, of course, possess physical middles. The best to which a globe can aspire would be @ conceptual middle, but that is not quite the same thing. If © exvespicientesvdens revolutum lapdens ret quippe magnus valde, Maske: 4, ® Mah 6:6 1 Greenbla (99129). Higins (998) ‘6 Though, as Higgs ots, there are some mappacmund! that do not ovent the word around Jerusalem, Matthew Parise. centres his map of Palestine around Acre and puts Jerualem off tothe side ibis world map as well (id. 4)618 JEFFREY JEROME COHEN Jerusalem is the world’s centre, then that fixed point exists only on maps and timelines that cannot capture the fullness ofthe world, cannot capture the perpetual ccurve that gives to lands and waters their unattainable horizons. Lapipary MANDEVILLE ‘The errant trajectory of the Book of John Mandeville was suggested early on, when the narratives of Hippocrates’s daughter and the monstrous flying head of Satalia erupted into a pilgrimage narrative, the Mandeville-author’s additions to a source containing neither. The Book gaits so much velocity in its narration that it escapes the theology-saturated landscapes of the Holy Land to boomerang through hetero- dox India, Egypt, Africa, China, Sumatra, Hungary, Amazonia, a multiverse that in its proliferations trades sacred histories for secular multipticities."” Mandeville’s travels are in fact the motions of a body transported by reading, encountering its other worlds in books and fashioning new realms from dynamic textual convergence. ‘The Book of John Mandeville isa literary pastiche, an alchemical experiment con- cocted of perhaps three dozen sources, from encyclopedias and itineraria to religious tracts, travelers tales, and histories." John Mandeville’ seems to have been a fiction, no more likely to have existed than the incubus-begotten Merlin in Geottrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Yet the Book of John Mandeville never intended to give us the best routes or the most dogma-soused accounts of sacred sites. An energetic meditation uzon the exotic, upon the genre of travel narrative, upon the nature of the world we inhabit, the Book of John Mandeville (in all of its ‘multifarious manifestations) is ccnstitutionally incapable of offering anything but cosmos where change and movement are constants, and geographies where bodies are caught in perpetual motion, where even the inanimate stirs with a kind of desire~ soaked life ‘The Book opens by providing those anchoting bits of biography that have pro- pelled readers to locate a real person as the text's narrator. Born in St Albans, John Mandeville is possessed of a non-halant Englishness, seen most often as he quietly interprets the foreign from an Anglocentric point of view, A knight who ‘travelide 1 Here lam arguing aginst Iain Maclnd Higins'sinfluntia account ofthe Mandevill’s achievement and ambitions in Rigen 998). Higgins observes tha the Boots virally unique among medieval ‘aoe! writings in expaning the plgrims guide wth survey ofthe world beyond the Holy Land? (p40). He ties this mavement somewhat counterintuitive toa desire to male Jrcslem the centre ofthe entice teat a comsoation ofeedto a much shrankzn Christendom and challange led downto those Christians ‘who, as the prologue pus have the wherewithal to undertakes holywoyage overseas 45,8 ell sto Temi them of ow mach they hed lost ith the Flore ofthe Gruss. For a thorough consieration of toe Mandeville author's sources see Deu (988: 59-93) a8 wells the extensive table a 2-5.naps and perpetual when the of Satalia it escapes th hetero (se that in, andeville’s tering its vergence, nent con » religious raficion, coffrey of ville never of sacred narrative, all of its hing but a ere bodies Lof desire have pro- pans, John he quietly travelide schievenent ssdiewl 8 tp.4o).He the entize die Chistian sevel se asleaswellas | | | | PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIC 619 aboute in the world’ (p. 23), Sir Jobm possesses @ thorn from the crown placed on Jesus at the Passions served in the Sultan's army and was offered a wife; drank from the fountain of youth; hates Jews isa specialist in exotic alphabets; knows good wine and balin and diamonds from bad. These attributes act as truth-effects, attaching the story to what seems a historical personage with lived experience, securing the narrative to a bulwark, a seeming veridicality. The text sutures itself at the same time to a specific chronology: Mandeville’s year of departure is in the Defective Version 1g his year of return 1366; his circuit through the world the accomplishment of thirty-four years in total Mandeville’s attachment to hore serves as an effective brake upon his nomadism, the guarantee that, despite not having tumed back after attaining Palestine, he will nonetheless eventually reappear osed by an author who would have self-identified as English or French is not only impossible to decide, itis ultimately not all that relevant, No matter who the actual author, no matter what collective identity that author would in life have embraced, the Book of John Mandeville is strewn with allusions to its narrator's nationality, affixing him in history and to place. Some references are trivial, giving the Mandeville-persona a patina of casual Englishness: thus in detailing the Saracen alphabet, he writes that just as they have ‘extra’ letters in their alphabet, so do ‘we’ English possess thorn and yogh (p.58). Like most medieval English writers, Mandeville ghbiy contlates “England” and “britain as if the Welsh and Scots did not share the island (Constantine is called ‘kyng of Ingelond that was, that tyme called the Greet Brytayre; p. 25). The knight's birthplace is St Albans, not far from Londons his name is by the fourteenth century sufficiently Anglophone, and given the polyglot nature of his contemporary homeland, his Englishness isin no way attenuated when his words sound like this: ‘ieo Johan Maundeuille, chiualer.. .neez ct norriz Dengleterre de la ville Szint Alban, qi y passay la meer” ‘The English Mandeville isa smaller circle within the wider compass drawn by the pilgrim Mandeville whose inital destination is Jerusalem, Just as within the Christian ‘compass, a Jewish presence inheres within the English circle as well: most famously in Mandeville’ fantasy that a large population of Jews has been immured behind remote hills eady to mingle with their brethren when freed in the time of Antichrist. “Mandeville asserts that Jews living among contemporary Christians study Hebrew so as to welcome in their ancient tongue these enclosed people when they are freed. They will join with them for to destruye men of Cristendon’ (p. 83). Having detailed the Mandeville-author's tendency never to miss an opportunity to demonize the Jows, and having stressed his anti-Jewish innovations, Benjamin Braude labels the » On the circularty ofthe text, see Heng (2001 esp. 152), 0 Warmer (889: 2-3) cited by Higgins (1997 3620 _JEEFRBY JEROME CONEY passage about the enclosed Jews ‘blood-curdling’ and ‘a warrant for genocide’ Just ‘the opposite configuration of space is closer to the truth: having expelled its Jewish population in 1290, England inhabits an island rather like the enclosed regions where these distant Jews supposedly dwell, Late medieval Englishness is a national identity precipitated through the exclusion of Jewishness.* A tiny minority at best, pre- Expulsion Jews in England hed teen under frequent threat from both their bboutrs and from the nation. Their wholesale removal from the island did nothing to reduce English anti-Jewish fantases. Just the opposite: once gone, they loomed as, more of an imagined danger than ever. The Book of Jolnn Mandeville is widely regarded for its extensive tolerance, a generosity extended even to the distant Mongols and the Muslims who hold the Holy Land.” Ian Higgins observes: Xo other sligious community ...is so badly served in The Boos the ews, who inabit nly the past and the future, and are depicted with a hostility bordering on perancia.” Rather than a puzzling lapse in an otherwise tolerant persona, this paranoia may be no more than yet another signifier of Mandeville’ recalcitrant, immobilizing Englishness— ain Englishness that cannot be wholly disentangled from the Jewishness it abjcts. In The Jew in the Medieval Book, Anthony Bale maps the narrative turbulence coursing through Chaucer's Priotes's Tale intermixing a it does both Christian and Jewish identities." Its flax and instability are counteracted by a“lapidary vocabulary cof tombs and gems, metaphorical petrfications that strive to impede the texts toiling, Like the description of tke lite clergeon as a jewel, the ‘tombe of marbul stones” into wich the boy's body is placed (VI: 680) is an attempt to ‘contain the expansive landscape anc soundscape envisioned in the tale, a reassetion of the Christin community’ faith inthe fiity of signs... The tomb stands for morbid permanence and closure... The solid stone tomb repudiates the bodily rupture with which the Prioress is fascinated? In a story filed with blood, teas, and songs in constant and boundary-smashing ‘movement, the marble tomb strives to demarcate, contain, and immobilize. The _monument of stone fails, however to still what it immures, The closing stanzas of the tale transport the scene to Lincoln and conflate ancient Syrian Jews with more recent English oves. ‘The little boy, Bale writes, ‘wanders out of his distant Asian tomb into the Priorese's England and the pilgrimage group:”” Of the three tombs we've seen in Mandeville's Rook, one has been emptied of the body that once occupied it, while the other two are too full: a restless apostle in fitful slumber, awaiting a distant future; the 2 Braue (5996), Braue explains this hatred through seference to Christian erusade and a desire toate a Holy Land without eoelaiments 2 On thie point see eg. Tomatch {200} © See, most notably, Campbell {9812261 Camaphell ders Mandeville a a‘hedonist of lenowledge’ with an aesthetic attitude twards fact (Pa) leading him to stress ‘tolerance and understanding’ (9.33), especialy 2s conpared to is source fin tis ese, Ordorc of Pordenone) Higgins 997: 2). Bale (2006), be tbiests. | Tid. 5.de?" Just Uits Jewish ions where sal identity best, pre- reir neigh- nothing to Toomed as » is widely he dita inhabit only may be no slishness— ect. turbulence vristian and vocabulary » the texts > attempt to ution of the permanence ve Priozess is y-smashing »bilize. The anzas of the nore recent tomb into a while the future; the anda dese Aorist of sceand enone) PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIC 621 monstrous progeny of illicit union.”* Given his fascination with such bodies that remain filled with uncanny life even in the grave, shouldn't John Mandeville likewise be able to escape lapidary capture, to leave the Holy Land to its seriptural eternities? Boptgs IN MOTION “The Book of ohn Mandeville recordshow a traveller once journeyed the earth’s roundness, ‘only to turn back at that point where his relentless forward motion had almost conveyed hhimto the place of his departure. This story, overheard by Mandeville in his youth, exerts 1 peculiar grip upon his imagination: the narrator describes the tale as one ‘Y have y- ‘thought man tymes’ A ‘worthy man of oure countré” decides to leave England—and not forpilgrimage, not for redemption, but for no other reason than ‘tose the worlde’ (p. 67) “eving passed through India and the five thousand isles that le beyond its shores, he arrives at an island where ‘he herd: his owen speech in the exhortations of men di cattle, The traveller takes the familiar language to be a marvel rather than a marker of return, Mandeville, however, insiss that the man bad come so far in his journey that he had arrived ‘into his owen marches'~—England’s borders, the edge of the known world, abandoned so long ago. Finding no transportation forward, the traveller ‘turned agayn as hhecom, and so hehadde a gret travayl, After having finally arrived home and {apparent- Iy) too restless to long remain, the man sails to Norway. Storm-driven to an island in the North Sea, he encounters an eerily familar scene: “And when he was ther, hym thoughte tht hit ras the ye the which he hadde y-he on byfogs, where be hurde speke his owen specho as the men drof becstys. And that myghtryght wel be. (p. 67) A man circles the world to meet aplace intimate and strange at once, to mect in a way his own past, his own self, but ftom an unanticipated perspective. ‘According to Mandeville, any traveller can potentially arrive home again by remaining ever in motion, But ‘the erthe is gret’ and “ther beth so many wayes' Mandeville never states that anyone has successflly circled the earth to arcive at his departure, to attain home via an endlessly curving route. Yet if the man who almost circuited the world has any regrets about not completing the compass, he never voices them. The traveller who s0 inspired Mandeville as a young man is never ‘witnessed returning to the England of his birth. He is glimpsed only upon the road or the sea, never since his initial departure within ‘oure countré? What would happen if this traveller really had circumambulated the globe? Would he then have settled into sedentary life? Or must he turn back before he arrives because, having so filled his life % A slighty ealer tomb held the body of Hermogenes the wise man’ Disintemed ar th building of St Sophia in Constantinople, the 3,000-yer-old corpee was clutching a golden plaque on which was zibed {ia Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) that man's faith in mesa to come (p27)622, JEFFREY JEROME COHEN ‘with motion, the stillness of a homeland—the stasis of an English identity—no longer proves able to satisfy? Mandeville, Defective: always open to the future, never to arrive comfortably at ome. ‘Mandeville’s boyhood imagination is captured by a traveller who nearly circles the ‘world but abandons the jouneyat the borders of home, He does not fully recognize the familia, perhaps because he hin-slf has become in his wandering strange, Maybe that is why the travellers story is so alturing to Mandeville: the man must never return, the ‘voyage must never be completed fr the only way to keep a body in motion isto prevent its coming home. Mandeville, of course, does retutn, He writes his Book while resident in the England from which he had been long absent. Yet in the Defective version, that return is not wholly satisfying: no sooner is the book completed than Mandeville isin ‘transit to Rome. He totes his vo.ume to the Pope, who gives the narrative his papal seal of approval. As the story comes to a close, Mandeville is travelling again... this time (according to the Book’snarrative fiction) in his memory, his mind, his armchair. Rather like medieval readers of the Boak, rather like us, his ‘partyners’ (p. 95). Would Mandeville’s fellow pilgrims, his medieval readers, his portyners, have recognized the limits of their companion’s tolerance? Would they have realized the brake that Mandeville's Englishness places upon his restless trajectory? Would they have realized that Mandeville’ failure was perhaps to have almost circled the world, but to have returned before he could arrive home by a route that would have changed his perspective, that would have queered his orientation, that would have made him see what remains stubboraly in place when a voyager who wants to ‘se the world’ carries with him and transports back the filings of his home? Mandeville is sometimes confined by the compass of his own Englishness, by the limits of his own devotional cxcuit, as if these were (following Bale) lapidary narratives, marble tombs. Yet the Book is also geological, in the rocky triple meaning of that word: sedimentary (an accretion of histories and texts into new forms), igneous (hardened after long movement into settlaé contours), metamorphic (ever changing, open to the futur, circling the world to mect and no longer recognize oneself). Each textof the Book can be seen asa crystallization, x hardening, a gem created from an ever-luid narrative that does not ever cease ta be abody in motion, ready for metamorphoses to come. GEOLOGICAL MANDEVILLE Inthe Church of the Holy Sepulchre, if we look just off to the side ofthe vacant compass that Joseph of Arimathea drew, we will find ourselves confronted not only with the stone of an ancient tomb, but with a scattering of other rocks: the ‘roach’ of Calvary, its whiteness forever stained by the dripping of divine blood (p. 38}; four rocks near the pillar at which Jesus was scourged, continually dropping water in an endless act of tertestrial mourning (some versions, though not Defective); the ‘toche’ under which thentity—no ne future, circles the ognize the yybethat is ‘etum, the toprevent, leresident tsion, that ceville isin papal seal «this time air. Rather ners, have alized the ‘ould they the world, ‘echanged made him the world sss, by the narratives, that word: (hardened pen to the ofthe Book Inarrative at compass hthestone Zalvary, its «s near the less act of which the PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIC 623 Jows hid the cross for St Helena to exhume. Such stones commemorate the past by standing in for it: the relics they Ind were long ago removed, the death for which they shed their endless tears vanquishedby a bodily retum tolife, Yetthese lithic monuments right activate ina careful reader awider chain of associations, for the Book offers story told through stones. Sir John Mandeville is widely known for his geographical obsessions, but these unfold beside, along with, and though passions best described as geological. To give some highlights: in Tyre one can see the stone on which Jesus sat to preach (p. 32). ‘Not far from Jerusalem is the Fesse Ynone (Ditch of Memon), where an eternal supply of undulating gravel can change suddenly into glass (p. 32). This oceanic expanse of rock may bea gulf of the Gravel Sea, The Sultan built his great city ‘upon a rooch? and nearby are stones lef for St Katherine by angels (p. 33). Not far from Damascus a voyager can see the ground from which Adam was fashioned, and the rock-hewn cave inside which he cwelt with Eve once expelled from paradise (p. 35) "The Dead Sea casts forth chunks af asphalt, big as horses (p. 45). By its shores spreads the barren plain upon which a fisting Jesus was tempted to transform stones into bread. In the river Jordan, tie Children of Israel left enormous stones ‘in the myddel ofthe water’ when through a miracle they passed over its bed dryshod (p. 46). On the rock outside of Nazareth where some Jews attempted to hurl Jesus to his death can still be viewed his footprints, impressed forever upon the stone when he vanished from his would-be assassins {p. 49). The Saracen paradise features homes wrought of precious stones (p. 54). Diamonds have a gender, as well as a sexuality: male and female come together to spawn even more of the glistening end libidinous rocks: ‘They proweth togodres, the maule and the femaule. And they beth noryshed with the dew of hhevene, and they engendreth comurely and bryngeth forth other smale dyamaundes, that rmulteplieth and groweth all yeres, (p 62) Engendering ‘comunely’ renders diamonds, with their lithic promiscuity, rather ike the soon-to-be-encountered nudist communist cannibals of Lamoria, the ultimate test of Mandeville’s tolerance (successfully passed; in some versions he even com- ments on the vaunted sweetness of the flesh of children). ‘The Lamorians, like diamonds, keep all women ‘in commune’ (p. 65). Mandeville avers that he knows from experience feeding your diamonds with May dew makes them increase in size. Diamonds of ether sex can overcome poison, prevent strife, banish evil dreams. They can also heal lunatics...and Englishmen, we are told, are ‘lunar, rendering them like Mandeville incessant travellers (p. 62) Some of the world’s heaving seas obscure magnetic stones (‘roch of the adammaund, ».62) in their depths pulling to obivion any ship manufactured with metal nals. A sea without bottom has reeds that float its suxface; their roots entangle ‘many precious stones of vertu’ that protect their bearers from bodily harm (p. 69). The beastly men of ‘Tracote covet a stone called ‘traconyghte} not because it possesses any inmate virtue but simply because it comesin forty attractive colours (p. 70). Cyconcephali carry foot-long rubies around their necks asa sign of kingly office (p. 0). The Great Khan prefers his accoutrements of daly living to be fashioned from jewels. Rubies and garnets worked624 _ JEFFREY JEROME CONEY Into grapevine designs seem his household favourite, Even the steps to bis throne and the chair itself are hewn from gemsand bordered in gold (p.73). The Khan also passesses a radiant carbuncle that serves as palace nightlight (p. 77) For no reason other than a seeraingly innate animus, Alexander the Great attempts to enclose the Jews ‘of the kynde of Gog Magog’ (p. 82) in far-off hills. When human labor proves insufficient to the task, Alexander seeks God's assistance, and is rewarded by divine imprisonment of these people: ‘God herd his prayer and enclosed the hilles togedre so that the Jewes dwelleth ther as they were y-loke in a castel? The gates that confine the homicidal race are wrought of ‘great stones wel y-dight with semen, A barrier that will not be overcome until the time of Antichrist, these rocks keep the Jows removed from the stream of time, just as theit ancient Hebrew locks them in a perpetual premodeya (p. 3). Submarinal ‘toches of adamaundes’ not far from the lands of Prester John, meanwhile freeze matter in place, Like underwater ‘magnets they bind to themselves ships with iron fitkings. Mandeville tells us he once went to see the expanse, and in a rate moment of poetry he describes a forest fashioned of naval masts: ‘Y say as hit had y-be a gret ile of trees growing as stockes. ‘And oure shipmen sayde that thilke trees were of shippes mastes that sayled on see, and so abode the shippes ther thorgh vertu of the adamaund? (p. 84). rester John’s domain is home to the Gravel Sea, where rocks and sand ‘ebbeth and floweth with gret wawes asthe sec doth. And tresteth never’ (p.84). This billowing sea of stone sports fish ‘of good savour and good to ete’ Prestet Job, like the Great Khan whose daughter he weds, prefers housewares, eating utensils, and furniture made of gleaming gems, for jewels and precious metals betoken ‘his nobley and his might” (p.85). The Vale Petilous is strewn with gems, gold, and silver to lure covetous men to their deaths. In the middle of this terrible place is a rock an which is engraved the ‘visage and the heed ofthe devel boylich, right hydous and dredful to se’ (p. 86). His eyes star, colours swirl, fire erupts from mouth and nostrils. An islane exists in which, ‘women have ‘stones in her even. When enraged they can slay men with their vision (p.87). Onan island so distant that few stars shine and the moon is viewed only in its last quarter dvell ants (‘pismere?’) as large as hounds. They gather the abundant gold into great heaps. Local men use slever tricks to rob the insects oftheir hoards (p. 9). East of the land of Prester John are only ‘great roches, their stony lifelessness the mark of impassable wilderness. Paradise is hidden behind immobile rocks (p. 92)- In his meditation on stone asa radiantly beautiful material and a durable spur to philosophy, John Sallis writes o°stone’s ‘peculiar temporality’ Stones ancient not only in the sense tat it withstands the wear of time better than other natural things but also in the sense thet its antiquity is of the order of the aay zeal. Stone comes fromm pas that has always been pretent,a past inassimilable to the order of time ia which things, come and go in the human word and that nonbelonging of stone is precisely what qualifies to smarkend hence memorialize such comings and goings suchbirths ané deaths. As ifstone were {enible image oftimelesnes, the idea material out on which to inseibe marks cepebleot visibly ‘memoralzing into an indefinite foture one who is dead and gore:"* 2» Sallis G94 26)hrone and > possesses attempts en human ze, and is denclosed castel? The dight with hese rocks brew locks les’ not far inderwater us he once sa forest as stockes led on see, zbbeth and lowing sea Sreat Khan re made of his might” ous men to raved the p86). His asinwhich heir vision Tonly inits ndant gold ards (p. 91) ssthe mark 2). ble spur to, other natural Stone comes whieh things { qualifies to wbleof visibly PILGRIMAGES ANDTHE BxoTIC 625 Such everlasting stones are certainly part of the landscape of the Book. They mark tombs and discoveries and great events. Stone isthe perfect material to use to think about that which cannot be transported or transmuted. Thus in the wilderness outside Bethany Mandeville relates the biblical story of the temptation of Jesus by the ‘devel of Helle’ (p. 45). The fiend commands the fasting savior ‘Dic ut lapides isi panes fiat, or ‘Say that these stones ben maked bred’ (p. 45). Only divine power can. perform such transubstantiation. For a human to contemplate such volatility in lapidary substance would be extieme folly. Yet the transmutation of rock through words is precisely what the Mandeville-author accomplishes. In the Book, stone isa strangely mobile, even itinerant material. Though. rocks never do become bread, we watch as they billow into waves, as they offer us the miracle of fish from a pebble sea, as they enude rays of light and virtue, Rocks pull metals, ‘towards their embrace. They matelicentiously and engender baby gems. The stones that ‘mark the Mandcvillian landscape are of two kinds: those that afix history to place, and those that act like bodies in motion.*° The former anchor the narrative, the latter uunmoor the Book, alluring and mobile rocks that are indistinguishable from flows of water or lava, Anchoring stones—the igneous accretions left behind by molten flow— include inert wealth, lonely ruins, rock-hewn gates that bar paradise or seclude Jews, empty tombs. These are historical residua, depositories of ancient stories, unmoved rarkers of vanished time, Metamorphic or nomadic stones serve not as suture points but as spurs to constant motion: zhe endless pull of 'adamaunel, the restless tol of the Gravel Sea, living practice that unfolds within inhabited space (the Sultan reconfigures a church, diamonds mate and reproduce and are traded by the wayfarers they ward). Undulating, magnetic, lovemaking stones: despite the lapidary effects of religious and national identities, within t1e Rook of Joh Mandeville even the mast static of bodies are spurred into motion. SrisMic MANDEVILLE ‘What Ihave been calling for convenience the Book of John Mandevilleis in reality not a singular thing but a diffuse ard volatile concatenation, There is no “The’ Book of John Mandeville, onty a proliferation of Books of Mandeville, few of which have a historically identifiable author, redactor, or translator, all oF which vary in major or minor ways from their apparent siblings, parents, cousins, queer friends, assorted 2° The sume could be said of iene inthe Rook: 50 Jong as Mandeville is the name given 0 @ unset forward! motion fa otion the is Mandevile'stavele and Mandevills Travels» ierary petegrination anda histricel event), long asthe isecory of bis wandering does not tae its love of robility for thestdour of destination, itis dificult ta say ecly who ‘Mandeville ke his Root he ‘Seems mare a phenomen than « persona anchored in » geography or ine626 JREREY JEROME COMEN hangers-on, Developing a vocabulary adequate to capturing the Books has proven a difficult critical task (as my forzy into kinship metaphors just proved; other critics tum to chemistry or biology fer their taxonomic metaphors). The text refuses to settle down into some well-delimited identity sit a reinvented itinerarium, a spur to pilgrimage, a Crusading substitute, an armmchaie travel guide, a romance, a heretical tract, a paean to orthodoxy, a proto-novel, an imaginative delectation of the exotic, and the monstrous, 2 compilation, an encyclopedia? Yes. And becauise itis all these things at once it breaks generic boundaries and cannot be sorted neatly for library filing, No wonder Stephen Greenblatt called the Book ‘hymn to mobility.** Though a bricolage of materials drawn from a dizzying array of texts (mainly French and Latin), the Book of John Mandeville seems almost sui generis, Nothing quite like it exists lain Macleod Higgins, the critic who has studied the dynamic and dispersed existence of the Mandeville manuscripts most closely, describes the Book as a ‘multi-text ‘The Book can be regarded not asa sngle, invariant work, but asa mltinodsl network, a kind of rhizome, whose French ‘radical gave tse co a discontinuous series of related offshoots in several languages, each of which can vary considerably from the others while being The Book itself to certain readers... Clearly, The Book is more than several books at once, both in its btigins and generically; itis textualy multiple as well” Critical consensus holds that tre Book was first composed in French (and likely continental rather than insular French), though no otiginal exists. No text inhabits the centre of the compass away from which speed two continental and one Anglo- French versions, away from which scatter a plethora of English variants with Egypt gaps or in rhyme or in close sympathy with French farebears, away from which are propelled at further and further removes German, Latin, Irish, Italian, Danish, and. Spanish redactions, At the cent:e of this Big Bang that sent Mandevilles careening, through Latin Christendom is oaly.. the Postulated Archetype, an Ur-Book that we ‘assume must have been in existence at some point. When the Postulated Archetype abandoned its sepulchre in Palestine to retreat to that heaven where perfect texts reside it left no earthly trace of its having been here, only the lingering textual ripples that suggest its inherent volatility, and perhaps indicate that it never intended to be transfixed like a glossed and reverenced Bible. ‘The Book of John Mandevilicis therefore more of an event than an object. moves through the world, leaving behind various versions of itself that bear witness to the form it took in a certain place under some influential and typically indeterminable conditions. It would be a mistake to look at any one of these precipitates as fit were the Book itself rather than a record of the Books passing, just as a lava flow cannot be reconstituted from one of the igneous rocks into which it hardened and then abandoned in its onward rush. The Books of John Mandeville are best seen as & 21 Greenblate (99s 28), > Higgins (98: 54). 1 iy dscusion ofthe Mandeville manuscript e based on the overview in Higalas (1097: 20-5),+ proven a her critics refuses to yaspurto 1 heretical the exotic s all these ‘or library "Though rench and aite like it dispersed Book as a ‘ork, akind sflshoots in The Book both in its and likely «inhabits ne Anglo- vith Egypt which are anish, and careening, ok that we Archetype rect texts wal ripples ded to be tItmoves ress to the erminable cannot be and then 197: 203) [ PILGRIMAGES AND THE EXOTIC 637 performance of their own narrative structure, as a fextual flow that crosses linguistic and national boundaries in a directionless quest to remain in motion, to circle the ‘world by pressing forward and yet never to return home. This flow might leave in its woke certain crystallizations (manuscript attestations that we read today, but cannot assemble into some singular entity). Like Mandeville’s diamonds these crystals will always copulate with others and form strange new progeny. The Books of Mandeville amount to a body ever in moticn, because structurally defective, open, reaching forward not to assimilate but to embrace, to touch and to change. In their prolifera- tion, dispersal, and constant mutation, the Books of Johns Mandeville display an irreducible surplus not diminisheble into the small contours af historical context or local determination. That thing in the Books of Mandeville which renders them ever restless over time, that surplus that can take a body outside of itself and scatter it across a suddenly more capacious world: that exorbitance in Mandeville so tied to an ardor for the lithic, that thing is art, restless and nomadic art Unleashed by books that wander the world to vanish into varying forms is an art ‘no more human, no more ours alone, than are marble tombs containing manna or missing bodies or monsters, diamonds that yearn for copulation and increase, the heave of Gravel seas, or any other beauty we share with stone. BisirocRrarHy Bars, Awrion (2006). The lew in the Medien Book: English Antsemitims,1<0-1s00 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres Buna, Hoo (594), The Location of Culture (London: Rostledge). Saupe, Bayan (1998), ‘Mander’ Jews among Others in Bryan F Le Beau and Mena- chem Mor (eds), Pilgrims and Travelers to the Holy Land (Omaba, Nebe Creighton University Pres), 13-38. Covent, Mate B, (988), The Wines and the Other World: Exotic European Thavel Writing 400-1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Pres Cony, 2008), ‘renting wth Animas inthe Middle Ags in Barbara A. Hancwalt and Lisa J Kiser (eds), Engaging with Nature: Essays onthe Natural World in Mata and orl Modern Europe (Note Damn, Inds University of Notre Dame Pres), 39-62 Daz, Cine (1988), Le Live d Joon de Mandeville: Une ‘rographie™ ow XIVe site ‘Loan ta-Nesve: institut e'ftndes Médivales de Université Catholique de Louvain) Geemeas, Sran (990), Marslos Posessionn The Wonder ofthe New World (Chicago University of Chicago Pres), aoc, Rv (198), Mandeville in A. S.G. Edwards (el), Middle English Prose: Creal Ge to Major thors and Genres (New Bransick, NJ. Ratgers University Pres), 123 Ho, Giraton (2003, Empire of Magic: Meiel Romance anid the Poles of Cusural Fantasy (New York Coluenbia Univesity Pres) koa ans Mact20> 997), Wing East The Travel of ir Jon Manndevie (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Pres) ican, la Macisoo (19), ‘Defining the Eart’s Center in a. Medieval “MuleTex” Jerusalem inthe Book of John Mandevile; in SyviaTomasch and Sealy Gils (eds), Text628 JEFFREY JEROME COHEN land Territory: Geographical Inwgination in the Burepean Middle Ages (Phil University of Pennsylvania Press), 20-5. ones, Tasanan, and C, Davo Baxson (eds) (2007), The Book of John Mandeville (Kalamazoo, Mich: Medieval inst tute Publications). Lonvens, Lino (2001), “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race’ Journal of ‘Medieval and Early Modern Studie, 3: 149-64, Sais, Jon (1994), Stone (Blooming-on, Ind.: University of Indiana Press. Senvovr, M. C. (ed.) (2002), The Defective Version of Mandeville’: Travels (ETS OS 3195 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society) Towasci, Svea (2000), ‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Vietual Jew; in Jefirey Jerome Cohen (ed.), The Postcolonial Middle Age; (New York: Palgrave), 243-60. ‘Wasnt, Geonoe F. (ed. (889), The Buke of Jor Mauadeuil (Westminster: Roxourghe Club).