Jean de Mandeville

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Jean de Mandeville (also Jehan de Mandeville , Johannes von Mandeville or John (of) Mandeville , in English translations also John Maundevylle ) is the name of the unknown author of a French-language description of a trip to the " Holy Land " compiled from various sources between 1357 and 1371 , the Far East and the Kingdom of the Priest King John .

John de Montefilla, manuscript for 1459, New York Public Library

The work

The novel-like travel description in first person form does not have a title in the original. It spread under names such as Livre (book), Reisen or "Travels" by Jean de Mandeville. Based on Claudius Ptolemy's and his Geographia, the author assumed a spherical shape of the earth, even if he underestimated its circumference by about a third.

swell

The work is fed from various sources. It is unlikely that the author himself traveled to Constantinople , Palestine and Egypt . Travel beyond that can be excluded. On the other hand, he processed numerous literary works:

The fact that Mandeville also used Marco Polo's Il Milione report as a source is now largely excluded from research.

Formal structure

Two pages from the English early print from 1499, Ethiopia and India with an illustration of an insole , showing how it finds shade under its large foot in the heat.

The travel report is divided into two almost equally extensive parts. The first is a description of the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem and the Middle East (especially to the holy places and to Cairo ). The second part contains a report on a journey of discovery into the Middle East , India , the island world of the Indian Ocean , China , Africa , and the empire of the Mongolian Great Khan as well as the empire of the mythical priest John . The further the description moves away from Europe, the more fantastic the countries and phenomena described become: For example, he reports of people who live in Ethiopia and only have one big foot on which they run nimbly and which they protect from sun and rain hold over yourself.

The text covered a wide range of well-known "histories" with reports on iconographically familiar wonder animals such as the phoenix , with reports from salvation history, the history of the martyrs and information on geographical "miracles" known since ancient times.

Ratings

The author's assessments of foreign cultures and customs are extremely cautious: Man must not indignant about any of the peoples of the earth due to their different laws, nor judge them or pray for them, because we do not know which of them God loves and which of them Have to fear God's hatred. Because HE does not want any evil to happen to any of his creatures.

Biography and fiction

It is not clear to what extent the internal information about the person who wrote it corresponds to reality. The surviving biographical information is contradictory. It is possible that Mandeville's descent from an English knightly family, his birth in St Albans and his departure from England in 1322 belong to literary fiction. But behind the pseudonym there is obviously a person of high culture, education and extensive knowledge.

Information in the factory

If one follows the information in the travel report, then Mandeville, a knight from St Albans , left England in 1322 with the aim of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land . In 1343, after returning to Europe, he settled in Liège and, suffering from gout, went to the care of a doctor he knew from Cairo: "John the Bearded", who urged him to write down a travel report. This happened in 1356/57, according to an early Latin edition, which, however, goes beyond the previous French edition, which dates the text to the year 1371, and ties it together with a medical text about the plague, the author of which is a certain “Jehan de Bourgoigne autrement dit à la Barbe “, citizen of Liège, is called.

Information from another source

Jean d'Outremeuse (1338–1400), again a by no means reliable chronicler of Liège, spread in his Myreur des Histors , 11 that a man who only wanted to be known as "Jehan de Bourgogne or Jean à la Barbe" was on his Confided on his deathbed in 1372, he was in reality John de Mandeville, "comte de Montfort en Angleterre et seigneur de l'isle de Campdi et du chateau Perous". In 1322 he had to flee from prosecution. Outremeuse's statements are contradictory and reveal that he himself worked on the Mandeville myth, which in turn led the authors of the Cambridge History of English and American Literature to speculate that d'Outremeuse himself might have been the author. MC Seymour argued against this with reference to Jean le Long, monk of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Bertin, whose writings appear among those which the author processed.

Reception history

middle Ages

In the unbroken tradition of early printing: Pages from an English edition from 1696 with some of the typical iconographic illustrations

Mandeville's travelogue quickly found widespread circulation and was translated into Latin and all common European languages; into German by Otto von Diemeringen and Michel Velser . Today more than 200 manuscripts are known, 58 of them in German, 57 in French, 49 in Latin, 36 in English, 15 in Flemish, 13 in Italian, 8 in Czech, four in Danish, three in Irish and two in Spanish. There are also various crib prints .

Christopher Columbus knew the work, assumed that it was a real representation of the circumstances, and used it as a basis for planning his trip for the western route to India. This was especially true for the idea of ​​the earth as a sphere and the circumference of the earth given by John de Mandeville.

Early modern age

The early prints brought the title into the market segment that is now being recorded by research under the term “ Volksbuch ”. The editions here remained at an antiquated level in terms of language and printed image: Fraktur was used in English until the end of the 17th century, while Antiqua had long dominated the market at that time . The illustrations remained rough. The readers were drawn from simple customers who knew the text and valued it because of its edifying histories and its excursions into the world of the Bible and the iconographic tradition that accompanied it . One found here the explanation of much that Gothic altars depicted. Upper class readers read serious travel reports in editions with scientific forewords. A critical discussion of the truth of travel began in the 17th century . The simple public seems to have continued to appreciate them unaffected.

When, at the end of the 19th century, Mandeville's encyclopedic method of working with modern textual criticism was thoroughly researched, literary studies subjected the work to a devastating criticism and accused the author of constant plagiarism. Texts like this showed the spiritual world of the Middle Ages, which was not capable of any more critical judgment and was satisfied with an unchecked compilation of old texts.

It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the evaluation was reoriented. Now the journeys were seen as one of the first fictional travel novels, a classification which, however, ignores the late medieval and early modern reading practice. The text was not considered fiction by the then-preferred public at the time of its greatest popularity in the 15th century or in the 18th century. The report was written to be read as authentic and was received that way. It should develop its effect in amazement at the miracles of creation and salvation history .

literature

Primary literature

  • Jean de Mandeville: Travel . Reprint of the first prints of the German translations by Michel Velser (Augsburg, with Anton Sorg, 1480) and Otto von Diemeringen (Basel, with Bernhard Richel, 1480/81), ed. and with an introduction by Ernst Bremer and Klaus Ridder. Olms, Hildesheim et al. 1991, ISBN 3-487-09430-4 [= German folk books in facsimile prints. Row A, 21].
  • Sir John Mandeville's travelogue . In German translation by Michel Velser. According to the Stuttgart paper manuscript Cod. HB V 86, ed. by Eric John Morrall. Berlin 1974 [German texts from the Middle Ages, 66].
  • Itinerarium Orientale . Mandeville's travelogue in Middle Low German translation. With introduction, variants and glossary ed. v. Sven Martinsson. Lund 1918.

New High German translations

  • John Mandeville: Journeys of the knight John Mandeville from the Holy Land to distant Asia: 1322-1356 . From the Mittelhochdt. trans. and ed. by Christian Buggisch. Ed. Erdmann, Lenningen 2004, ISBN 3-86503-010-6
  • The travel book of the knight John Mandeville . Translated into New High German and introduced by Gerhard E. Sollbach. Frankfurt am Main 1989.
  • Johann von Mandeville: From strange countries and strange peoples. A travel book from 1356 . Editing, editing and translation from Middle High German by Gerhard Grümmer. Leipzig 1986.
  • John Mandeville: The Journeys of the Knight John Mandeville through the Promised Land, India and China . Edited by Theo Stemmler, based on the German translation by Otto von Diemeringen; taking into account the best French and English manuscripts. Stuttgart 1966.
  • The Marvelous Adventures of Sir John Maundevile Kt. Being his Voyage and Travel which treateth of the Way to Jerusalem and of the Marvels of Ind with other Islands and Countries. Edited and profusely illustrated by Arthur Layard. With a Preface by John Cameron Grant. Westminster Archibald Constable & Co. 1895

Secondary literature

  • Reinhard Berron: Some comments on translated names in the Diemeringen version of Mandeville's 'Reisen' . In: Christiane Ackermann u. Ulrich Barton (Ed.): “Making texts speak.” Philology and interpretation. Festschrift for Paul Sappler. Tübingen 2009, pp. 219-229.
  • Ernst Bremer: Article Mandeville, Jean de (John, Johannes von). In: Author's Lexicon . , Vol. 5, Col. 1201-1214.
  • Josephine Waters Bennett: The rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville , New York: MLA, 1954
  • Christiane Deluz, Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville. Une «geography» au XIV. Siècle ; Louvain-La-Neuve: Institut d'Etudes Médiévales, 1988
  • W. Günther Ganser: The Dutch version of Johanns von Mandeville's travelogue. Rodopi / Amsterdam, 1985
  • Birthe Koch:  MANDEVILLE, Sir John (also Jean de Mandeville). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 5, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-043-3 , Sp. 658-659.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Klaus Ridder: Jean de Mandeville's “Travels”. Studies on the transmission history of the German translation by Otto von Diemeringen ; Munich, Zurich 1991
  • Susanne Röhl: The livre de Mandeville in the 14th and 15th centuries. Investigations into the handwritten tradition of the continental French version (= Medieval Studies 6). Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004
  • Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada: Real and Imaginary Worlds: John Mandeville . In: Feliciano Novoa Portela (ed.): Legendary journeys in the Middle Ages. Stuttgart 2008, pp. 55-76.
  • Michael Charles Seymour: Sir John Mandeville ; Aldershot: Variorum, 1993; ISBN 0-86078-371-5
  • Rosemary Tzanaki: Mandeville's Medieval Audiences. A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville. 1371-1550 ; Burlington, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; ISBN 978-0-7546-0846-2

Web links

Commons : Jehan de Mandeville  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, Kt Which Treateth of the Way to Hierusalem. and of Marvayles of Inde, with other Ilands and Countryes. Reprinted from the Edition of AD 1725. With an Introduction, additional Notes, and Glossary, by JO Halliwell , London, 1839 and Reprint 1866, p. 4 and The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville, K t . Which Treateth of the Way to Hierusalem; and of Marvayles of Inde, With other Ilands and Countryes. Now publish'd entire from an Original MS. in the Cotton Library , London, 1725, p. 5
  2. ↑ Quesada, p. 60.
  3. ↑ Michael S. Seymour: Sir John Mandeville . Aldershot, Hants 1993 (Authors of the Middle Ages, 1), p. 8.
  4. ^ Ernst Bremer: (Art.) Jean de Mandeville . In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon . 2., completely reworked. Edition. Ed. V. Kurt Ruh et al., Vol. 5 (1985), col. 1201-1214, here col. 1204.
  5. ↑ Quoted from: Quesada, p. 61.
  6. ↑ Cambridge History of English and American Literature 1907-21, Vol. 2, III, § 7
  7. ↑ See Quesada, p. 59.
  8. ↑ Quesada, p. 72.
personal data
SURNAME Mandeville, Jean de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mandeville, John (English)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION medieval author; Author of a geographical representation of the world
DATE OF BIRTH 13th century or 14th century
DATE OF DEATH around 1372
Place of death uncertain: Liège