The Book of John Mandeville: An Edition of the Pynson Text. Edited by Tamarah Kohanski. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 231. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Pp. lviii + 132. $28.

The Book of John Mandeville—better known nowadays as Mandeville's Travels but known in its own day under various designations, including that used for the edition under review—was a genuine medieval best-seller. First composed in French around 1356, it was soon translated, directly or indirectly and sometimes more than once, into Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Irish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. Some three hundred manuscripts are still extant, and the book has enjoyed an almost uninterrupted career in print since the 1490s, especially in English, a consequence of its ostensible author's nationality. By its own account, the work was written from memory by one John Mandeville, knight, of St. Albans, who spent more than three decades overseas as a pilgrim and freelance soldier (his employers included the Sultan of Babylon and the Great Khan of Cathay). No such figure has ever been located, however, and scholars long ago demonstrated that his "travel memoir " is a compilation based on the writings of genuine travelers supplemented with a whole library of ancillary works. Whatever the book is, it is not a memoir—it is in fact what Marco Polo's book was often called: a description of the world—and wherever the author may have traveled beyond a good library (he could have been a Palestine pilgrim, for example), his "memoir " has nothing to do with his possible overseas voyaging. It is one of the many ironies of Mandeville studies that we know more about certain of the book's translators and scribes than we do about its ostensible author.

Iain Macleod Higgins
University of Victoria