John Mandeville Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Mandeville

Mandeville's Travels is the modern editorial title of a prose treatise that initially circulated under several medieval titles, most commonly The Book of John Mandeville. By its own account this variously titled book was put together by a certain John Mandeville, knight, of Saint Albans, a town just north of London. Having left his native country on Michaelmas Day 1322, the English knight spent some thirty-four years traveling throughout Asia and northern Africa, only ceasing his travels when the physical infirmities of increasing age finally caught up with him. His world travels thus ended, Sir John took comfort in his gouty retirement by setting down in writing some of his memories from his years abroad. In general, these "memories" have little to do with the knight's own experiences as a traveler, and so they are organized not as a first-person narrative recounting a personal itinerary, but as an informative and largely third-person exposition based on a geographical scheme that proceeds roughly from west to east, from Constantinople toward the Earthly Paradise (a real place in medieval thought and one which Columbus would later believe he had located).

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