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The defective version of Mandeville's travels

Mandeville's Travels was written in French in c. 1356 by an unknown author, possibly a regular in an abbey in northern France. A copy of this primary version of the book was carried into England before c. 1375 and there developed a separate Anglo-French scribal tradition, known as the Insular Version, which is the source of all of the English and Latin Translations made in England. The English translation known as the 'Defective Version' is the oldest and also circulated most widely. Its name derives from the loss of the second quire in the Insular manuscript, or its antecedent, from which it was translated, containing part of the description of Egypt. Despite this loss of text, the Defective Version established itself as the dominant form of the work in England, and was perpetuated in the printed editions of the text until 1725.

Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville : une "géographie" au XIVe siècle

Writing East : the "travels" of Sir John Mandeville

No work revealed more of the mysterious East to statesmen, explorers, readers, and writers of the late Middle Ages than the Book of John Mandeville. One of the most widely circulated documents of its day, it first appeared in French between 1356 and 1371 and was soon translated into nine other European languages. Ostensibly the account of one English knight's journeys through Africa and Asia, it is, rather, a compilation of travel writings first shaped by an unknown redactor. Writing East is a study of how Mandeville's Travels came to appear in its various versions, explaining how it went through a series of transformations as it reached new audiences in order to serve as both a response to previous writings about the East and an important voice in the medieval conversation about the nature and limits of the world. Higgins offers a palimpsestic reading of this "multi-text" that demonstrates not only how the original French author overwrote his precursors but also how subsequent translators molded the material to serve their own ideological agendas.