Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville

8. Having Come to Rest Despite Myself

8 Having Come to Rest Despite Myself AT THE END OF ITS TOUR OF Prester John's Land and surrounding isles, as we saw in the previous chaper, The Book takes its projected audience still farther east to the dark and mountainous region near the world's beginning, where it offers them a distant glimpse of the mossy wall enclosing their original homeland. In a text that set out from the farthest "parties doccident," and that traces the itinerary of no one traveler in particular, this last inaccessible destination would have been a fitting place to bring the vicarious journey to a close. It is not, however, the place where the Mandeville-author chose to conclude . Instead, he adds three more stops to TheBook's itinerary, prolonging the marvelous survey a little further, before having Sir John break off somewhere near the Great Khan's territory. At that point, the Knight asks his audience to reflect on the world's religious diversity, reaffirming its underlying spiritual unity, yet unexpectedly concluding this reaffirmation-and the entire recollected "divisament dou monde"-with a comment on non-Christian idolatry that recalls something of Polo's negative tone. Once Sir John has (re)established his orthodoxy in this way, the Mandeville-author has him undertake the task of easing the audience out of the far-away textual world in which they have been moving for so long, addressing them with a brief peroration first on his account's incompleteness because of the sheer number of "choses estranges" "over there;' and then on the unhappy personal circumstances in which he put his book together. Finally, he sends the book into the world in good medieval fashion, with a short prayer. No lessthan the exordium, whose multiple transformations we witnessed in chapter 2, TheBook's five-stage closing movement rarely passed untouched through the hands of its medieval intermediaries, and this is especially true of the personal peroration. In England, for example, Sir John's last words were supplemented by at least three redactors with a passage explaining how the 240 Chapter 8 pope confirmed his book as he returned through Rome. On the Continent, in contrast, two redactors brought the Knight to Liege for a twilight reunion with a physician known to him from the Sultan's court, and one of them made the physician-whom we know to have had a genuine extra-textual existence -responsible for convincing Sir John to compile his book. In the event, this double account of The Book's composition proved persuasive enough that some scholars used it to launch a quest for the Mandeville-author's real identity. Rather than take up the still-unfinished quest in the present chapter , though, I examine these two different and misleading supplements to an originally misleading conclusion, as well as other conclusions that are not quite so disingenuous, in order to see how they work to close the text's world. Neither Farther Forward, Nor All the Way Bacl' Finally, by way of conclusion, the interpolator has Sir John address the sceptical much as he does in the portrait of the Khan's court, boldly affirming the veracity of his account no matter what such people think: And oure holy fader of hisspecialgrace remytted my boke to ben examyned + preued be the Avys of his seyd conseill, Be the whiche my boke was preeued for trewe jn so moche pat pei schewed me a boke pat my boke was examynde by, pat comprehended full moche more be an hundred part, be the whiche the Mappa Mundi was made after. And so my boke, all be it pat many men ne list not to 3eue credence to no ping but to pat pat pei seen with hire eye, ne be the Auctour ne the persone neuer so trewe, is affermed + preued be oure holy fader in maner + forme as I haue seyd. From these words, the Cotton text turns to Sir John's "quasi-juridical" account of his book's composition, and it is a testament to the interpolation's Having Come to Rest Despite Myself 257 rhetorical persuasiveness- and the syntactic complexity ofthe sentence beginning "I Iohn Maundevyll"-that one hardly notices the fundamental contradiction which emerges regarding the book's origins. In the Defective and Egerton form of the interpolation, this contradiction reveals itself much more obviously, since the papal interpolation there immediately follows Sir John's "quasi...