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9 Conclusion "MEDIEVAL WRITING DOES NOT PRODUCE variants; it is variance." Such was the founding assumption of the present study, and its validity has been fully confirmed by the isotopic evidence laid out in my reading of the mandevillean multi-text. So too has its utility. If nothing else, this reading has shown that recognizing variance as essential to medieval writing-rather than as an accident to be repaired by a textual scholarship founded on the belief that only the untouched authorial original is of critical interest-allows us to see individual works as it were in parallax. Thus seen, the objects of attention shift slightly and reveal things that one might otherwise have overlooked, either about the works themselves or, by extension, the culture in which they were produced, circulated, and reproduced. Instead of collating versions in order to travel backward toward an absent fons et origo, an ideal text whose plenitude diminishes all of its actual instantiations, one lays them side by side in order to trace each textual tributary (in both senses of the word) outward, viewing the individual details of this verbal flux as potentially significant, as the product of an active and often engaged reception and rewriting enabled by the specific material conditions and cultural attitudes associated with medieval textmaking. In the present case, the (re)production of significant variance starts well before The Book ofJohn Mandeville itself was originally compiled. Both the Mandeville-author's principal underlying intertexts-William of Boldensele's Liber and Odoric of Pordenone's Relatio-represent written records that partly rewrite the forms that were available to their authors, and they both came to the .Mandeville-author in Jean le Long's variant French translations, as well as in some form of their original Latin. In reproducing these two texts, as we saw, the author did more than simply splice them together; he overwrote and augmented each of them with words rewritten from still other texts, ranging from the biblical through the fictional and the historical to the scientific. The resulting dialogic variation on its precursors and summa of eastern 266 Chapter 9 lore was then released into the world, presumably in a single form, whereupon scribes, translators, and redactors all began the task of reproducing the Mandeville-author's compilation in the differently weighted versions that I call isotopes. Sometimes the reproductive changes were minor, as in the case of the Continental and Insular Versions, which differ in small but interesting ways from each other, if not also from the original whose trace they are thought to represent. Sometimes, however, the changes were great, as in the case of the Bodley, Metrical, von Diemeringen, and Vulgate Latin Versions, which differ as much from each other as they do from the authorial version that indirectly stands behind them. Seen in its most general terms, this isotopic variance occurs along a remarkably wide spectrum: at one end lies diction (such asVelser's rendering of the French "diverse" as the German "wunderlich"); at the other, disposition (such as von Diemeringen's displacement of the lengthy account of Saracen beliefs and practices from the middle of the text to its very end, and with it some of TheBook's passing references to religious diversity). In between these two mainly formal poles lies a fascinating and informative range of rhetorical and ideological variance, the result of attempts by The Book's intermediaries to heighten or tone down certain effects, to make particular claims look more convincing or less unsettling, and also to endorse or resist certain arguments. Such resistance as there is, is largely to be found in the widely circulated Vulgate Latin Version, which I describe as "always orthodox;' because it so often breaks the Self-critical mirrors fashioned by the Mandeville-author in his depictions of non-Christian Others, in order to replace them with a strenuous defense of "the most holy mother Church" through which alone one is saved. Initially, the fact that only the Latin rendering produced significant variance by systematically working against the grain of its indirect source might seem to expose a considerable gap between the Latin intellectual world and that of the vernacular. Yet against this we have to set the four independent Insular Latin translations that do not attempt to unmake the Mandeville-author's imagined world, even if they resist some of its details in the manner of several of the vernacular renderings. Indeed, the unusually widespread acceptance of The Book's composite world by...

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