The Egerton Version of Mandeville's Travels (review)

While every noun and adjective of the phrase 'The True Story of Sir John Mandeville's Travels' is questionable, yet this fourteenth-century travel book has been immensely popular from the very beginning. There are over 300 manuscripts and countless editions: Wynkyn de Worde printed two editions in 1495 and 1499. The Travels captured the European imagination and between them, Marco Polo and Mandeville dominated European views of the rest of the world for centuries.

Seymour has dedicated much of his life to the principal English manuscripts of the Travels which he surveyed in 'The English manuscripts of Mandeville's Travels' (Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, 4.5 (1966) 167-210). He has now edited the four fundamental ones, including the Defective Manuscript (so-called because it lacks the description of Egypt), the Metrical Version, and the one from the Cotton manuscript, which happens to be a better version than the Egerton one. All have been published by the Early English Text Society.

The present manuscript is the one used by Malcolm Letts for his modernized English version of Mandeville's Travels (Hakluyt 2nd series, vol. CI, London, 1953). For anyone who only wants to know the story, then this is the one to read, even though Seymour's latest version does contain annotations identifying various places and peoples mentioned in the text that update the notes in his earlier editions. The problem with Seymour's notes is that some annotations are longer while others are shorter, and it is nowhere made clear what improvements or decisions have been made for this version or how views have changed over the years. There are also points in the commentary that are not well addressed, for example Seymour's dismissal of Mandeville on Caesar's adjustment of the calendar (see pp. 43 and 183). Caesar did indeed add two months to a year (46 BC), but it was only one year, and that was to put the calendar back in kilter. Mandeville thinks he added two months to every year, which is an understandable mistake. Seymour, however, says Mandeville miscalculates rather than misunderstands.

Students of Middle English language, on the other hand, will enjoy the painstaking transcription by Seymour. As I have not seen the original, I cannot vouch for the accuracy, apart from a short comparison with the two very welcome coloured frontispieces of fols 45 and 59 (verso). The transcription could also be useful, and certainly entertaining, for students: it is undoubtedly much easier to read than, for example, Chaucer's verse. Reading out loud is the natural way to hear such works. Of course, the mismatch between the Roman alphabet (even expanded by þ and ʒ) and the various versions of English pronunciation, with the consequent variations in spelling, will cause some problems. The spelling does, however, reveal the dialect used for this text as probably being from North Yorkshire, but Seymour has changed his assessment of the script from early fifteenth century cursiva libraria (p. 199) to anglicana formata hand c. 1400 (p. xxvii). Otherwise his description of the manuscript is virtually unchanged, though his variations in the transcription of the note from 1803, found in the front of the manuscript, are a little disconcerting. It seems a shame that he does not include the exotic alphabets transcribed in the manuscript, apart from the one included in a frontispiece.

So this text completes a life work of Seymour: the corpus of transcriptions of the basic English versions of Mandeville. Unfortunately (or should that be 'fortunately' in terms of future research?) it leaves many questions unanswered or resuscitated. This is not helped by the unreflective way in which Seymour approaches his task. Though he mentions his other versions, there is only a very limited attempt at correlation, illustrated by just a few passages.

This is certainly a fun text for students of Middle English in terms of...