Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville by Iain Macleod Higgins (review)

REVIEWS this very shift away from the idealist monoglossia (Alexandrian anal­ ogy) she finds in textual theory toward a heteroglossia, a celebration of an idiosyncratic textual anomaly, that the "legacy" of Auerbach is to be seen most clearly in contemporary textual studies. The "venerable bon usage" (p. 102) has ceded to the partial, the avant, and the brouillions, in demonstration of the continuance of those postmodernist aspects of Auerbach's philological "character" noted by Geoffrey Green's essay. Even (perhaps especially) in such moments where one feels the provo­ cation most strongly, the essays in Lerer's book are justly Auerbachian in their setting down of a philological "challenge" which must then be confronted with all the energy, enthusiasm, and vigor that characterizes Mimesis itself. So what is thefinal legacy of Auerbach? Much too early to say, of course, but in a sense both Lerer's Literary History and Hanna's Pursuing History epitomize that legacy in their scholarship, rhetoric, and shape. DAVID GREETHAM City University of New York Graduate School IAIN MACLEOD HIGGINS. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. ix, 335. $49.95. Any book that begins its introduction by reference to Adam and Eve announces the scope of its own ambition. lain Higgins's ambition in Writing East is not only admirable but, for the most part, successfully realized. Taking its cue from the peripatetic originary pair, Writing East also journeys eastward, moving with Sir John, the narrator and ostensi­ ble author of the complex of texts commonly known as "Mandeville's Travels," from the familiar world of western Europe to the East as it was created in the medieval occidental imagination. In his own scholarly ex­ cursus, Higgins employs two guiding principles. The first guiding principle is that the East, imagined and reimagined over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is not one but many: the "Travels," that is, encompasses a multiplicity of orients as its narrative moves through Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, the land of Prester John, India, the Terrestrial Paradise, and back to western Europe again. In its writing of this multiplicity, the "Travels" is one of those essential 277 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER medieval "artifacts that give expression to the worldly aspirations of medieval Christian culture" (p. 13). Its ideology is thus manifested in its geography. Higgins's second guiding principle also concerns multiplicity-not, however, in the geography within the text of the "Travels," but in the subsequent textual travels of The Book ofJohn Mandeville itself. As Higgins explains (in his book's most original and convincing portions), the "Travels" is not one text but many. Constituted of redactions, ver­ sions, translations, and "isotopes" (p. 26), The Book is best understood as a "multi-text" (p. viii), "a heterogeneric compilation," "a multinodal network, a kind of rhizome" (p. 18). In its attention to issues of textu­ ality, Writing East is a compelling response to recent theoretical contro­ versies about the nature and transmission of medieval texts. Scholars such as Paul Zumthor, Peter Shillingsburg, and Tim William Machan (although only the first is listed in Higgins's extensive bibliography) are among those debating whether it is possible to establish a unified and stable text, whether it is possible to trace the descent of a text from a single, identifiable, and authored (in a modern sense) manuscript source, and, in fact, whether it is desirable to do so. Higgins's implicit answer to each of these questions is "no." Throughout Writing East, Higgins demonstrates that The Book is not a unified text, nor is it a sin­ gle text, nor is the earliest extant version authoritative. Reading it as if it were stable or stemmatically determinable is to accept modern premises that falsify the process whereby medieval texts were created. Refuting the dominant schools of modern editing practice that either establish a best text or amalgamate a variety of available texts, Higgins aims for a "palimpsestic or topological reading" that considers the man­ uscript versions together so as to analyze "the rhetorical strategies and ideological aims" (p. 27) of each. From the more than 60 French, 44 English, 103 Dutch...