-The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

A reproduction of a manuscript held by the British Library, this work is a 14th century travel memoir attributed to an English knight. Although authorship of this work is disputed, it is agreed that Sir John Mandeville is unlikely to have existed. Mandeville’s Travels were popular, with over three hundred surviving manuscripts in numerous languages dating to the 1360s. The geographic structure described in this work, with Jerusalem at the center of the world with an Asian east, European west, and African south, greatly influenced medieval Europe’s conception of world society. In his travels, Mandeville describes the Pygmy Kingdom in India, which is inhabited by short people with correspondingly short life-spans who are talented artisans. In his supposed travels through India, Mandeville also claims to have encountered and drunk from the Fountain of Youth. He recounts a visit to Amazonia, an empire in Europe near the Caspian Sea composed entirely of women warriors, which along with descriptions of cyclopeses, upheld Greek mythology.

Mandeville’s fabulated travels have been identified as utopian forerunners of Thomas More’s genre-defining work, which used the travelogue to discuss the philosophy of an ideal world. Mandeville’s Travels was also read by 15th and 16th century explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Ponce de Leon, and Sir Walter Raleigh.