Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume II.
complete book, e-book

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13.—SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE.

One of the last questions in which Sir Henry Yule[2] took an interest in, was the problem of the authorship of the book of Travels which bears the name of SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE, the worthy Knight, who, after being for a long time considered as the "Father of English Prose" has become simply "the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of Travels, written in French, and published between 1357 and 1371."[3]

It was understood that "JOHAN MAUNDEUILLE, chiualer, ia soit ceo qe ieo ne soie dignes, neez et norriz Dengleterre de la ville Seint Alban," crossed the sea "lan millesme ccc'me vintisme et secund, le jour de Seint Michel,"[4] that he travelled since across the whole of Asia during the 14th century, that he wrote the relation of his travels as a rest after his fatiguing peregrinations, and that he died on the 17th of November, 1372, at Liege, when he was buried in the Church of the Guillemins.

No work has enjoyed a greater popularity than Mandeville's; while we describe but eighty-five manuscripts of Marco Polo's, and I gave a list of seventy-three manuscripts of Friar Odoric's relation,[5] it is by hundreds that Mandeville's manuscripts can be reckoned. As to the printed editions, they are, so to speak, numberless; Mr. Carl Schönborn[6] gave in 1840, an incomplete bibliography; Tobler in his Bibliographia geographica Palestinae (1867),[7] and Röhricht[8] after him compiled a better bibliography, to which may be added my own lists in the Bibliotheca Sinica[9] and in the T'oung-Pao.[10]

Campbell, Ann. de la Typog. néerlandaise, 1874, p. 338, mentions a Dutch edition: Reysen int heilighe lant, s.l.n.d., folio, of which but two copies are known, and which must be dated as far back as 1470 [see p. 600], I believed hitherto (I am not yet sure that Campbell is right as to his date) that the first printed edition was German, s.l.n.d., very likely printed at Basel, about 1475, discovered by Tross, the Paris Bookseller.[11] The next editions are the French of the 4th April, 1480,[12] and 8th February of the same year,[13] Easter being the 2nd of April, then the Latin,[14] Dutch,[15] and Italian[16] editions, and after the English editions of Pynson and Wynkin de Worde.

In what tongue was Mandeville's Book written?

The fact that the first edition of it was printed either in German or in Dutch, only shows that the scientific progress was greater and printing more active in such towns as Basel, Nuremberg and Augsburg than in others. At first, one might believe that there were three original texts, probably in French, English, and vulgar Latin; the Dean of Tongres, Radulphus of Rivo, a native of Breda, writes indeed in his Gesta Pontificum Leodiensium, 1616, p. 17: "Hoc anno Ioannes Mandeuilius natione Anglus vir ingenio, & arte medendi eminens, qui toto fere terrarum orbe peragrato, tribus linguis (...)

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