Mandeville's Travails


Book Description

This book offers a critical methodology for analyzing travel literature. The subject of travel literature, as well as travel literatures, have not always been regarded with respect or given much critical attention. In order to amend this lack of positive reception, Francis Tobienne Jr. analyzes the late medieval text Mandeville’s Travels, specifically the Cotton MS. This text, though not overly popular currently, was among the most popular pieces of literature for well beyond its fourteenth-century inception in some three hundred manuscripts divided into three groups as well as early printed editions; further, this text offers a way in which to approach other pieces of travel literature. To facilitate this critical process Tobienne proposes a seven-part method: 1. Identify and Define the Problem, 2. Make Observations, 3. Look for Regularities, 4. Wonder Why Regularities Exist, 5. Propose a Hypothesis, 6. Use an Experiment and 7. Have Reproducible Results. Of note, Mandeville’s Travels is both the impetus behind this seven-part method, as well as the object of study. Thus, Tobienne showcases how each element of the seven-part method is at play in the text, even as he argues for the text’s importance within medieval studies. Also included in this examination is the application of this seven-part method to medieval and post-period pieces of literature. The book culminates in an argument for the canonization and importance of Mandeville’s Travels in and beyond medieval studies.







Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time


Book Description

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.




Karl Marx: Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, London 1887


Book Description

Die zweite Abteilung vereint Marx' Werk "Das Kapital" in seinen autorisierten Ausgaben, einschließlich Übersetzungen, und alle direkt dazugehörenden Werke und Manuskripte, beginnend mit den ökonomischen Manuskripten von 1857/58.




Nowhere in the Middle Ages


Book Description

Literary and cultural historians typically cite Thomas More's 1516 Utopia as the source of both a genre and a concept. Karma Lochrie rejects this origin myth of utopianism along with the assumption that people in the Middle Ages were incapable of such thinking. In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Lochrie reframes the terms of the discussion by revealing how utopian thought was, in fact, "somewhere" in the Middle Ages. In the process, she transforms conventional readings of More's Utopia and challenges the very practice of literary history today. Drawing on a range of contemporary scholarship on utopianism and a broad premodern archive, Lochrie charts variant utopian strains in medieval literature and philosophy that diverge from More's work and at the same time plot uncanny connections with it. Examining works such as Macrobius's fifth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Mandeville's Travels, and William Langland's Piers Plowman, she finds evidence of a number of utopian drives, including the rejection of European centrality, a desire for more egalitarian politics, and a rethinking of the division between animals and humans. Nowhere in the Middle Ages insists on the relevance and transformative potential of medieval utopias for More's work and positions the sixteenth-century text as one alternative in a broader historical phenomenon of utopian thinking. Tracing medieval utopianisms forward in literary history to reveal their influences on early modern and modern literature and philosophy, Lochrie demonstrates that looking backward, we might extend future horizons of utopian thinking.




The Travels of Sir John Mandeville


Book Description

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is the chronicle of the alleged Sir John Mandeville, an explorer. His travels were first published in the late 14th century, and influenced many subsequent explorers such as Christopher Columbus.




Mandeville's Travels


Book Description

The text of British Library Egerton MS 1982, with an essay on the cosmographical ideas of Mandeville's day by E. G. R. Taylor. The main pagination of this and the following volume (Second Series 102) is continuous. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1953.




Imagining the World


Book Description

This is a study of the manner in which certain mythical notions of the world become accepted as fact. Dathorne shows how particular European concepts such as El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, a race of Amazons, and monster (including cannibal) images were first associated with the Orient. After the New World encounter they were repositioned to North and South America. The book examines the way in which Arabs and Africans are conscripted into the view of the world and takes an unusual, non-Eurocentric viewpoint of how Africans journeyed to the New World and Europe, participating in, what may be considered, an early stage of world exploration and discovery. The study concludes by looking at European travel literature from the early journeys of St. Brendan, through the Viking voyages and up to Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville. In all these instances, the encounters seem to justify mythical belief. Dathorne's interest in the subject is both intellectual and passionate since, coming from Guyana, he was very much part of this malformed Weltschmerz.




The Mongols and the West


Book Description

The Mongols had a huge impact on medieval Europe and the Islamic world. This book provides a comprehensive survey of contacts between the Catholic West and the Mongol world-empire from the first appearance of Chinggis Khan’s armies in 1221 down to the death of Tamerlane (1405) and the battle of Tannenberg (1410). This book considers the Mongols as allies as well as conquerors; the perception of them in the West; the papal response to the threat (and opportunity) they presented; the fate of the Frankish principalities in the Holy Land in the path of the Mongol onslaught; Western European embassies and missions to the East; and the impact of the Mongols on the expanding world view of the maturing Middle Ages. For courses in crusading history and medieval European history.




Marvelous Possessions


Book Description

A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of Greenblatt’s thinking on a subject that has permeated his career and a thrilling tale of wandering, kidnapping, and go-betweens—of daring improvisation, betrayal, and violence. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks, forward to the present, and, in his new preface, even to fantastical meetings between humans and aliens in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greenblatt would have us ask: How is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder—for tolerant recognition of cultural difference—from being poisoned?




Recent Books