Mandeville's Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the "Book of Sir JohnMandeville" by Rosemary TzanakiReview by: Carolyne LarringtonThe Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 55, No. 219 (Apr., 2004), pp. 264-266Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3661275 .

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264 REVIEWS

British Academy comes close to adopting the position articulated by Eric Hobsbawm: men and women define their adherence to a community by their sense of what others are like who do not 'belong', 'in other words, by xenophobia' (p. 113). In Pearsall's view, there is no way of avoiding the unpalatable fact that Chaucer displayed the linguistic, class, and cultural prejudices of his day. But his interests were international, 'there is no English poet who is less interested in England as a nation' (p. 297). Akbari takes a different view: 'we are surely justified in referring to the "discourse of nation" in late fourteenth-century English literature' (p. 124). The essays throughout the volume were deliberately chosen by the editor to reflect different points of view.

If 'climate' may be used figuratively, so may 'geography', or, more exactly, 'cultural geography', which seems to mean in this context any attempt to come to terms with- 'map'-the Muslim world, conditioned by the knowledge, ignorance, and prejudice prevailing in fourteenth-century England. Since this world was unmistakably foreign, it is argued by some of the contributors that Muslims may also become a convenient way of representing other kinds of stranger: women, pagans, and home-grown heretics. Hence Susan Schibanoff describes what happens in the Man of Law's Tale when, in her terminology, the 'outlaw' becomes the 'inlaw'. Quite literally one's in-laws in this context. This kind of 'geography' is ultimately inward-looking, rather than an objective enquiry: thus Louise Fradenburg employs her trademark psychologizing to read the Prioress's Tale as Chaucer's study of narrative stasis. It is a story which employs many words to describe not very much, and its anti-Semitism is a backward-looking parody (a cruel one) of real revolution and change.

However, other essays convey more positive views of the cultural benefits accruing to Chaucer from Western contact with the East. Dorothee Metlizki shows in detail that Chaucer's use of alchemical terms in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale is exact and knowledgeable. The present reviewer was grateful for the information and references to sources given here, and in Vincent DiMarco's exposition of the historical places and people fictionalized in the Squire's Tale. Kathryn Lynch and Katharine Slater Gittes both canvas openly the possibility that the very idea of a framing narrative, the pilgrimage which provides the excuse for storytelling, derives ultimately from Eastern models, perhaps even the most famous of them all, the 'Thousand and One Nights'.

'Cultural geography' provides a generous umbrella for a variety of contributors with differing agendas. Maybe, as in other essay collections, the coherence seems at times a little strained, but it does not seem to matter too much. Provided that the essays be informative, clearly written, and provocative-as most of them are-the editor's wish to avoid an artificial uniformity is to be welcomed.

H. L. SPENCER Exeter College Oxford

ROSEMARY TZANAKI. Mandeville's Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville. Pp. xvi+302. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. ?47-50. This valuable study of the Book of John Mandeville seems at first sight to promise

more than it can ultimately deliver. Yet Rosemary Tzanaki succeeds in analysing as much as can be known about reception in terms of the kinds of data available. The question is addressed systematically: Tzanaki identifies the various generic elements in the book as clues to authorial intent and closely examines the principal different redactions of the text, their marginalia and illustrations, and the companion texts to the Book in the codices in which it is bound. The Book's influence on other medieval

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works, Christine de Pizan, Jean d'Outremeuse, for example, is also taken into account: Christine makes use of it for geographical information; Jean reads the Book as history, though he has no compunction in changing its persona into a native of Liege. Tzanaki subdivides the generic affiliations of the Book into pilgrim guide, geographical treatise, romance, history, and theological work. Much of interest is uncovered by working to this plan, ranging from the quirky-one owner of the Cotton manuscript tore out the section on the Holy Land, presumably for use as a guide when travelling-to the predictable: audiences did not generally sympathize with the tolerance and humanism which the persona expresses towards other religions, to the point that such sections were often curtailed.

Two particular transformations are exemplary: the translation of the vernacular text into Latin, and the creation of a metrical version produce concomitant changes of emphasis in the text which suggest very different types of intended audience. Tzanaki notes how the Latin version accommodates itself more closely to orthodox Christian views, illustrated by a chapter heading: 'of the detestable sect of the Saracens and their faith', a sentiment quite at variance with the tenor of the persona's views of Islam. There is increased castigation of the practices of bad Christians, the prophecy about the retaking of the Holy Land is omitted, and the romance elements are much reduced. A telling demonstration of medieval authorizing practices occurs when the Vulgate Version adds cross-references to Odoric of Pordenone in order to confirm the Book's authenticity, without realizing that Odoric is in fact the Book's source for these passages. The Metrical Version considerably reduces any sense of the persona as a character; it concentrates particularly on the marvellous, incorporating a substantial section on the 'Stations of Rome' and adding some dubious information about the geographical location of Purgatory.

The examination of illustrations confirms, as might be expected, that the traditional wonders, in particular the Plinian races, were frequently chosen for depiction. Established illustrative schema for Anthropophagi and Blemmyae were no doubt to hand in the workshops, as were designs for biblical incidents. Anecdotes which belong to romance are illustrated freely, as is the splendour of the court of the Great Khan. Wynkyn de Worde's 1499 edition has many striking woodcuts, and the sophistication and elegance of the illustrations in the incomplete early fifteenth-century Czech Textless Version, and in Bibliotheque Nationale de France MS fr. 2810, the Livre de Merveilles, make one long for a full study of the Book's illustrative tradition. The marginalia signal the importance of the travelogue about the Holy Land, but also point up the circumference of the earth, the forest of pepper trees, no doubt because of pepper's enormous economic value, and the Plinian races, whose appearance in the text, however briefly, serves as a confirmatory and authorizing strategy. Romance anecdotes are sometimes annotated as tale or goude tale, but draw little additional comment, while the story of Chinggis Khan and the arrows, doubtless because of its similarity to Aesop, and references to biblical history, is also widely noted. A disapproving French annotator adds 'coutume folle' to descriptions of exotic anthro- pological activities.

The Book keeps mixed company in the different manuscripts in which it is bound. Tzanaki suggests that these predominantly contain either religious or marvel texts. The Book's most frequent companion is the Roman d'Alexandre, but other compilers see it as a travel narrative, combining it with works as divergent in their historicity as the Voyages of Brendan and the Letter of Prester John, on the one hand, and Odoric of Pordenone, Marco Polo, and, in time, accounts of the Portuguese exploratory voyages on the other. The Defective Version is bound with Piers Plowman at least five times.

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Other versions are found with the Speculum Christi or the Elucidarium, works of theology which tend towards the encyclopedic or historical. Given that the persona's humanism and tolerance are largely edited out of the Metrical Version, it is no surprise to find it bound with the Siege of Jerusalem. In chronological terms, Tzanaki concludes that the Book's earliest audience, who regarded it as a pilgrimage account, found its attitudes of tolerance disquieting. Later readers valued it for its romance elements and exoticism, though it was also regarded as providing useful information about questions of science and geography to an astonishingly wide range of people. Columbus famously owned a copy, MS Harley 212 belonged to John Dee at one time, while the heretical views of Menocchio, as reported in Carlo Ginzburg's classic The Cheese and the Worms, were partly inspired by his reception of the Book.

The introduction contains a very useful list of manuscripts containing marginalia and/or illustrations and a diagram of the relationship between the different versions. More useful still might have been a complete list of manuscripts with codicological information. The index conflates owners with audience, obscuring an important distinction not adequately explored here. The book still sounds like the thesis it was in places: there is a tendency to quote from secondary literature where primary sources would have been preferable. Thus we have to take the author's word for changes effected by the Mandeville-author to Boldensele, Odoric of Pordenone, Gervase of Tilbury, and the Pilgrymage of Torkyngton: details of editions consulted are not given. The volume is generally well produced, though some readers will be momentarily confused by the wrong pictures being attached to correctly placed captions on pages 179 and 265. Nevertheless, this study is thorough and absorbing, and it provides a great deal of information which, it may be hoped, will inspire others to look closely at the paratexts of influential medieval works.

CAROLYNE LARRINGTON St John's College Oxford

DAVID LOEWENSTEIN and JANEL MUELLER (edd.). The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Pp. xii+1038 (The New Cambridge History of English Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ?100. Hold hard librarians, please! This single volume of the New Cambridge History of

English Literature cannot replace the five volumes of the original Cambridge History, which devotes five volumes to the equivalent period: it is still useful for its content- summaries of less well known works, which have been excluded here to save space and allow new interests in. The function of the volume under review is to update readers on the progress of scholarship over roughly the last thirty years, and this it does admirably. It would be very helpful reading for a beginning graduate student, at least the first section on 'Modes and Means of Literary Production, Circulation and Reception', and that on the specific era in which the student is interested. The full footnotes and terminal bibliography enable a reader to follow up and widen appreciation of the topics discussed.

After the initial section outlining the continuities and changes in, for example, literacy, manuscript and print cultures, patronage, and readers, the remaining two- thirds of text are divided into four eras, 1529-1558, 1558-1603, 1603-1642, and 1642- 1660, the last containing a chapter which takes the history through to the 1670s. Within each era, a chapter is given to consideration of a prominent area of literary activity, such as the nation, the court, the Church or Christianity, London, the theatre, and the household, progressively broadening and lengthening as the sites of production and

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