27 May /14

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a work published by a ‘Sir John Mandeville’ and was one of the most popular books in the Middle Ages. It tells the story of an English knight who left England in 1322 and then travelled through Egypt, India, China, Iran and Turkey. Medieval manuscripts of the book appear in many languages –Latin, French, Germany, English, Italian, Czech and Danish. It was read by Christopher Columbus.

But ‘Sir John Mandeville’ never existed and much of the story is invented. So much so that Sir Thomas Browne (who introduced almost 800 words into the English language, putting him in the Top 30 of all-time contributors to the English language) called him “the greatest liar of all time”. It appears that the book was a compilation of travel writings put together in Latin in the early 1300s and then translated into French, with the English translation being based on both the Latin and English versions.

So it is an anonymous original, which is translated by an anonymous person, which became one of the most widely read “English” travel descriptions and which actually gave English almost 200 new words which include the words travel, superficiality, porcupine, mosque, intense, Adam’s apple, commodity, hiss, lemon, sophistication and harvest.

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