Ladan
Niayesh, ed. A Knight’s Legacy:
Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2011).
Reviewed
by Andrew Bozio (andrew.bozio@lmc.gatech.edu)
Since
David Aers’s seminal essay, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or,
Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’” scholars
of Renaissance literature have been encouraged to reconsider the influence of
medieval literature and culture upon the early modern period.[1] One of the strengths of Ladan Niayesh’s edited
collection, A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville
and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England, is that it enables this
reconsideration of periodization with exceptional precision. Certainly, the
volume’s most specific contribution comes in its ability to advance the field
of Mandeville studies; prior to its publication, it was possible to say, as
Mary Baine Campbell notes in her introduction, that “no collection of scholarly
essays related to Mandeville’s Travels
yet exists in English or French” (1). But the methodological strength of this
volume lies in its use of Mandeville’s Travels
as an instrument for exploring the refashioning of medieval thought within the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In three sections, the volume moves
chronologically to trace the ways in which Mandeville’s Travels was disseminated, adapted, and reimagined in the years
following its initial composition. The result is not only a more nuanced
understanding of Mandeville’s place within premodern culture, but also keen
insight into the way that Mandeville, and medieval culture more broadly, was
reinvented over the course of the early modern period.
In the
first section, Michael C. Seymour, Charles W. R. D. Moseley, and Kenneth Parker
study the reception of various editions of Mandeville’s Travels across the late medieval and early modern periods.
Collectively, these essays undermine a familiar narrative of epistemic rupture,
where the Renaissance ushers in a period of skepticism and scientific inquiry
that reveals the beliefs of the medieval period to be, at best, naïve. Namely,
as Moseley argues, it is “simplistic” to assume that “as a result of ‘new
discoveries’ the factual credibility of Mandeville’s description of the world
evaporated towards the end of the sixteenth century – between, say, the two
editions of Hakluyt’s Principall
Navigations (1589, 1598-99)” (28). Suggesting, instead, a profound
complexity within the reception of Mandeville’s Travels, these essays contain a wealth of information, and they
represent a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the manner
of Mandeville’s dissemination or in theorizing the political and ideological
significance of his reception.
Building
upon this work, the essays of the second section foreground what Niayesh terms
“Mandevillian ideologies,” or the styles of thought that Mandeville develops
and, in turn, disseminates with the circulation of the Travels. Drawing upon Rosemary Tzanaki’s concept of religious
geography, Leo Carruthers foregrounds the relationship between spiritual and
physical spaces, using this intimacy to illuminate the peculiar topography of
the Travels. In turn, Matthew Dimmock
builds upon the relationship between religious belief and geographic space in
his excellent essay on Mandeville’s treatment of Islam. Rather than appraise
Mandeville’s putative tolerance of Islam, Dimmock notes that the Travels represented, in the words of
Frank Grady, “the most popular secular book in circulation,” and thus,
according to Dimmock, it became “undoubtedly a primary source for medieval
Christian notions of Islam, the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad” (93). The
essay is rich in nuance, showing the complexity of Mandeville’s consideration
of Islam and of Muhammad. Scholars of medieval England may be particularly
interested by Dimmock’s claim that the Travels
argues for the conversion of the Muslims against their destruction in the
Crusades and, in so doing, articulates an idea that would reemerge in certain
strands of Lollard thought, Langland’s Piers
Plowman, and The Book of Margery
Kempe. With still greater focus, Line Cottegnies considers the status of
Mandeville’s Travels in early modern
England by contrasting the work with Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of Guiana (1596). Although both texts are presented
as travel narratives, as Cottegnies argues, they differ sharply in “their
epistemologies of travel” (110). Namely, Mandeville relies upon the auctoritas of earlier explorers to
ground his work, whereas Ralegh “uses a type of experimental observation” in
his encounter with other cultures, anticipating Francis Bacon’s work in The Advancement of Learning (1605)
(109). Thus, although several essays in the collection disrupt our sense of an
epistemological break between the medieval and the early modern periods,
Cottegnies’ essay reinforces the idea of a profound discontinuity, embodied
most palpably in the styles of reasoning that Mandeville and Ralegh deploy.
Arguably, this tension is one of the real strengths of the collection. Taken as
a whole, the essays of this collection show how one might rethink the nature of
periodization with intellectual rigor and new insight.
In
tracing the contours of Mandevillian ideology, the essays of the second section
lay a strong foundation for the concluding section of the book, which concerns
the representation of Mandeville and Mandevillian lore upon the early modern
stage. This section, entitled “Mandevillian stages,” is the culmination of the
collection, in part because the essays suggest how reception and ideology fuse
together within the dissemination and adaptation of Mandeville’s Travels. Richard Hillman reveals that
Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the
Great, Parts 1 and 2 (1587-88) were strongly influenced by the story of
Judith and Holofernes. Also drawing upon the work of Rosemary Tzanaki, Ladan
Niayesh argues in her fine essay that there were “five dominant types of
receptions” of Mandeville’s Travels
in the medieval period, when the work was treated “as a pilgrimage itinerary, a
geographical treatise, a romance, a history or a work of theology” (161).
Niayesh then localizes this plurality within the figure of Prester John,
showing how the transformation of his character over the course of the late
medieval and early modern periods reflects “not just the changing fortunes of
Mandeville’s legacy but the errancies in the West’s complex relationship to
‘the East’ (taken in its broadest sense)” (166-167).
In
another stellar contribution to the volume, Gordon McMullan traces the ways in
which early modern drama appropriated Mandeville’s Travels in works such as Jonson’s New Inn (1629) and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1611) before offering a focused reading of John
Fletcher’s The Island Princess
(1621), a play that McMullan persuasively argues invokes and refashions Mandevillian
imagery. By extending his discussion to include recent performances of The Island Princess, some painfully relevant
in light of the 2002 Bali bombing, McMullan also offers a solemn reminder of
the politics of history and temporality, a central concern of this collection.
Finally, in her essay on Richard Brome’s The
Antipodes (1636-38), Claire Jowitt considers the ambiguous place of
Mandeville’s Travels within a play
about fantastical travel. Using Brome’s play to consider both the status of
Mandeville’s Travels within the
seventeenth century and the “larger political and generic questions concerning
the ways in which dramatic texts use travel writing in this period,” Jowitt
reveals that Brome, like Mandeville, transforms new worlds into templates for
understanding the old (197).
In
short, the strength of this collection lies in its efforts to define
Mandeville’s place within the politics of place and periodization in late
medieval and early modern England. In “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault argues
that the Renaissance differed fundamentally from the medieval period in its conception
of the nature of location. If the medieval episteme was defined by “a
hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places; protected
places and open, exposed places; urban and rural places,” the early modern
period witnessed the invention of space as an a priori and immaterial dimension; “extension was substituted for
localization,” in Foucault’s words, as part of a conceptual shift that Max
Jammer, Edward Grant, and Edward Casey have described at considerable length.[2] A
Knight’s Legacy adds nuance to this schematic history. By tracing the
reception and reinvention of Mandeville’s Travels
across the late medieval and early modern periods, this collection reveals the
difficulty of speaking in broad terms about Mandeville as a singular figure, one
whose work was uncritically absorbed in a particular era only to be soundly
rejected in the next. Indeed, the essays invoke a dominant narrative of
epistemological rupture only to undermine it, and, in doing so, they reveal new
continuities and discontinuities between the medieval and early modern period. For
these reasons, A Knight’s Legacy
represents an exciting collection that would appeal to anyone seeking to
understand the continual reinvention of Mandeville’s Travels and, more broadly, the appropriation and adaptation of
medieval thought.
Andrew
Bozio
Georgia
Institute of Technology
[1] David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early
Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the
Subject’,” in Culture and History,
1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David
Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177-202.
[2] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,”
translated by Jay Miskowiec and published in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27, esp. 22-23. See also Max
Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of
Theories of Space in Physics, third edition (New York: Dover Publications,
1993); Edward Grant, Much Ado About
Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Edward S.
Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
