‘Travels’ (in the remarks, for example, on the letters þ and ȝ), and even perhaps for the choice of the pseudonym of Mandeville. For Burgoyne, as the foe of the Despensers, was a partisan of a real John de Mandeville, probably of Marshwood, who, implicated in 1312 in the death of Piers Gaveston [q. v.], was pardoned in 1313 (ib. ii. div. iii. p. 1138). This Mandeville was not apparently involved in the events of 1322, and would himself be too old in 1312 to make it reasonable to identify him in any way with the friend of D'Outremeuse, who died sixty years later, in 1372. But his name might easily have been adopted by Burgoyne, the exile of 1322. In any case, the presumption is that the Liège physician's true name was De Bourgogne, and that he wrote the ‘Travels’ under the pseudonym of Mandeville. Whether D'Outremeuse was his dupe or accomplice is open to doubt. D'Outremeuse was not over-scrupulous, for the travels which Mandeville took from Odoric he in turn took from Mandeville, inserting them in the ‘Myreur’ as those of his favourite hero Ogier le Danois (ed. Borgnet, 1873, iii. 57). There are signs, too, that he may at least have been responsible for the Latin version of Mandeville's ‘Travels,’ in which Ogier's name also occurs; but if he had no hand in the original, he had ample means of detecting its character; his own authorities for the extant books of the ‘Myreur’ (Chronique, p. xcv) include nearly all those which Mandeville used.
The success of the ‘Travels’ was remarkable. Avowedly written for the unlearned, and combining interest of matter and a quaint simplicity of style, the book hit the popular taste, and in a marvel-loving age its most extravagant features probably had the greatest charm. No mediæval work was more widely diffused in the vernacular, and in English especially it lost nothing, errors apart, by translation, the philological value of the several versions being also considerable. Besides the French, English, and Latin texts, there are others in Italian and Spanish, Dutch and Walloon, German, Bohemian, Danish, and Irish, and some three hundred manuscripts are said to have survived. In English Dr. Vogels enumerates thirty-four. In the British Museum are ten French, nine English, six Latin, three German, and two Irish manuscripts. The work was plagiarised not only by D'Outremeuse, but by the Bavarian traveller Schiltberger, who returned home in 1427. More curiously still, as Mr. Paget Toynbee has lately proved (Romania, 1892, xxi. 228), Christine de Pisan, in 1402, borrowed from it largely in her ‘Chemin de Long Estude’ (vv. 1191–1568); the sibyl who conducted Christine in a vision through the other world first showed her what was worth seeing here in terms almost identical with Mandeville's.
According to M. Cordier the first edition in type was the German version of Otto von Diemeringen, printed probably at Bâle about 1475, but an edition in Dutch is thought to have appeared at least as early as 1470 (Campbell, Typogr. Néerlandaise, 1874, p. 338). Another German version by Michel Velser was printed at Augsburg, 1481. The earliest edition of the French text is dated Lyons, 4 April 1480, and was speedily followed by a second, Lyons, 8 Feb. 1480–1. The year 1480 also saw an edition in Italian, printed at Milan. The earliest Latin editions are undated, but one has been assigned, on good grounds, to Gerard Leeu of Antwerp, 1485. In English the earliest dated edition is that of Wynkyn de Worde, 1499, reprinted in 1503. It was perhaps preceded by Pynson's, a unique copy of which is in the Grenville Library, No. 6713. An edition by T. Este, 1568, contains virtually the same woodcuts which have been repeated down to our own days. Fifteen editions in English before 1725 are known, all, as before stated, of the defective text. The edition of Cotton MS. Titus C. xvi. in 1725 and its reprints have already been mentioned. Modernised forms of it have been edited by T. Wright, ‘Early Travels in Palestine,’ 1848, and by H. Morley, 1886.
