The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

From the opening

THE Travels of Sir John Mandeville were edited anonymously in 1725, in the version for which a ‘Cotton’ manuscript in the British Museum is our only extant authority. From 1499, when they were first printed by Wynkyn de Worde, the Travels had enjoyed great popularity in England, as in the rest of Europe; but the printed editions before 1725 had all followed an inferior translation (with an unperceived gap in the middle of it), which had already gained the upper hand before printing was invented. Another manuscript in the British Museum, belonging to the ‘Egerton’ collection, preserves yet a third version, and this was printed for the first time by Mr. G. F. Warner, for the Roxburghe Club, in 1889, together with the original French text, and an introduction, and notes, which it would be difficult to over-praise. In editing the Egerton version, Mr. Warner made constant reference to the Cotton manuscript, which he quoted in many of his critical notes. But with this exception, no one appears to have looked at the manuscript since it was first printed, and subsequent writers have been content to take the correctness of the 1725 text for granted, priding themselves, apparently, on the care with which they reproduced all the superfluous eighteenth century capitals with which every line is dotted. Unluckily, the introduction of needless capitals was the least of the original editor’s crimes, for he omits words and phrases, and sometimes (a common trick with careless copyists) a whole sentence or clause which happens to end with the same word as its predecessor. He was also a deliberate as well as a careless criminal, for the paragraph about the Arabic alphabet at the end of Chapter XV. being difficult to reproduce, he omitted it altogether, and not only this, but the last sentence of Chapter XVI. as well, because it contained a reference to it.

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