SOURCE: An introduction to Mandeville's Travels, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. xiii-xxi.

In the excerpt below, Seymour comments on style and structure in Mandeville's Travels and places the work in the context of medieval literature.

Mandeville's Travels was written in French on the Continent, possibly at Liège and probably not by an Englishman, about 1357. Nothing else is known, and little more can be inferred, about the immediate origins of the book. None of the various attempts to pierce the author's anonymity, which began in the fourteenth century at Liège and which have successively associated the book with Jean de Bourgogne, a Liège physician (d. 1372), and Jean d'Outremeuse, a Liège notary (d. 1399), as well as with the author's adopted name, will bear critical examination.

The book was immediately successful. Approximately 250 manuscripts survive to attest its tremendous popularity. Within a hundred years it had been...