SOURCE: "The Pilgrim as Curious Traveler: Mandeville's Travels," in Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, pp. 130-57.

In the following excerpt, Zacher presents an overview of Mandeville's Travels, focusing on Mandeville's treatment of the Holy Land, and argues that the work is worth interest because of "its peculiar attitude toward pilgimage and exploration, its intricate sturcture, and its sophisticated point of view. "

Mandeville's Travels was internationally popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (over 250 manuscript versions of it survive): it influenced contemporary writers like Chaucer and the Gawain-poet,¹ and Columbus, among other explorers, turned to it for advice before making his ocean voyages.² In our time, however, it is largely unread and seldom discussed by medievalists. There may be some excuse for this neglect. The complicated manuscript tradition of the Travels has long demanded most of the attention...