Spatial Narrative and the Mandeville -Author’s Vision of the World: Reading Mandeville’s Travels as a Universal History

This article illuminates the generic potential of Mandeville’s Travels (with respect to its fourteenth-century Middle English Defective Version) as a universal history on the historiographical level. It argues that the Travels as a generically multifaceted text embodies an authorial vision of the late medieval world as ultimately pivoting on Christendom, and this is complementary to the historically objective descriptions of a socio-economically non-Eurocentric late medieval world system that is equally conspicuous in the text. Through spatial narrative, the Mandeville -author now centralises Jerusalem as the undoubted cosmological fulcrum, now decentralises it as eclipsed by the more prosperous global commercial and cultural hubs in the East. But overall, the Mandeville -author’s universalising envisaging of a Christocentric human history is central to the ideological purport of the Travels , and it lies covertly beneath the domesticating representations of the non-Christian East in the overt narrative plots. Combining codicological, book historical, literary, and narratological analyses, this article unearths the Mandeville -author’s essential profile as a historiographer deeply informed by Christian universalism, thereby foregrounding the ardent Mandevillian devotional piety and belief in the Christian unification of the world at the eschatological end of time. It also demonstrates that in the narratological sense, the Mandeville -author’s art of narrative is fleshed out to be manifest in the delicate synthesis of virtual and factual narratives through the arrangement of overt plots and covert plot progressions, whereby the Mandeville -author’s historical writing and the expression of historiographical pursuit both find their voices in the composition of a universal history under the guise of a travelogue.