The influence of medieval romance in the episodes of Hippocrates’ daughter and the fairy of the Sparrowhawk Castle from The Book of John Mandeville

Resumo

The Book of John Mandeville (c. 1357) is one of the most famous works of the Middle Ages and probably the most-read travel narrative of the period. It describes the journey to Jerusalem and then to Asia of a traveller who presents himself as John Mandeville, an English knight born and raised in the town of St. Albans, Hertfordshire. In 1322, on Michaelmas Day (29th September), during the time of Edward III, king of England from 1327 to 1377, Mandeville left his country and crossed the sea to the Holy Land and further East. His sojourn lasted thirty-four years, during which he came in contact with the people and traditions of many places, some strange, full of wonders and monstrous beings. When, tired of travelling, he finally returned “to rest”, he took on the task of writing down his adventures in the form of a book, which, according to the dates on the Defective Version, the oldest and most popular English variation, he finished in the year 1366.

Bibliographical references

Sources

CHAUCER, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957 [Accessed 6 Oct. 2024]. Available at quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/CT/1:1.1?rgn=div2;view=toc.

HIGGINS, Iain Macleod (editor and translator) – The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.

HORACE – Satires Epistles. The Art of Poetry. Translated by H. Ruston Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library 194. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926 [Accessed 6 Oct. 2024]. Available at loebclassics.com/view/horace-ars_poetica/1926/pb_LCL194.479.xml.

SALISBURY, Eve; WELDON, James – Lybeaus Desconus. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2013.

SEYMOUR, M. C. (ed.) – The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels. Oxford: Published for The Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 2002.

Studies

MANN, Lindsay – “‘Gentilesse’ and the Franklin’s Tale.” Studies in Philology 63/1 (1966), pp. 10–29.

MOSELEY, C. W. R. D. – “The Marvels, The Mystery, The Man: Reflections on Re-reading Mandeville's Travels”. Forma de Vida. Revista do Programa em Teoria da Literatura da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, n.d. [Accessed 6 Oct. 2024]. Available at formadevida.org/moseleyfdv22.

PHILLIPS, Helen – An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales. Reading, Fiction, Context. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

SAUL, Nigel – For Honour and Fame. Chivalry in England, 1066-1500. London: Pimlico, 2012.

TZANAKI, Rosemary – Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences. A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550). Aldershot: Routledge, 2003.