Besides his political and philosophical parerga, Mandeville wrote, in 1711, a medical treatise, Of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions—their symptoms, causes, and cures. The treatise is in the form of a dialogue, and is "interspersed with instructive discourses on the real art of physic itself, and entertaining remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries." In this, with the same entertaining style and clear and subtle judgment, he protests against and ridicules speculative therapeutics, and pleads for patient diagnosis and careful observation and record of facts. His own theories about the animal spirits and their connexion with "the stomachic ferment" are fanciful enough, but he shows an intimate acquaintance with the scientific methods of Locke, and a warm admiration for Sydenham. The Virgin Unmasked; Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness; An Inquiry into the Causes of the frequent Executions at Tyburn; An Inquiry into the Origin of Honour, and Usefulness of Christianity in War—are titles of other works of Mandeville; but all that is characteristic of him as a thinker and humorist may be found in the Fable of the Bees. (w. m.)
MANDEVILLE, Jehan de, the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of travels, written in French, and published between 1357 and 1371. By aid of translations into many other languages it acquired extraordinary popularity, while a few interpolated words in a particular edition of the English version have gained for Mandeville in modem times the spurious credit of being "the father of English prose."
In his preface the compiler calls himself a knight, and states that he was born and bred in England, of the town of St Albans; had crossed the sea on Michælmas Day 1322; had travelled by way of Turkey (Asia Minor), Armenia the little (Cilicia) and the great, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt upper and lower, Libya, great part of Ethiopia, Chaldæa, Amazonia, India the less, the greater, and the middle, and many countries about India; had often been to Jerusalem; and had written in Romance as more generally understood than Latin. In the body of the work we hear that he had been at Paris and Constantinople; had served the sultan of Egypt a long time in his wars against the Bedouins, had been freely addressed by him on the corruption of contemporary Christendom, had been vainly offered by him a princely marriage and a great estate on condition of renouncing Christianity, and had left Egypt under Sultan Melech Madabron, i.e., Muzaffar or Mudhaffar[1] (who reigned in 1346-47); had been at Mount Sinai, and had visited the Holy Land with letters under the great seal of the sultan, which gave him extraordinary facilities; had been in Russia, Livonia, Cracow, Lithuania, "en roialme daresten" (?de Daresten or Silistria), and many other parts near Tartary, but not in Tartary itself; had drunk of the well of youth at Polombe (Quilon on the Malabar coast), and still seemed to feel the better; had taken astronomical observations on the way to Lamary (Sumatra), as well as in Brabant, Germany, Bohemia, and still farther north; had been at an isle called Pathen in the Indian Ocean; had been at Cansay (Hangchow-fu) in China, and had served the emperor of China fifteen months against the king of Manzi; had been among rocks of adamant in the Indian Ocean; had been through an haunted valley, which he places near Millestorach (=Millescorath, i.e., Malasgird in Armenia); had been at many great feats of arms, but had been incapable of performing any himself; had been driven home against his will in 1357 by arthritic gout (despite the well of youth!); and had written his book as a consolation for his "wretched rest." The paragraph which states that he had had his book confirmed at Rome by the pope is, however, an interpolation of the English version.
This recital is of itself enough to provoke some little questioning, and on investigating the sources of the book it will presently be obvious that part at least of the personal history of Mandeville is mere invention. Under these circumstances the truth of any part of that history, and even the genuineness of the compiler's name, become matter for serious doubt. No contemporary corroboration of the existence of such a Jehan de Mandeville seems to be known. Some French MSS., not contemporary, give a Latin letter of presentation from him to Edward III., but this is so hopelessly vague that it might have been penned by any writer on any subject. At Liége, in the abbey of the Guilelmites, now pulled down, there certainly was in the I6th century a tomb of a man in armour said to be Mandeville; but the old French inscription showed no name, and the arms were quite unlike those of the Mandevilles, earls of Essex; while the Latin inscription, stating that the tomb was Mandeville's, and that he died at Liége on November 17, 1372, is not only apparently much later in style, but confounds him with a physician called "ad Barbam," who is said in a printed Latin edition of Mandeville to have met him first at Cairo and again at Liége, and to have persuaded and helped him to write his travels.[2]
Leaving this question, there remains the more complex one whether the book contains, in any measure, facts and knowledge acquired by actual travels and residence in the East. We believe that it may, but only as a small portion of the whole, and that confined entirely to the section of the work which treats of the Holy Land, and of the different ways of getting thither, as well as of Egypt, and in general of what we understand by the Levant.
The prologue indeed points almost exclusively to the Holy Land as the subject of the work. The mention of more distant regions comes in only towards the end of this prologue, and (in a manner) as an afterthought. As regards the writer's claim to have travelled in those more distant regions, it is somewhat astonishing to find that any modern editor could have regarded this as possibly founded in truth. And the apology sometimes made for the book, as only a compilation of what was regarded as truth in the writer's age, is not tenable in the face of the frequent assertion (explicit or implicit) that he had himself been in the remotest regions spoken of, and had witnessed some of the most marvellous circumstances that he details. To this we shall recur later, for the bearing of these statements can only be appreciated when the true derivation of the matter about the further East shall have been exhibited.
By far the greater part of these more distant travels, extending in fact from Trebizond to Ormus, India, the Indian Archipelago, and China, and back again to western Asia, has been appropriated from the narrative of Friar Odoric (written in 1330). These passages, as served up by Mandeville, are almost always, indeed, swollen with interpolated particulars, usually of an extravagant kind, whilst in no few cases the writer has failed to understand the passages which he adopts from Odoric and professes to give as his own experiences. Thus (p. 193)[3] in appropriating a passage of Odoric about tortoises
- ↑ The on in Madabron apparently represents the Arabic nunation, though its use in such a case is very odd.
- ↑ This physician is called in a French MS. "Jehan de Bourgoigne dit a la Barbe." M. Michelant once saw the title of a medical or botanical treatise bearing the name of Jehan de Bourgoigne. Can he also have written these travels under a feigned name?
- ↑ Page indications like this refer to passages in the 1866 re-issue of Halliwell's edition, as being the most ready of access. But all these passages have also been verified as substantially occurring in the French MS. from Lord Ashburnham's library mentioned below (of 1371 a.d.), cited A, and in that numbered xxxix. of the Grenville collection (B. M.), which dates probably from the early part of the 15th century, cited G.
