Imperial fantasies: imagining Christian empire in three fourteenth-century versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville

Abstract

This article traces changing representations of empire in the world and attitudes to imperialism through three closely-related fourteenth-century versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville. The earliest known versions of TBSJM, probably written either in England or Northern France, react to a profoundly changed understanding of the world system in the light of the expansion of Latin Christendom’s horizons in the thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries, and its descriptions of empires and their rulers within and beyond Europe reflect this changed understanding. Two significant revisions of the text produced within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, however, are noteworthy for their resistance to their source-text’s world image. An analysis of these redactions shows how redactors’ notions of the place of Christian empire in the world and of their own historical relationships to empire shape their versions. This analysis nuances our understanding of the history of Christian imperialist thought in the late Middle Ages by showing how beliefs about empire were contested and remade as texts crossed political, cultural and linguistic borders.

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