Cynocephali from the Kievan Psalter
You can listen to this episode here.
Quote:
“Since I have given a description of the Holy Land and the countries thereabouts and the many routes by which to get there, … to Mount Sinai, to Babylon, and other places, now I’ll narrate and describe to you islands and various people and animals, because there are many different people and countries which are separated by the four rivers, which come from the Earthly Paradise. ...
If one wishes to go into Tartary or Persia or Chaldea or India, one embarks … at Genoa or Venice or some other port. Then one travels by sea and arrives at Trebizond, which is a good city… . The ports of the Persians and Medians are there, and those to other frontiers. ...
From Trebizond people go to Greater Armenia to a city called Erzerum, which used to be a large city but the Turks have almost totally destroyed it, and no wine or fruit grows there.
From there one travels to a mountain called Mount Sabissa, and there’s another mountain called Ararat … where Noah’s ship rested, and it is still there. One can glimpse it from afar in clear weather. ...
Then one travels to a city called Tabriz, a fine, handsome city. … One can travel … towards India, and reach a city called Kashan, also a fine city [where] the three kings met … when they went to make their offerings to Christ in Bethlehem. … One can travel to a place called Cardabago, and the pagans say that Christians can’t live here because they die … quickly, and they do not know the cause. ...
...One can travel for many days, via many towns and cities, until one reaches a city called Kenarah, which used to be so huge that the walls around it were twenty-five miles in circumference. The walls are still evident, but people don’t live there. This is the limits of the Persian Emperor’s land. ...
[Beyond is] the land of Chaldea, which is a vast nation with attractive, well dressed men. The women … repulsive and hideously dressed. ...
Then one reaches the land of Amazonia.”
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that followers historical travelers on their, as one might expect, journeys in the medieval world. And this is where I remind you that the podcast has a Patreon. As you’re probably painfully aware by now, I do have advertising on here, which is very much thanks to the Recorded History Podcast Network - by itself in isolation, my podcast is really too small to bring in advertisers, but it’s also too small to really be supported by advertising alone. Podcast ad money is driven by download numbers in the thousands, and it may shock you to learn that medieval history is something of a niche interest. All of this is to say, that though you hear advertising on the podcast, it doesn’t exactly pay the bills, and that Patreon support from listeners such as yourself is really the more reliable way forward for a podcaster such as myself. So if you can chip in, please do. And on that note, my thanks go out today to Steven for doing so. Thank you very much.
Now, let’s get back into the story, back into the Mandeville.
As you heard a moment ago, we are with this episode leaving the lands of Syria and Egypt well behind and with them those regions that were more well-travelled by Mandeville’s sources. We are entering spaces on the map that are a little more open to colouring in with some pretty colourful details. Here, it starts to get a bit stranger.
This is where we find the mountain on which one can find manna, “the bread of angels.” “Sweet, white stuff, much sweeter than any sugar or honey, [that] comes from heavenly dew [falling] on the grass, where it solidifies and becomes white.” We find the vast country of Ethiopia and in it, “a spring from which, during the day, the water is so cold that nobody can drink it, whilst at night it is so hot that nobody can bear to touch it.” We find the one-footed people who race about at speed, their single foot large enough that it “can provide shade and cover the entire body from the sun.”
We’re getting more of what you might imagine here at the edges of the medieval European map, those fanciful figures that one sees in the more colourful manuscripts. The monopod, as it’s sometimes called, or else the skiapod - one-foot or shadowfoot - this is not an invention of the Mandeville author. In Friar Giovanni Carpine’s report of his time among the Mongols, he wrote that he was told of “certain monsters ... who had only one arm and hand in the middle of the chest and one foot so that two of them shot as one person with a single bow, and they ran so fast that horses could not catch them.” But the friar didn’t invent them either. They’re older, much older, and they’re not alone.
We’re getting to the parts of the book where these figures start to populate the pages, and we will see more of them. But first, we’re getting to the part of the book where we see Amazonia.
Amazonia is exactly what you’re thinking of: fearsome warrior women, living without men - it’s all there. The origin story offered here is a war against the Scythians that had resulted in a devastating defeat, the death of the Amazonian king and the cream of the nobility with him. On hearing the news, the queen and her women had taken up arms and killed every man left in the country. They had wanted, one version of the Mandeville text tells us, to make every other woman a widow like them, but one can imagine other motivations. Maybe they saw an opportunity long looked for; maybe their queen simply took the chance to take power.
Men were shipped in from nearby lands for reproduction, any boys born sent back to them, and the girls raised there in Amazonia. If they were noble-born their left breast was cauterized so that they might more easily carry a shield, for the commoners it was the right, so that they could better shoot bow and arrow. Either way, they were considered “terrific warriors,” highly sought after in other lands as mercenaries.
Like the monopods, the Amazons were not an innovation. They had long been situated in stories of the “over there” in Scythia, a land of monsters from which monstrous men might occasionally erupt into the “civilized” realms. The myths of Jason and the Argonauts and Heracles had entered that land, Heracles killing the Amazonian queen. They show up at Troy. They’re identified in Herodotus in providing the backstory for the Sarmatians. They make appearances in the Alexander Romances. They’re clearly still going to be on people's minds in 1542 when Francisco de Orellana faces warrior women on the river that we now call the Amazon, and of course they haven’t been forgotten since.
Beyond the Amazons, is India, and it’s an India in three parts. The first is temperate, but the second is searingly hot, so hot its people immerse themselves in rivers or pools from morning through noon and leave only their face above water to breathe. The third is icy cold, so cold that water crystalizes, not into ice, but into “murky, yellow coloured diamonds … so hard that nobody can break or smooth them.”
Like other medieval chroniclers, the Mandeville author treats these freezing minerals as living beings, speaks of them as being bred and giving birth, increasing in quantity and size, and thriving when cared for and watered with the “May dew,” the dew collected on May Day thought to have particularly nurturing qualities. Like pet rocks of another time, these minerals granted grace, courage, and strength in combat to those who carried them, along with protection from an unsound mind, arguments, unrest, apparitions, and sorcery. Not so very unlike the way some people still think of crystals now actually.
India in this text is a land named for the presence of the Indus River running through it, a river which contains 30-foot eels. It’s people travel little, for they are beneath the sluggish orbit of Saturn, a planet that takes 20 years to make the circuit of its signs, and between this planetary lethargy and the hot climate they have little desire to move around very much. So different from “us,” the Mandevillean “us” we who live beneath the nimble moon and dart about the Earth with similarly swift movements. Clearly, there’s a paper here for someone who wants to write about colonialist attitudes in medieval literature.
With all this nimble travelling going on, many people do move about in Greater India, Mandeville tells us, merchants from Venice, Genoa, and elsewhere visiting on business, taking the ships joined without nails that Marco Polo and so many others commented on, and reaching the island “named Hormuz,” the Persian Gulf location giving us some idea of the size of “Greater India.”
The source our author was following for this section was Odoric of Pordenone, a far-travelled Franciscan whose journey took him to eastern China and who had only recently returned to Italy, in around 1330. Like Odoric, our guide takes us to Thane, now part of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, and once, he tells us, boasting a king strong enough to make war against Alexander the Great. Then, as now, it had something of a rat problem. Cats couldn’t catch them, Mandeville says. They were just too big, and large hunting dogs were needed.
The author seems to grapple with the local religion with some difficulty. “...some worship the sun and some worship fire, some worship trees, some worship the first thing they encounter in the morning, some worship effigies, some worship idols,” and he wants us to be clear that those last two options are not one and the same.
Effigies were depictions of some great ancestor who had accomplished godly things, Heraclian figures who were not thought to actually be gods, were not I suppose thought by the author to stray into outright idolatry. So when he writes that there were people who worshipped an adder, if they encountered it first in the morning and especially if it then brought them good fortune throughout the day, he also says that “even some Christians” likewise treated one animal or another as better to encounter, with hares and swine figured to be most unfortunate.
The idols, on the other hand, those were something else. Those three-headed half men and half oxen were “false gods” who funnelled the voice of the Devil, who answered to whatever they asked, and in whose presence the people would “often” sacrifice their own children, sprinkling the blood upon those idols. Worshiping the ox for its innocence, meekness, and many uses was one thing, even smearing its dung on one’s forehead and chest, but this, this was clearly considered to be a bit much in Oderic and channelled on in Mandeville. And to be fair, if ever anyone actually is sacrificing their child, that is a bit much.
As for the movements of Mandeville himself, we do get a little of that in this region, for we read that near the city of Kollam, he personally visited a mountain of the same name. There at the foot of the mountain was a lovely well, its water sweet with the fragrances and flavours of spices of all sorts, the taste changing with every passing hour. And it was not only this certain pleasantness around the palate that brought drinkers there to the well. It was the promise of health, the possibility of a cure for any who came and drank three times from its waters, and more than that, the gift of youth and life without serious illness. This Fountain of Youth was said to flow from Earthly Paradise, and Mandeville claims to have visited the well himself, to have drunk of it, and to feel “still the better for it.”
The mythical fountain had made many stops in its journey through the chronicles of Herodotus and the Alexander Romances, and was just landing here in India for a time, before flitting west with the invasion of the Americas to there be attached to new locations and new hopes.
Here, the description of its powers is in some ways curiously reserved. It does not grant eternal life. It is simply proposed that those who drink it seem young, a very different thing than being young, or indeed being young forever, and in this, it's in keeping with its source, not Friar Oderic here but the Letter of Prester John. In that most consequential of fabrications the fountain was not offered as the kind of miraculous life-giver it sometimes is thought of. Instead, in that account, the water promised a life without fatigue, and one in which, so long as the drinker lived, they did so as a thirty-year-old. Not so much eternal life then, nor even eternal youth, more a case of a sustained, youngish midlife. It’s still a pretty attractive sell, but you can see why it would be spruced up in other marketing materials.
We’ll leave Mandeville now with his semi-eternal 30s, for just a moment. After this break, we’ll journey on through India, explore the islands a little, and we’ll speak of monsters and their meanings. But first, the break.
…
From Kollam, complete with its healing waters, one travels ten days to Ma’bar. It’s “a grand kingdom, with many fine cities and towns,” but the feature that most excites the author there is the corpse of St. Thomas, its location part of a tradition of placing St. Thomas there in India, one which we found in Marco Polo for example. The corpse, we read, “is buried in this land, in a beautiful tomb,” but the arm is not. That, quote, “arm with its hand, which he put on Our Lord’s body when He had been resurrected and Our Lord said to him… ‘be not faithless, but believing,’ that very hand is still placed uncovered outside the tomb.”
To this doubting limb, people were still said to come and seek judgement, “to ascertain who [was] in the right.” Both sides would set out their cause on written documents and place them in Thomas’s hand. Immediately, it would cast aside the unjust paper, keeping a hold of the truthful one. And from far and wide, those caught up in legal disagreement came to seek this miraculous resolution to their problems. To the church of St. Thomas itself though, they came for something quite different.
Inside that church was the massive figure of a god, richly and exquisitely crafted all in pearls and gems, and visited by pilgrims from near and far, some with knives in hand to cut at their legs and make offerings of themselves as they went, some dropping to their knees at every third step in prostration. At their arrival, they burnt incense before it in offering, some likewise tossing coin or gem into the pool before the temple, some sacrificing themselves.
A great religious celebration is described, one in which the god’s figure, or sometimes a smaller representation, is placed in an elaborate chariot and brought in sacred procession through the city. It’s accompanied by music and song, by some people throwing themselves beneath its wheels, breaking bones or even ending lives out of their love for their god.
The most interesting thing here is really the tone of this section, which is, again, wholly derived from Oderic of Pordenone. When you go that source, it’s all, in translation, “abomination” and “detestable” “superstition,” with Friar Oderic fastidiously disclosing details that he seems barely able to describe and withholding some which he says are not to be spoken of at all. Even the Nestorians there are “vile … heretics,” let alone those whose beliefs are more distant from the friar’s own. And I should acknowledge here that part of the difference may indeed be creeping in with the translators, but aside from the lack of such pejorative language, there is something else happening here in the Mandeville text.
“One can find few Christians who are willing to suffer so great a penance for Our Lord’s sake,” it say at one point, or “it’s similar to how in our country a person would consider it a great honour to have a holy man in one’s kin, someone who is called a saint after his death,” at another. The Mandeville presentation contains a much more comparative approach, with practices or people much more often likened to Christianity, much less likely to be dismissed as utterly abhorrent, still understanding this other within a Christian worldview, but not immediately categorizing it as heresy. It’s an interesting perspective, and it’s one we’ll be coming back to by the end here.
Let’s depart the mainland and strike off to sea, heading for the islands. Like many books that concerned themselves with western European travel to India and China, this one does so particularly with the Indian islands, and of course that makes sense because it is indeed based on those many books, again here mostly Oderic. Those islands are said to number 5,000, a great number, but then we are dealing with a greater sense of “India.”
Mandeville makes a quick 52-day leap, skipping over “many lands and islands” in the interim, “about which it would be too prolix to describe,” and he lands on “Lamuri,” from the medieval Arabic word for the part of Sumatra where they traded. There, the author borrows from Oderic’s account of a people who go about naked, from the comparison to Adam and Eve created naked “and that people shouldn’t be ashamed of that which God made,” but not Oderic’s aside that those same naked people mocked him for his buffoonish insistence on clothing.
Mandeville omits that gentle chiding, maybe not wanting to make himself the figure of fun, even for an understandable offence such as wearing clothes, but he’s unwilling to omit the cannibalism. He says that everything in that place was held in common, including “crops and corn,” and every man was rich as the other, no word on whether that was every person or actually just ever man. But these people had one quote/unquote “wicked habit: they eat human flesh more enthusiastically than anything else.” Children were sold and, if sufficiently plump, eaten, or else reared until fleshy enough to consume. It is delicious, they say, “the best and sweetest meat in the world.”
From Lamuri/Sumatra, we travel, somewhat confusingly, to the nearby island of Sumatra, the very nearby island of Sumatra, with its people who marked their faces with hot irons and were forever at war with the naked people.
Near that, was Java, with its spices that were carried by ship into China, and in the other direction, into India, Arabia, and beyond, its “ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, [and] mace,” its “plenty of everything, except wine,” its king over seven kingdoms, his palace extravagant in alternating rooms of silver and of gold.
There’s Salamasse with its delightful cities, its trees which produce everything from bread flour to an incurable poison, its people who wear precious gems that render them impervious to iron and steel, Mandeville neglecting to mention, as Oderic did, that the stones were placed beneath the skin through a cut that was then allowed to heal over.
There’s the large and abundant island of Calonach, actually southern Vietnam, whose king has a thousand wives and a great many children, and who goes to war with four hundred elephants, a much more moderate number than the 14,000 given in Oderic. It’s said that even the fish of the sea come to worship that king, coming one kind after another to lay themselves on the shore and be collected. It’s said there are snails with shells large enough for a person to live within as a little house.
There’s Ceylon, or Sri Lanka, its inner wilderness haunted by so many snakes, dragons, and crocodiles that nobody dares to live there, its great pool said to have been wept into existence by Adam and Eve when they were exiled from the garden.
There’s an island where the people drink blood, one where those who are deemed close to death are strangled and eaten, and another where they eat snakes and speak to one another only in hisses. There’s an island where the people have the heads of dogs and fight with large shields and spears, are deemed intelligent, their king “faithful and righteous.”
The islands flow quickly, one to the next, and on them we find many of the “monstrous races,” transmitted on to medieval writers by Pliny the Elder, those ones that we delight in finding on the pages of medieval manuscripts. Beyond the dog-headed folk we reach an island of those with only one eye, set into their forehead; there’s one where they have no heads but eyes and mouths in their torsos; on another, they have no heads and no eyes at all, just mouths on their backs; there are those with both male and female genitalia, who use each whenever it’s called for; there are those with only a tiny opening for a mouth, only able to eat what they can take through the tube of a feather; and those with flat faces and flat mouths, and neither nose nor eyes. Finally, there are people who, out of all this vast variety, are for some reason singled out and deemed “disgusting,” simply for having a voluminously large upper lip that they wrap over their face to shade it from the heat of the sun.
In his cataloguing of these mysterious islands and their Plinian races, the Mandeville author went well beyond Oderic’s occasional hybrid. He peopled his world’s more distant stretches with those fantastical figures that his readership had come to expect. He gave them lands of griffins, larger than 8 lions, stronger than 100 eagles, with talons like ox-horns that could raise a pair of oxen into the air. He gave them the creatures he called hippopotami, half man, half horse and liking nothing so much as human flesh when they could have some.
And what were these figures doing here? Or, to maybe ask a different question, what were they doing in medieval texts?
In part, the answer is that they were what a well-read audience would anticipate, and when we think about this we should consider our understanding of plagiarism as modern readers and how unproductive it is to impose that on a medieval work, to write it off as a career-ending bit of cut-and-paste. When we’re talking about medieval travel narratives, it was entirely unremarkable for a writer of even the most authentic narrative, firmly based in first-hand experience, to weave in details and descriptions that their audience would be familiar with.
Aside from simply transmitting knowledge, it was, perhaps oddly to us, a way to establish one’s report as authentic, to locate it solidly within the existing body of knowledge and slot it in among the other pieces. So in, for example, the travels of Johann Schiltberger, the subject of my first series, you find these little anecdotes or descriptions that you recognize from other sources, from Mandeville even, a case of the quote/unquote authentic story laid on the foundations of one we now understand to be largely if not wholly taken from other travellers.
So in Mandeville, you find these fantastical beings who had long populated writings of far off places, and so you could trace it back through Vincent of Beauvais, back through Isidore of Seville, through Pliny’s Natural History, and on further back into his sources, those reports of far-off places transmitted across time and retained, incorporated within firsthand accounts of those lands.
And of course there may have been some distortion going on in those early reports. You come across this entire people with lips that they use to shade themselves from the sun, and you wonder if they weren’t simply slightly more fuller lipped than some ancient Greek was used to, or maybe even an isolated case of an anomalous birth. Did the dog-headed people really have the heads of dogs, or did they simply have culinary habits or other cultural practices that put someone, somewhere, in mind of a dog, a way, essentially, to say barbarian. Did the snake-eaters who spoke in hisses only speak an unfamiliar language? And when Pliny said that a people in Ethiopia had no noses at all, should we again just take this to mean a person with a less jutting, less protruding nose. Not all of the examples are so easily explained away - some seem much, much more of a reach than others - but there’s definitely a way here to see how the very ordinary, monstrous other has been made into a monster.
However they came to be, these quote/unquote monstrous races took on other meanings too. In fact their meanings had been contested for a very long time, their physical shape, human status, access to reason and soul, their place in the hierarchical ordering of the Great Chain of Being.
St Augustine, writing in the early 5th century, had considered the existence of “antipodes,” the people on the other side of the earth, to be unlikely, saw no real reason to believe in it, but if they did exist, they were certainly God’s creations that, dog heads or not, had their origins in the same first man as the rest of humanity. They were not unnatural. They, like all nature, existed by God’s permission. And it’s a thread picked up by Isidore of Seville in the 6th through early 7th centuries in his monumental Etymologies, and again by Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th. Whether or not these and other influential figures thought them entirely figures of the mind, they put serious enough thought into what their existence might mean.
For some, the monstrous races were best understood as allegory, standing in for different sins, traits, or actors within the Christian drama. You get this in a late 13th-century example, penned by someone known only to us as the Clerk of Enghien, one that really amplifies the “otherness” of these figures as something horrible or horrifying, “terrifyingly ugly to see … and vile and evil their law and customs.” However, the clerk reminds us, “God has made nothing in vain,” and all these figures had their equivalents in human society. If there were creatures from afar with faces on their chests, then there were lawyers more near with mouths in their bellies, and you find similar readings in other texts.
Those people we met who shaded themselves behind their lips were in other sources claimed to represent those who hid behind the mischief of their mouths; the unnaturally giant in stature were the excessive in pride; and the dog-headed cynocephali were the “fermenters of discord.” Such readings were very much in keeping with the treatment that animals themselves sometimes received in bestiaries: the dog that drops its meat in the river out of desire for its shadow is like the man who gives up what he has when wanting what he hasn’t and in the process ends up with neither; the ants marching in lines, each one following the others to find corn and bring it back, are a lesson to people to behave sensibly and await their reward in the future. Each animal, from the familiar to the fantastic, could be used to illustrate some social lesson, some religious concept.
But this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening in Mandeville. These “others” don’t seem to be implemented allegorically in our text, so what are they there for? Part of it does seem to go back to colouring in the background using familiar colours, allowing the reader to find what they expected to find, but there’s also something else.
The Mandeville author’s inclusion of these varied peoples can be understood within a broader vision of what has often been termed “tolerance,” with Stephen Greenblatt writing of this as a text in which a “crusading drive toward the sacred rocks at the centre of the world is transformed into a tolerant perambulation along its rim.” Greenblatt is far from the only writer to use the word - sometimes its been framed in even more glowing terms - and I’ve mentioned it myself at times in talking about the text’s treatment of different cultures and religions, often in contrast to its sources.
But is tolerance really the right way to understand this? Maybe not, and for a few different reasons.
What’s happening here in this text has been argued to be more like a kind of Christian universalism, an attitude toward the possibility of all people, Christian and non-Christian alike, being saved or redeemed despite their divergent faiths, perhaps despite their seemingly inhuman features. It’s not so much tolerance of difference then, accepting and allowing of difference, as it as finding a way to fit that difference within a Christian totality, that comparative approach I noted less an inclination to hold two things next to one another in proximity than it is a drive to make one fit within the other.
And maybe we should all hold our applause for this 14th-century paragon of progressive decency because we haven’t yet gotten to the part about the Jews. The Jews, perhaps unsurprisingly, have it pretty rough in Mandeville.
As Anthony Bale notes, the author views Muslims and others as at least having some features of Christianity, as being on the right path, travellers drawn to the same star if not yet at the preferred destination, but Jews on the other hand, they’re uniquely singled out as having rejected it.
There is of course mention of them having killed Christ, without the Roman emperor’s permission, and with details both as to the torture and as to their selection of just the right wood so that the cross would not rot and Christ would remain up on it all the longer. There’s mention of how they’d then hidden that cross until St Helena, Constantine’s mother, had found it, how they’d thrown St. James, first bishop of Jerusalem from the temple spire.
So there’s that, and then there are the Jews locked away near the Caspian Sea, the ones identified with Gog and Magog, shut behind impenetrable mountains by God and Alexander, speaking their own language, and waiting, waiting for the Antichrist, in whose time they will emerge. They’re to be led by other Jews - not those from behind the mountains - who will speak to them in Hebrew, show them the way into Christendom, guiding their striking hands and allowing them to, quote, “do much harm to Christians,” an example of the timeworn trope of Jews as enemies within who will aid those without.
The Mandeville author tells of this locked away people, this threatening force awaiting the end times, and tells of their escape.
Quote:
“In the era of Antichrist a fox will make himself a den in the same place where King Alexander had the gates made to these hills. He will burrow into the earth so far until he surfaces amongst these Jews. When they see this fox they’ll be very astonished by him, because they’ve never seen such an animal, although they do have many other animals amongst them. They’ll chase him and pursue him until he has run again into the foxhole he came from. So then they’ll dig after him so deeply until they reach those sturdily made gates which Alexander had made with great bricks and mortar, and they’ll break these gates down and so they’ll have found a passage out.”
Then, the “much harm” would begin.
So, maybe not tolerance.
And maybe that was never the right word to begin with. Robert Patterson has argued that it wasn’t. Tolerantia as a medieval concept, or at least in one development of that concept, was not about love or acceptance as we might think of it. It’s about restraint, about suffering the presence of something you have power over to fulfill some social good, not just a lack of aggression toward extremely distant folk whether real or imagined.
Actually, Patterson proposes, the true model of tolerance in the text is not its author, but the realm and rule of the Mongol khan.
And that’s where we’ll be going next time.
Sources:
Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels, translated by Anthony Bale. Oxford University Press, 2012.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, translated by Charles Moseley. Penguin, 2005.
Cathay and the Way Thither Vol. II. Hakluyt Society, 1913.
Andyshak, Sarah Catherine. Figural and Discursive Depictions of the Other in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Florida State University Libraries, 2009.
Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Higgins, Iain Macleod. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Patterson, Robert. Mandeville's Intolerance: The Contest for Souls and Sacred Sites in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Washington University in St. Louis, 2009.
Schildgen, Brenda Deen. Dante and the Orient. University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Tzanaki, Rosemary. Mandeville's Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550). Taylor & Francis, 2017.
Verner, Lisa. The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages. Routledge, 2005.