No Work Has Enjoyed A Greater Popularity Than Mandeville's; While We
Describe But Eighty-Five Manuscripts Of Marco Polo's, And I Gave A List Of
Seventy-Three Manuscripts Of Friar Odoric's Relation,[5] It Is By
Hundreds That Mandeville's Manuscripts Can Be Reckoned.
As to the printed
editions, they are, so to speak, numberless; Mr. Carl Schoenborn[6] gave
in 1840, an
Incomplete bibliography; Tobler in his Bibliographia
geographica Palestinae (1867),[7] and Roehricht[8] after him compiled a
better bibliography, to which may be added my own lists in the
Bibliotheca Sinica[9] and in the T'oung-Pao.[10]
Campbell, Ann. de la Typog. neerlandaise, 1874, p. 338, mentions a Dutch
edition: Reysen int heilighe lant, s.l.n.d., folio, of which but two
copies are known, and which must be dated as far back as 1470 [see p.
600], I believed hitherto (I am not yet sure that Campbell is right as to
his date) that the first printed edition was German, s.l.n.d., very likely
printed at Basel, about 1475, discovered by Tross, the Paris
Bookseller.[11] The next editions are the French of the 4th April,
1480,[12] and 8th February of the same year,[13] Easter being the 2nd of
April, then the Latin,[14] Dutch,[15] and Italian[16] editions, and
after the English editions of Pynson and Wynkin de Worde.
In what tongue was Mandeville's Book written?
The fact that the first edition of it was printed either in German or in
Dutch, only shows that the scientific progress was greater and printing
more active in such towns as Basel, Nuremberg and Augsburg than in others.
At first, one might believe that there were three original texts, probably
in French, English, and vulgar Latin; the Dean of Tongres, Radulphus of
Rivo, a native of Breda, writes indeed in his Gesta Pontificum
Leodiensium, 1616, p. 17:
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