In the final episode of the Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story.
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Hello and welcome to the last episode of medieval Beginnings I’m Mary Welsley a contributor to the paper and I’m joined as ever by enina dumitrescu also a contributor to the paper hello Arina hello Mary this is the culmination of a year-long tour through the strange and magical world of medieval literature and
So it’s appropriate that we are concluding with a journey this week we’re transported to magical lands filled with gold digging ants cannibals and geese with two heads we’ll meet monstrous creatures with human bodies and the heads of dogs as well as the mysterious Eastern patriarch prester John today’s episode is of course about
The hairbrain travels of s John Manderville it’s a text full of madap sometimes unintentional humor but it also has a darker side it is both delighted and terrified by the people and Lands Beyond Europe’s Shores when Christopher Columbus’s ship the Santa cruth cited land on the 12th of October
1492 a copy of mandeville’s travels lay in the Admiral’s day cabin okay so in let’s talk about the opening of this text because it it kind of situates us in quite a specific way that’s right Mary it it doesn’t begin where you would expect right the our our
Narrator here is an English Knight John Mandeville we’ll talk about that later and so you would think that it begins in England and moves out from there but actually it starts in the holy land and only a few paragraphs into we have the introduction to the author who is
Supposed to be a knight from St Albans apparently he set sail on meel M day in 1332 on the journey to the Holy Land and then on to Asia and Africa and this is all you know this is taking place after the Crusades he says it’s been such a
Long time since the Crusade so he thinks readers would like to hear what’s going on there’s a sense that the Crusades could be renewed and that at least at the beginning this seems a very kind of Christian Perspective um a militant Christian Perspective that there are lands to be conquered or reconquered but
In fact this is taking place um after the fall of AKO and the last Christian stronghold in the holy land so at this point the Europeans are out of that area the mams have taken it over so so this this narrator um you’ve said kind of at
The beginning he’s not really an author who is this so-called John Manderville unfortunately we don’t really know um I think earlier scholarship thought that he was an English author and there certainly are a lot of English texts uh now it’s assumed the text was first written in in French this is possibly
French or Belgian cleric writing in the mid-4th century and uh we don’t think that he really traveled to all those places not just because some of the people described clearly didn’t exist they’re outlandish uh but even so it seems that this is this is actually a compiler this is someone who’s reading a
Lot of sources and compiling a travel Nar narrative out of these different books even though the the narrator acts as though he’s seen it right he talks about being in certain places or about the sultan telling him things or being at the court of the great con this seems to be a
Fiction yeah because in one sense it isn’t it isn’t a true travel log but it’s a sort of travel log through a library in a way because it’s this kind of journey through these diverse Source material you know it’s it’s kind of this tapestry of different sources we’ve got Isidor sevil
Vin it’s clearly very grounded in these Dominican and Franciscan texts produced by missionaries specifically and and it kind of shows the the kind of Christian Zeal and as you said a kind kind of militant Christian Zeal to not only understand the world Beyond Europe Shores but also to to conquer it and
Possibly to enslave it and also to convert those peoples to Christianity and so those texts clearly are are kind of informing this informing the text itself but so I mean can we can we give readers something of the sort of texture of the travels you know what’s what’s it
Like to read it well I I think you know it is a book that you can read from beginning to and but I I suspect that it was also meant to be dipped into we have quite disperate sections the pros is pretty direct it’s not complex or
Particularly poetic it can be a bit repetitive sometimes and I I I think it’s really meant to be enjoyed in chunks there are a lot of facts given it’s a it’s a very you know facts with with quotation marks around them of course not all of them are facts
Although sometimes surprisingly they are you know there are these little glimpses of culture and cultural practices that we know to be true from today but it’s the kind of text that will give measurements and distances and how many days travel it takes to get from this
Place to that place so that you get the sense of authority from it and it’s quite also disperate in the way it’s laid out there’s a lot of uh time spent in the holy land at the beginning and then around to Egypt for example to North Africa there’s a great amount of
Detail around Jerusalem but then in other areas it’ll just give us little Islands or little Nations one at a time one paragraph each and sort of cycle through them quickly and in those cases it almost seems like those people’s are almost thought experiments rather than an exploration
Of a of a of a place yeah so it’s it’s quite a diverse text yeah I think we should probably say that you know some of the texts that we’ve done in this series are decidedly more rhetorically complicated and uh formally interesting and as you say you know it is a little
Bit plodding in places but I think this partially explains why it was so incredibly popular and’ll get on to just quite how popular it was in a second and I think in some ways I I was sort of thinking about what are the what are the kind of analogies from today that
Explain what this text is sort of like and I and I there’s this wonderful line in it where the author mandville the narrator says men say in all ways that new fers and new teeing been Pleasant to hearer so men always say that new things and new Tidings are Pleasant to hear and
And I was thinking about this idea of newness and new Tidings and and thinking about news and our own kind of fixation with news in our own day and and then I was kind of thinking yeah this is this is kind of the daily male sidebar of
Shame it’s this kind of you know there there are moments when this this text kind of GPS at these these people these creatures that are kind of familiar but also quite distant and and I felt I felt that there were certain kind of strange parallels there I think that’s exactly
Right there’s a tableid quality to it and and that’s true in a couple of ways one is that you get you know moments of political reflection that are actually quite interesting in terms of a you know sort of thinking of Reflections on Justice Reflections on how Society can
Be set up and I think you can you know read those as as maybe not very indepth uh set of ideas but but certainly interesting to think about in terms of the political imagination of Western Europe at this time you get a lot of sexy stuff you know a lot of SE sex
Lives of various foreign peoples you know we get sales advice almost like ads and we get this weird mix of things that are true and things that are not true and it’s not always easy to tell because when a text give you gives you some true
Things it’s hard to know which of the out outlandish things are false and and which aren’t uh we’ll come back to that but I think that’s one of the sort of textures of of this text it doesn’t lie easily in either fiction or non-fiction or something like history I don’t really
Know what people were meant to believe at the time and I somehow doubt that intelligent readers really believed all of it but where did they draw the line right and and I think we should also say there’s a there’s a kind of feeling sometimes when you’re reading it that
That there are these kind of wormholes in the text there are these moments when you suddenly swoop back into Biblical history or a moment when suddenly you’re transported forward into the future and you know mandaville the narrator will say this is what the prophecy has described that this is what will happen
In you know in the coming days and so just as it’s kind of playing a little fast and loose with geography and it’s sort of moving around and it’s talking about you know this is one way to get to Jerusalem but another way is this way
It’s kind of doing the same thing with time that time is is not this kind of linear thing it’s it’s much it’s much more complex much more weblike I think another thing that we should perhaps emphasize is that although we don’t think that this John Manderville um who
Was from St Albans really existed some senses it kind of it makes sense as an idea that he might have come from St Orbin because this was a place of you know in the late medieval period of you know St orban’s Abbey incredibly wealthy Benedictine Abbey a place of real scientific innovation incredible
Learning so it sort of it sort of fits with our idea of of you know where where a great learned traveler should come from and of course the other thing to say is that you know he the narrator is very much framed as a knight and so we
We’re almost kind of touching up against the sort of romance genre that we’ve we’ve talked about in earlier episodes of the series you know here is the figure of the night which is this very kind of appealing figure yeah and I I think it’s it’s also fair to say this is
Not the first travel Narrative of its kind there were others and there’s also you know as you said there’s a romance tradition of thinking about uh heroic men who travel widely um the Alexander story is wild popular in the Middle Ages in all sorts of languages we even get it
Already in Old English so this idea of a man who boldly goes to the East and sees strange and marvelous things and Untold riches and you know meets with the peoples there um that has a long tradition in European vernacular and Latin writing thanks for listening to this
Extract from medieval Beginnings a close reading series from the London review of books to listen to the full episode episodes and all our other close readings series sign up to our close readings subscription go to lb. me/ readings or click on the link in the description