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Sir John Mandeville is best known for the work Travels of Sir John Mandeville. About the authorship and authenticity of the travel, there has been endless controversies. The book was originally written in French and was translated into English. It was well received in England. It is now established that Sir John Mandeville is a fictitious hero, very much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the creation of the imagination of a French Physician named Jehan de Bourgoyne who died at Leige in 1372. He amused himself by recounting the adventures in French and passed them off as more genuine than those of Marco Polo by his realism and artlessness of description. The book pretends to be a narrative of journeys to Palestine and China by an imaginary English Knight, Sir John Mandeville. The author confesses that he traveled through strange countries where man were fed on serpents and hissed like them, of dog-headed men or of men with feet so large that they held them over their heads as sunshades. Fantasy is the soul or the narrative. Truth and fiction are strangely mingled. By its simple, effortless almost childish style, it had a happy effect on the development of the English prose style.
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| Sir John Mandeville's Travels |