The imagined pilgrimage of Sir John Mandeville's late medieval Book of Marvels and Travels

This thesis investigates two main topics: the medieval practice of imagined pilgrimage and a Middle English text called the Book of Marvels and Travels (1350s). While recent historical and literary scholarship has helped to uncover how English monastic audiences engaged in imagined pilgrimage, which is the act of going on a holy journey in spirit rather than in body, less work has been done to explore how secular English audiences turned to texts to undertake non-physical journeys. The focal point of medieval European pilgrimage, Jerusalem was largely out of reach for many medieval English men and women due to a variety of personal, political, and economic reasons. Imagined pilgrimage texts such as the Book fulfilled a need in readers for an alternative means to attain the same spiritual benefits that physical pilgrimage offered its participants. Employing an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the literary history of imagined pilgrimage, in this project I offer a new reading of the Book and investigate both the history of pilgrimage writing and the complex monastic and secular debates surrounding the shifting benefits, dangers, and definitions of physical and imagined holy travel. Presented by a narrator who identifies himself as a knight named “John Mandeville,” the Book provided its medieval English reader-pilgrims with the information needed to make imaginative pilgrimages to the Holy Land and the Eastern world that lies beyond it.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat