Thread by @dtmooreeditor, So have y'all heard of Chaucer? Author of the Canterbury Tales, the [...]

So have y'all heard of Chaucer? Author of the Canterbury Tales, the founder of the English literary canon? 'Course you have! Odds are pretty good, if you've studied English Lit, that in your mental timeline he's literally the only name before Shakespeare.

Now: any of you heard of Sir John Mandeville? Author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, an account of the titular knight's journey from England to Constantinople, to North Africa and the Levant, thence to Persia, India and parts east of there?

Thought not.

Now, if you were studying English literature in the mid-nineteenth century, say, who do you think you'd refer to as the father of the English canon?

If you guessed Sir John, take a congratulatory biscuit, you cheeky little scamp.

In fact, Sir John Mandeville was once known as the "father of English prose" (still is, in some circles - Chaucer wrote wholly in verse). His 1357ish Travels were until the 1370s the most widely-read work in English, and...

...from the eighteenth-century flourishing of English lit academia (prior to that, while you might *read* in English, you would only really *study* literature in French or Italian) to the late Victorian age, Mandeville was the top of the canon, and Chaucer a popular niche.

So what happened?

The Travels is an example of what Eng. Lit. calls "travel literature," a genre popular in the Middle Ages. Intended chiefly as a reference, the author's journey to exciting destinations is presented as a narrative filled with anecdotes for reading pleasure.

Mandeville presents his journeys in three sort-of-distinct parts:
- from England across Europe to Constantinople;
- across the Mediterranean and along North Africa to the Levant; and
- to Persia, India, Cathay (China) and beyond.

We now know that "Mandeville" was most likely a Flemish monk called Jan de Langhe; and that he compiled the work from several sources, including Odoric of Pordenone, but for centuries scholars cherished the idea he was a real man, who travelled the world and came home to write.

It was accepted that the third leg of his journey, in which he met Cynocephali and Blemmyes and was welcomed into Prester John's court, was a fiction (indeed, his stauncher defenders insisted, an allegory), but the first two legs were clearly the work of...

...a crusading knight who'd been across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, who knew what he was talking about - a man as fearless, well-travelled and worldly as he was lettered and wise. The idea of a pious warrior-scholar appealed strongly to readers' romantic sides.

But then - gasp! - as travel across Europe became cheaper and more people could actually go on these trips themselves, people started to notice errors in the manuscript - details Mandeville had gotten wrong (such as the number of steps up a certain tower in the Hagia Sophia).

But that meant he was a dirty rotten liar! We can't be having that!

Almost overnight, Mandeville was stripped of his status as the Main Pre-Shakespearean Author Everyone Had To Know. I mean, people still studied the Travels, but he wasn't held up as the highest of the high.

And the funny thing is, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is, like Mandeville's Travels, absolutely a work of fiction; it's absolutely collated from other sources; it absolutely *presents* itself as a true story, a first-person account. But apparently Chaucer's okay.

And my best guess is that with Mandeville, they *thought* it was the real deal, and were shocked to have been taken in. They ripped him out of the canon because of embarrassment at their own gullibility.

Anyway, my point is that the "English Canon" is not an objective reality but an artificial, curated thing; that both inclusion and removal in the canon are based on incredibly arbitrary reasons; and that those reasons have a lot to do with the emotional needs of dead white men.

I love you, make sure to stay warm and eat properly.

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