Paper -a:
In the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the peoples of the Holy Land and East are described in relatively generous terms and are rarely demonized for their beliefs and practices. However, the author also consistently demonizes Jews. This paper addresses the text's anti-Jewishness and focuses on Mandeville's account of the Temple of Jerusalem. The contest with Jews for this site is central to understanding Mandeville's brutal treatment of Jews as he works to empty the Temple of its Jewish past in order to secure a Christian claim to the site. Despite his efforts, he cannot succeed because of the complex relationship between Christianity and Judaism. His frustration with this Jewish origin – an origin that will not fit neatly into the world as he wants to represent it – seems to drive his anti-Jewishness.
Paper-b:
The paper is intended to show some aspects of the symbolical geography of the Eastern countries in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. It will show the formal debts of Mandeville to the ideas and representations of the East and their mirabilia transmitted by the encyclopedian tradition from the 12th century; it will also attempt to propose a new symbolical explanation of the first-person narrated travel in Mandeville's masterpiece according to the historical-geographical theory vehiculated by the mappa mundi model of representation of the Earth. Special attention will be given to the representation of India in Mandeville's Travels in comparison with other descriptions of the mirabilia Orientis in other former sources (particularly the Letter of Prester John).
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