ABSTRACT
The Book of Sir John Mandeville is a baffling, frustrating text, whose putative narrator is an 'enigma for historians'. Much scholarship on the Book falls into one of two camps: works that celebrate it as a notably early high-water mark of 'tolerance' and works that condemn its virulently anti-Jewish sentiments. Mary B. Campbell argues that the Book rejects most modes of establishing its truth: Scorning as he does the conventional strategies of inducing belief in his readers, he is forced to rely on a kind of proto-verisimilitude. Suzanne Lewis describes a similar dynamic whereby illuminators in thirteenth-century England positioned John within and outside of the narrative of Revelation, such that his appearance becomes 'an authenticating witness to the truth of his visions'. The Mandeville author, like Benjamin Disraeli after him, is locked into the perspective of his subject position. The exclusion of the Jews is not merely an oversight in the otherwise cosmopolitan view of Mandeville; it is the essential ingredient.
