ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which Sir John Mandeville's work drew upon and developed contemporary geographical thought in order to further his designs, continuing with an examination of the Book's audiences and the ways in which they responded to it primarily as a work of geography. A large portion of the Book is devoted to various forms of geographical consideration. Mandeville has no doubt that the world, as medieval authorities had held for centuries, is a sphere. The very word 'geography' was rarely used in the Middle Ages; instead, 'the term cosmographia, sometimes employed to distinguish certain aspects of our subject from geometry, included practically all aspects of natural history, the sciences of animals, rocks, monstrosities, and meteorological phenomena'. The Book's description of the world, rooted in theology, branches out into new geographical themes such as the real possibility of circumnavigation of the globe; its influence will be accordingly diffuse, in the spheres of both theological and practical geography.
