Identity
In his preface the compiler calls himself a knight, and states that he was born and bred in England, of the town of St Albans. Although the book is real, it is widely believed that 'Sir John Mandeville' himself was not. Common theories point to a Frenchman by the name of Jehan a la Barbe (or other possibilities discussed below).
The most recent scholarly work suggests that The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was “the work of Jan de Langhe, a Fleming who wrote in Latin under the name Johannes Longus and in French as Jean le Long.” Jan de Langhe was born in Ypres early in the 1300s and by 1334 had become a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Saint-Bertin in Saint-Omer which was about 20 miles from Calais. After studying law at the University of Paris, de Langhe returned to the abbey and was elected abbot in 1365. He was a prolific writer and avid collector of travelogues, right up to his death in 1383.
Read more about this topic: John Mandeville
Famous quotes containing the word identity:
“I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of the heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)