Sir John Mandeville’s God(s)

Mandeville's Book exhibits a less conventional theology than is found in the other works—and no apparent pastoral purpose. Mandeville presents us with contradictory Christian and non-Christian understandings of God. The differences between his work and the others expand our sense of the imaginative possibilities for representing Jesus in fourteenth-century England. He allows us to perceive what aspects of clerical teaching carry over (or not) into a non-pastoral work. Mandeville presents Jesus initially as a warrior God who supports Christian knights and crusades, and who ordains his chosen people to inherit the Holy Land. It is difficult if not impossible to reconcile this idea of the deity with a Creator who appears later in the Book and expressly favors no people, or with Creators who condone child sacrifice, or polytheism, or diverse interpretations of Scripture. In the course of the travels, God becomes a series of discrete texts, a relativist figure perceived differently in different places. Mandeville collects ideas about deities from multiple, disparate sources, which he does not attempt to resolve into a single coherent figure or theology of redemption. Barthes’ theory of the text gives us analytical purchase on the multiple figurative representations in such literature, allowing us to see contradictions and discrepancies as signs of discursive combinations.