MANDEVILLE, Jean de.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Viaggi del Mandavilla [manuscript in Italian]. An attractively produced early 17th-century manuscript abridgement of Mandeville's Travels in Italian. The date 1515 on the title perhaps indicates that it was copied from the now very rare 1515 Venetian edition printed by Melchior Sessa, preserved in only two copies, at Padua and Messina. Mandeville's work first circulated in northern Italy in the late fourteenth century in a French version. This was was eventually translated into Italian and became the most widely read text. In a recent survey of the extant manuscripts of this version, Matthew Coneys located 12 examples, all produced before 1600. No later examples are recorded in the online database of Italian libraries. The first Italian printed edition was published in Milan in 1480. The printer, Pietro da Corneno, divided the text into 182 chapters, setting a pattern which was followed in the subsequent editions. By 1500 the text of the Italian version was fixed, and Italian editions were printed in Milan twice (1502 and 1517) and at Venice eight times between 1504 and 1567. These are all rare both institutionally (each preserved in only a couple of copies) and in commerce. After 1567, the text did not appear again separately in print until Zambrini's 1870 edition. The present manuscript copy was presumably produced in response to the ever-increasing rarity of the narrative after the 16th century. We have compared the manuscript with the text of four early Venetian printings

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