Abstract
This chapter presents the concepts discussed in this book, which is a collection of scholarly essays related to John Mandeville's Travels by scholars in England and France who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The first part of the book provides accounts of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travels of the Travels' variable text in its English or 'Insular' versions, along with some account of the epistemological considerations that accompanied its travel to the more pragmatic economic and colonial concerns of the Tudor and Jacobean periods. The second examines the historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, Mandevillian geography, and the importance of medieval culture to the understanding of a European Renaissance. The last section is concerned with the invented medium of the commercial theatre.