“Je n’en quier faire nouvel livre” The Chemin de lonc estude and Jean de Mandeville’s Merveilles du monde

The Livre des merveilles du monde by Jean Mandeville, was among the most popular books of the European Middle Ages. Christine de Pizan’s borrowing from it to describe the Holy Land in her Chemin de lonc estude, constitutes an unusually negative moment in the Merveilles’ reception history. Whereas other readers delighted in Mandeville’s exotic geography, Christine rejected it and the idea of crusade in favor of an intellectual consideration of good government.