Sensing Time in Jerusalem

Multifaceted Temporality in Mandeville’s Travels

Abstract

This essay in an investigation of the Mandeville-author’s linguistically embodied sense of time and temporality in the Jerusalem-episode in Mandeville’s Travels, one of the most popular masterpieces in the late medieval European literary panorama. In this essay, I shall extrapolate the Mandeville-author’s writing about ontological time and epistemic time, as well as their linguistic representation of time in the theological habitus of late medieval Jerusalem. As the travelling-persona whose historicity is still questionable, John Mandeville in the textual world roves peripatetically around the Holy City, demonstrating a momentum of moving towards the never-attained centre of the world. Through analyses of selected extracts from the Travels – with a focus on the Middle English text (i.e., the socalled Defective Version), moderately in comparison with the Old French and Middle High German redactions, when appropriate – I will demonstrate that the Mandeville-author’s adherence to Christian eschatological-liturgical perception of time and his cautiously performative writing about self-centred inner time consciousness are closely entangled in the Jerusalem-episode of the narrative. The selfhood of the Mandeville-author would thus appear to be dwelling in the tension between Christian theological norms of time and inner time consciousness, which unfolds a hesitant status of existence. This also points at the intersubjective nature of sensing and writing about time in the theologically unique chronotope of late medieval Jerusalem, wherein the soteriological connotations of time are not neutral but agentic enough to affectively stirring and steering authorial perception of time.