routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

32 Old and Middle English 600–1485
late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found ‘new worlds’ in the Americas,
these myths were enlarged and expanded, as Eldorado joined the Golden
Road to Samarkand in the imagination of readers concerning distant lands.
Mandeville begins a long tradition of writings about faraway places
which created the idea now called ‘Orientalism’. He talks of rivers such
as the Ganges, the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, which are, of course,
all real. He suggests that Paradise may be somewhere beyond, but:
Of Paradise ne can I not speak properly, for I was not there. It is
far beyond . . . Paradise is enclosed all about with a wall, and men
wit not whereof it is, for the walls be covered all over with moss,
as it seemeth. And it seemeth not that the wall is stone of nature
nor of no other thing that the wall is. And that wall stretcheth from
the south to the north, and it hath not but one entry that is closed
with fire burning, so that no man that is mortal ne dare not enter.
Not being able to describe Paradise, Mandeville, in attempting to give
his writings credibility, concludes:
. . . of that place I can say you no more. And therefore I shall
hold me still and return to that I have seen.
Such writings emphasise cultural strangeness and difference, and for
many centuries they have conditioned Western perceptions of the
societies they purport to describe.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
If no love is, O God, what fele I so?
(Troilus and Criseyde)
As we have mentioned, Geoffrey Chaucer used a wide range of cultural
references from throughout Europe in his writing, but he wrote almost
exclusively in English. This is highly significant, not only in giving
him his place as the first of the major English writers, but in placing
him as a pivotal figure who encompasses many of the earlier traditions,