Abstract
In 1351 Jean le Long d’Ypres translated six works concerning the East and the knowledge of the Asiatic continent, namely of the Mongol Empire. He translated Hayton’s Flos historiarum, Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s Liber Peregrinationis, Odorico da Pordenone’s Relatio, Wilhelm von Boldensele’s Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus, two Lettres exchanged between the Khan and Pope Benedict XII and the De statu, conditione ac regimine magnis Canis. Actually, we do not know for whom he translated these texts and to whom he addressed his work. The six translations are organically transmitted by six manuscripts. Two of them probably belonged to Northern-French bourgeois (the one has been written in 1368, the other at the end of the fifteenth century), while the other four belonged to French aristocrats: in particular, they probably circulated in the milieu of the Burgundian court. Although almost all the translations have been critically edited, there is a lack of an accurate study of their manuscripts.
My aim is to consider Jean le Long’s macro- and microscopic alteration of the original Latin texts and his method of translation, in order to understand if those alterations conceal a sort of ‘editorial plan’ that encouraged his work. After that, I will compare the resulting hypothesis with the question of the production and the circulation of the six manuscripts. I seek to understand whether the circulation and the reception of these translations conditioned his choices. He probably tried to transform his sources into something marvellous and more adventurous in order to satisfy his publics’ desires for this kind of literature, as the manuscripts seem to suggest.