In earlier works, Michael C Seymour has persuasively argued that the Book of Sir John Mandeville originated in northern France, c 1356–7. The author, probably a native of the area with access to a large ecclesiastical library, amalgamated extracts from sources such as Odoric of Pordenone's Relatio (1330) and William of Boldensele's Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus (1336) with Romance works such as the Roman d'Alexandre and the Littera Presbyteris Johannis (both twelfth century) to compose a travel narrative that is at once a didactic pilgrimage manual and a moralizing, often mendacious account of the Biblical and marvellous East.

Since 1963, Seymour has published a considerable body of work on Mandeville, in which he has examined the origins of the text and its popular transmission in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Egerton Version of Mandeville's Travels completes a series of four transcribed derivations of the Insular text (an exemplar of the original work which appeared in England c 1370–80), all edited by Seymour. With the issue of this version, the Early English Text Society (EETS) has now published all Middle English renderings of ‘Mandeville's’ book.

In the introduction, Seymour argues convincingly on the basis of dialect that the unique Egerton manuscript originated in a Yorkshire Benedictine house, c 1390. He also confirms it as a conflation of the Defective version (so named due to a substantial section of missing text – the ‘Egypt Gap’) and the more comprehensive Middle English translation of the Insular Latin Royal version, now lost. For students of the philological variance of the different versions of Mandeville, the introduction gives a list of textual deviations found in the Egerton manuscript, but absent from the more proliferated Defective version. The Egerton Version also includes a commentary with information on ‘Mandeville's’ source material, a Middle English glossary and an index of names and places.

Seymour's 2002 Defective version is arguably more significant for philological and literary studies, as this was the most widely disseminated version in late medieval England. Nevertheless, the unique interpolations and restoration of the ‘Egypt Gap’ make the Egerton manuscript a valuable and comprehensive version of Mandeville, and render this well-presented and meticulously researched volume a welcome offering from the EETS. The transcribed Egerton manuscript itself is faithfully re-created in Middle English with editorial amendments indicated in the introduction. Two colour plates are reproduced inside, but the dust-jacket dispenses with the EETS emblem to employ instead the Bodley ms 264 illumination of Polo's departure from Venice (fifteenth-century). Perhaps one of the marginal illustrations from a Mandeville manuscript would have been more apt.

The Medieval Traveller is more concerned with practical than fantastical experiences of travel in the Middle Ages. Its author, Norbert Ohler, a retired history lecturer from the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, favours writing popular portrayals of broad medieval subject matter. Other works include Sterben und Tod im Mittelalter (1990) and Krieg und Frieden im Mittelalter (1997); and here his Reisen im Mittelalter (1986), originally translated by Caroline Hillier in 1989, is updated with a new afterword, translated by Michael M Metzger. The author ambitiously spans the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, using a variety of material and documentary sources to propose that, despite numerous apparent dangers, travel was common in the Middle Ages. Geographically, the study mainly confines itself to western continental Europe, though forays are made into Asia and across the Atlantic.

After a short introduction, the book is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Background and conditions’, provides a thematic survey of the practicalities and opportunities for travel, including ‘Climate’, ‘Mounts, draught and pack-animals’, ‘Journeys by land, river and sea’, ‘The importance of religion, trade and communication’, ‘Hospitality’, ‘Speed of travel’ and ‘Innovations’. While Ohler proposes that travel increased from the eleventh century, however, he frequently neglects to consider variables such as age, gender and location, which undoubtedly affected an individual's need to travel as well as their experience of their journey.

The second section, ‘Descriptions of travel in the Middle Ages’, is a loosely chronological collection of literary and documentary accounts of various journeys. Among these are the sixth-century flight from slavery of the Gallo-Roman Attalus, the pious wanderings of Boniface (c 675–754), the Royal Progress of Charlemagne (742–814) and the thirteenth-century travels of Marco Polo (c 1254–1324).

That the book is intended for a general readership is apparent. More than thirty pages of Appenda are added to this new edition, in which Ohler expands on his text but, disappointingly, does not seek to engage with contemporary scholarship. Furthermore, notes and references are not employed, an index is entirely absent, and although fifty-three black-and-white images complement the text, many are unreferenced and undated. Consequently, while The Medieval Traveller contains a wealth of ardently researched and engaging information for a popular audience, this new edition is frustratingly deficient for academic purposes.