Printing and textual criticism: the iconography in John Mandaville’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo

Abstract

The rise of printing changed the mode of transmission of literary texts. Also, printing implied an increased participation of printers in the works, who often introduced changes in the original text. Some of these changes were the woodcuts and engravings that accompanied many of the early editions, used to illustrate some chapters or to function as mnemonic device. However, this ‘corpus xylographic’ has been forgotten often by modern editors. On preparing critical editions of old prints books, textual variants are considered and studied, but usually modern editors omit any reference to iconographic variations. In our critical edition of sixteenth-century Castilian versions of John Mandeville’s Libro de las maravillas del mundo, we find many changes in the woodcuts between the different editions. Frequently, some textual variations are the consequence on trying to describe a woodcut. So, we think that in any critical edition, the critical apparatus should account for these iconographic changes as it does with lexical variants.