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Naar aanleiding van...
Middle Dutch Literature in sixteen essays
Peter King
Medieval Dutch literature in its European context. Edited by Erik Kooper. Cambridge, University Press, 1994. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 21. (xvi-327 blz.) isbn 0-521-40222-0. Prijs: £40.
This is the twenty-first volume in the series of Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. It contains sixteen essays by different contributors, preceded by an introduction to their academic appointments and specialised fields (a useful inclusion, too often lacking from composite works), and a preface and introduction by the editor.
The object of these studies is, in Kooper's words ‘to offer new insights into Dutch medieval literature to those who have no direct access to it, and to present these in the context of the historical, social and cultural developments of the time in which this literature took shape. [...] to give an impression of the range and quality of the research of specialists in the field of Middle Dutch literature. [...] [and] to include studies of the most representative genres, authors, works or research interests’ (p. 4). To what extent the anthology fulfils this promise can best be judged after considering the texts.
Part 1 on the Court and City contains W. Prevenier, Court and city culture in the Low Countries from 1100 to 1530. The paradox here seems to be that although as early as 1300 the cities of the Low Countries (the most urbanised area of Europe, alongside northern Italy) were reaching their economic peaks, the bourgeois élite still clung to bygone chivalric romanticism. This was the more remarkable in view of the fact that not far south, in Arras, bourgeois culture flourished early in the thirteenth century in the Puy and the confréries.
There are, however, a number of factors that suggest that the burghers were not indifferent to popular culture long before the emergence of street poets and Shrove Tuesday plays in the fifteenth century, and the chapbooks (and farces?) in the sixteenth. Prevenier's first point is that there is good reason to uphold the earlier opinion that the thirteenth-century Reinaert was written for a bourgeois audience, since they were the only ones not attacked in the tale. The fact that there are no early records of burgher patronage can be accounted for by the fact that city records only started towards the end of the thirteenth century, and any records there may have been in Ghent and Bruges would have been destroyed in the fires at that time.
Then there is the question of the introduction of the vernacular, ‘undoubtedly an epiphenomenon of a “democratization” process’ (p. 17), in charters from about 1210, at the court of Flanders ca 1240, in Brabant under John 1 (1267-94) and Holland (1266). Would, the author asks, burghers demanding official documents in their own language rather than Latin, have been indifferent to the promotion of a vernacular literature? ‘The princes’ and merchants' command of both a Germanic (Dutch) and a Romance language (French) not only facilitated good commercial contacts but also allowed them easy access to the other cultures' (p. 22). Finally we are reminded that the patricians in the thirteenth-century cities of the Low Countries marked themselves as the urban élite by imitating the fashions and manners of the nobility. (And later on they established their literary coteries in the Chambers of Rhetoric by aping the court hierarchies of emperor, prince, dean, messenger and fool).
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Prevenier's case for an early bourgeois patronage appears to be supported by Frits van Oostrom in Middle Dutch literature at court (with special reference to the court of Holland-Bavaria). He compares the situation in Flanders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with that in England, where, as in Flanders, the court and aristocracy derived their language and culture from France, leaving the vernacular for the commoners. However, the Brabantine court in the fourteenth century was certainly not indifferent to vernacular literature. In Holland, moreover, Middle Dutch literature was promoted as early as the thirteenth century when Jacob van Maerlant (with his notorious dictum: ‘If it's French it's untrue’) wrote for the court of Florens v. But Maerlant's sustained fulmination against chivalric romances may well indicate that this French genre retained its readership alongside indigenous literature.
When in the fourteenth century Holland was ruled by the French-speaking House of Hainault from Valenciennes, there was, understandably, no patronage for Dutch court literature. But then the question rises, why was the vacuum not filled with bourgeois vernacular literature?
All this changed when the House of Bavaria acquired Holland, and moved to The Hague, bringing with them a broadening of the cultural horizon eastwards. So when Dirc Potter, a court poet, referred to German epics, he presumably assumed that his audience was acquainted with them. Two things are remarkable about the literary activity round this court in the later fourteenth century: its diversity, adapting courtly themes and modes from other European languages into an independent and original style, and its ‘pervasive moralism’. ‘If’, Van Oostrom neatly observes, ‘it had not been the fourteenth century we were characterizing here, the deep-rooted Dutch Calvinist spirit would easily have been held responsible for this. As it is, one is almost tempted to put forward the inverse hypothesis: that Calvinism was to take root so easily here in later centuries because it befitted a country which of old had been prone to moralize’ (p. 40).
Though Wim van Anrooij's contribution on Heralds, knights and travelling is of more interest to social than literary history, it throws an interesting light on the often lengthy journeys undertaken throughout Europe, leading in the fourteenth century to the Ehrenreden, a specific genre of poems praising the virtues of the travelling knight. The comparison of the treatment of these knights in France and England, with those in the German Empire (and hence the Low Countries), has, of course, a considerable bearing on the subsequent retention of a landed aristocracy in the former countries. As the knightly ideal waned later in the fourteenth century, the heralds, the itinerant poets in the German Empire, introduced new topoi (as in Chaucer) and the genre was even parodied by Peter Suchenwirt.
Herman Pleij who has firmly established the place of literature in the social history of the Netherlands, adds a valuable chapter to the debate on the burghers' contribution to vernacular culture in The rise of urban literature in the Low Countries. It was, he argues, the demand for literacy that accounts for the literary activity growing rapidly in the fourteenth century in Brabant and Flanders, stimulated by the intellectual middle class in municipal administration and the judiciary. The utilitarian approach in this popular literature was scorned by a nineteenth-century tradition of aestheticism, since a literature extolling middle-class virtues could not join the corpus of belles-lettres.
Just as their medieval forebears had borrowed and transformed courtly tales in Middle Dutch versions, the later writers adapted these tales further to suit the requirements of a reading public (of printed books) and a readership that was more interested in the market place than the trysting place. Pleij illustrates this with the example of Arnold van den Bossche's altarpiece of the martyrdom of ss. Crispin and Crispinian, in which all the tools and materials used by the executioners come from the shoemakers' trade. (As a personal aside, I would add that, unlike Pleij, I do not find this tasteless, let alone blasphemous, but rather moving - not unlike the young artists known to me, who painted the crucifixion during the last war showing British soldiers and nurses at the foot of the cross).
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A point made by Pleij seems to contradict Van Oostrom's earlier comment that ‘what is striking is the dearth of lightheartedness and the pervasive moralism in this literature’ (p. 39). According to Pleij, ‘humour and entertainment were made expressly functional in late medieval conceptions of literature’ (p. 66). There are still, it seems, two kinds of ‘literature’. The essay goes on to discuss examples of the upward cultural movement, adapting courtly themes to the ideal mores of the growing urban market. Surprisingly, in view of the printing press, this ‘material, unlike that of courtly culture, is hardly ever available in its original form’ (p. 70).
A particular kind of entertainment was provided initially by the charivari in their carnivals and later, towards the establishment of the Chambers of Rhetoric, in the absurdities of the world upside down. This kind of satire became extremely popular, in The Guild of the Blue Boat, in the various versions of the Land of Cockaigne and in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Sebastian Brant. But whatever the sources revived or satirised, the purpose was always the same, to develop ‘a highly original and adequate set of virtues [...] compiled from the classical, biblical and medieval traditions’ (p. 75).
The second set of essays considers The world of chivalry. The brisure du couplet that replaced the strophic structure in High German poetry when this began to be written down, is rare in the earliest Middle Dutch Charlemagne texts. In their chapter on Middle Dutch Charlemagne romances and the oral tradition of the ‘chansons de geste’, Evert van den Berg and Bart Besamusca thus reinforce the general view that these are of an early date since they were only orally transmitted. However, the Roelantslied and Aiol demonstrably follow a written Old French source. But there is also the evidence of Ogier van Denemarken, Madelgijs and Renout van Montalbaen that they were versions from an oral performance of the French tales. Returning, on the evidence of these texts, to the question of the transmission of the Renout, the authors finally question whether this was in fact based on a written Old French text, concluding that ‘there are strong indications that some of them [=the Middle Dutch poets] did not draw on a manuscript source’ (p. 92). This may be true of the very limited material available. But it does not allow for the possibility, if not certainty, that there were other texts, extracts and versions of these texts that have not survived.
Chapter five is The prologue to ‘Arturs doet’, the Middle Dutch translation of ‘la Mort le Roi Artu’ in the ‘Lancelot Compilation’ by Bart Besamusca and Orlanda S.H. Lie. The authors of this analysis quote Haug, who ‘interprets the prologue as a poetological statement of the author’ and themselves view the prologue as inextricably linked to the text' (p. 98-99). Of the three possible authors of the prologue - the translator himself, the compiler (or the owner) of the codex, or the fourteenth-century poet Lodewijc van Velthem - the translator himself is proposed as the author on the grounds that the prologue is so closely linked with the text. That is to say: the rhyming technique of the prologue and romance is the same and is very different from Velthem's, and the language of the prologue is more western (i.e. Flemish) than the compiler's or Velthem's.
In a short digression to indicate the popularity of the Lancelot tales in Flanders, two other versions are mentioned, the existence of one of which is only known through a German reference to a Lancelot ‘inn flemische geschrieben’. But can we be sure that the fifteenth-century German writer knew the difference between Flemish and (say) Brabantine?
The discussion of the prologue, on the art of praying and prayer itself, shows the poet confronted by the divine imperative to be truthful in what he wrote. Surrounded by an aversion to the embellishments of the poetic form as evidenced in the prose Lancelot, by the hagiography (Sinte Lutgart) as the ‘antidote’ to romantic fiction and even, perhaps, by Maerlant's attacks themselves, the poet of the prologue, while begging forgiveness for the sins he may have committed in writing, pleads that he has added nothing to the original French text. So it must have been the compiler who substituted Maerlant's version (from Geoffrey of Monmouth) of Arthur's war against the Romans for the translator's version. With his reputation at stake in this hostile environment, the poet defends himself by linking the secular subject matter of his translation to the higher truth in his prologue on prayer.
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The ‘Roman van Walewein’ is discussed as an episodic Arthurian romance by J.D. Janssens in chapter 7. Episodic here means those ‘non-historical Arthurian romances’ which present King Arthur ‘as a symbol of a specific attitude towards life’ (p. 113). Reminiscent of the previous article, we find the prologue to Walewein praying that God may help the poet, Penninc, find the right atmosphere to edify his public. A description of the tale leads to the author's comment that ‘the basic structure of the story is new in Arthurian literature: a three-part quest with the execution of each task depending on the success of the former’ (p. 117).
The structure and originality of the themes can partly be attributed to a fairy tale (550 in Aarne/Thompson), also to an Alexandrian romance and to Gerbert de Montreuil's Continuation Perceval. Another of Penninc's sources is Lantsloot vander Haghedochte (one of the three Flemish Lancelots mentioned in the previous chapter).
Penninc and Vostaert (who completed Penninc's work) therefore looked to two different traditions (Gerbert from Chrétien de Troyes and Lancelot of the cave). But there are important elements in the tale that cannot be attributed to either of these sources, and these suggest that the Middle Dutch poets had direct contact with Celtic literature. In fact Walewein ‘is the only continental story containing this theme’ (p. 122) - of the episode of Roges being changed by a spell into a fox. So Janssens concludes that ‘if it is correct that the Celtic themes and the names and high reputations of a number of knights of the Round Table were brought back to their homeland by Flemish people in Anglo-Norman service, it may be assumed that the Walewein and Iwein fashion was mainly located in Flemish courts’ (p. 124).
Part iii is devoted to Reynard the Fox and it consists of a single essay: Words and deeds in the Middle Dutch Reynaert stories by Paul Wackers. This adds to the substantial literature on the two epics an entirely original discussion comparing the two treatments of the theme solely on the basis of Reynard's deceit and its relationship to the narrative.
In Van den vos Reynaerde ‘the author has tried to create an autonomous narrative reality within his story. The behaviour of the animals is both causally coherent, and comprehensible in psychological terms’ (p. 132-133). The dialogue is the primary element in conveying the animals' motives and their reactions to one another.
The first example to illustrate this, compares Willem's Middle Dutch version with the same episode, the conversation between Bruun and Reynaert at Reynaert's castle, in the Roman de Renart. It convincingly shows that the former is more compact and reveals more of Reynaert's intentional deceit.
The second example takes us on to the conversation between Reynaert and the royal couple about the hidden treasure. Reynaert's verbal manipulation has to be more skilful here, but in the process he exposes not just the king's (albeit suspicious) gullability and the queen's greed, but also that the king is (over)ruled by his wife.
As a result of sustained deceit, words come to dominate reality, as in the confusion caused by Reynaert's specious promise of loyalty, his transfer of a straw as a (bogus) token of the transfer of the treasure (in exchange for the king's tender of a straw as a legal proof of pardon), and the king's belief in the fictitious treasure while doubting the existence of the factual place where it is reputedly hidden.
In Reynaerts historie, the extensive additions to the earlier version show a marked increase in the use of monologue, and the narrative consistency disappears. As in the Ysengrimus, information is given in the narrative to explain what has gone before. The often rambling monologues, Wackers shows, are somewhat incompetent commentaries on Reynaert's deceit, so that ‘the untruth of the words in Reynaerts historie can no longer be ascertained by reference to the narrative reality’ (p. 142).
The author of Reynaerts historie is not content to allow the concrete examples of greed and lies in Van den vos Reynaerde to speak for themselves as relevant to real life, ‘his concern is to show
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the influence of lies and the degree to which liars and lies determine the society we live in’ (p. 144) as he explicitly states in his epilogue, attacking human courts for their selfishness and untruthfulness.
In Part iv, The literature of love, the first of two contributions is A.M.J. van Buuren, Dirc Potter, a medieval Ovid. This is a discussion of Der minnen loep by Potter, who was a contemporary of two English admirers of Ovid, Chaucer and Gower. This treatise is, Van Buuren says, unique in the medieval literature of western Europe because it is an ars amandi in the form of a collection of stories witnessing to school influence. The four books of Potter's work deal with foolish love, good, illicit and licit love respectively. Only the ‘good’ love is not taken from Ovid's Heroides, and Potter dealt with licit love in two parts, devoting the first, ‘good’ love, to the instruction of young, premarital love. Potter may borrow from Ovid, but he also exploits the commentaries to create his own Christian morality - closer to Gower than Chaucer. The differences between Ovid's and Potter's Phyllis and Demophon are noted, with Potter's transfer of his tale to a medieval setting. The conclusion is therefore reached that notwithstanding Potter's debt to Ovid and the classical commentaries, his ars amandi shows a unique individuality.
Frank Willaert's ‘Hovedans’: fourteenth-century dancing songs in the Rhine and Meuse area (chapter 10) discusses the mimic dances, called baleries by Joseph Bédier. Jacques Bretel has left an account of the tournament at Chauvency in 1285, with a description of some of the dance-acts then performed to comfort the wounded knights. Willaert finds a stanza structure similar to the dance songs in ‘Een liedekijn van den hoede’ in the Van Hulthem MS and in two of John 1 of Brabant's songs. His other songs follow the thirteenth-century French virelai and ballade, and sometimes a mixture of both. The forms may be French, but the language of these songs shows High German influence. In fact ‘John of Brabant's poetry is an interesting witness to the fact that, before 1300 there did exist, in the Rhine and Meuse area, a public that was acquainted with Minnesang’ (p. 173). From Lotharingia the virelai-ballade spread rapidly in the latter half of the fourteenth century into southern Germany and the Low Countries. Jean Froissart's reference to ‘Hoves danses’ in a poem for the Duke of Brabant, reveals a loanword (hofdans) from the Low Countries rather than a dubious reference to the French verb used of horses pounding the ground. This, again, supports the evidence of the popularity of this song and dance in the Rhine-Meuse area. Froissart also mentions the enjoyment of this dance music in 1350 at the court of Edward III. ‘The success of these genres must probably be connected with the excellent reputation Rhenish wind instrumentalists had acquired throughout western Europe’ (p. 179).
There are three contributions to the next section on Religious literature. The first is Clara Strijbosch, The saint and the world: the Middle Dutch ‘Voyage of Saint Brendan’. The widespread popularity of the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis is attested by the numerous mss and translations of the original. The Middle Frankish Reis van Sint-Brandaan of about 1150 was doubtless inspired by the Navigatio, but is otherwise independent of it, as this essay demonstrates. They may both be similar in their focus on the supernatural in the journey undertaken as a pilgrimage, but there the similarity ends. In the Navigatio the emphasis is on the journey of passage to the Promised Land. From the start of the Reis it is the miracles of creation that Brendan has been ordered by an angel to record on his pilgrimage. This accords with the upsurge of interest in the physical world in the twelfth century. But the author of the Reis had to do a balancing act between the rationalists whose curiosity was branded as heretical and the orthodox view of the world with all its phenomena as divinely created. In the Reis, unlike the Navigatio, the author ‘has paid attention to aspects of Creation which are not directly linked with higher things’ (p. 199). The detailed description of man-made artifacts in the wondrous castle of the Walscheranden in the Reis necessitates the author's exoneration that the land was God-given and so the castle came under His control. Similarly there is evidence of some caution in the poet's treatment of the Antipodes in the Reis, since belief in the Antipodians was traditionally denounced as heresy. So although Brendan hears human sounds under the sea, and though his anchor is caught underwater, he
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the cable and moves on without having actually seen any of the underwater creatures.
As if to place the seal on his orthodoxy, the author of the Reis introduces the little man on a leaf, who warns the reader against the perils of curiosity, leaving the reader to believe ‘that seeing the world's miracles is not sinful, but pointless’ (p. 202). Dr Strijbosch leaves us with a gracious acknowledgement of the poet's sly sense of humour: ‘The little man exemplifies what man's conduct in God's Creation should be like, but he has also provided the writer with an excuse to tell his story. The warning against excessive curiositas as the conclusion of a series of episodes makes it possible not to have to choose between denouncing the world and curiosity about the world’ (p. 202-203).
The intricate debate about the meaning of Minne in Hadewijch's poetry is reopened by J. Reynaert in Hadewijch: mystic poetry and courtly love. He starts by questioning whether her adoption of courtly imagery necessarily means that she was herself of noble birth. Mystical writing of the twelfth century already drew on courtly literature. ‘Bear in mind your nobility’ was, in fact, recorded in one of Bernard of Clairvaux's homilies. It was also Bernard who propagated the erotic representation of spiritual love. ‘Minne’ in the Strofische gedichten (Poems in Stanzas) could be understood as ‘a power, a supreme being, the essence of whose nature is Love’ (p. 211) or ‘the highest possible kind of courtly love: a courtly love directed towards God’ (p. 211), or as ‘personally experienced love and as Love in an absolute sense, [i.e.] “divine Love”’ (p. 211).
Bernard's teaching on love is, unlike Hadewijch's, basically ecclesiological, in that the love is the love of the Church as the Bride of Christ, and this love is bridal or matrimonial, not amorous. In any case, the ‘“courtly” current of mystic literature reached its height only in the second half of the thirteenth century’ (p. 217), when it was certainly known in the duchy of Brabant.
If troubadour conventions were adopted by the beguines of northern France, this could be due to the fact that many of the beguines belong to the nobility. Reynaert questions this theory (as he does Hadewijch's own aristocratic background), since the beguinages were no more likely to contain noblewomen than were the older religious communities. On social-historical grounds there is, however, evidence to suppose that whereas the enclosed communities would accept those with a vocation whatever their social backgrounds, the beguinages themselves arose out of a demand from highborn women who could not marry (in a male-deficient society) for the security of a sheltered lifestyle.
Though we have no evidence that the beguines took vows of chastity, it may be a neat distinction to make that they were mistresses of Christ rather than brides like their counterparts in the convents, but this could surely not account for Hadewijch's departure from Bernard's bridal mysticism, assuming that Hadewijch was indeed herself a beguine.
In the next article, Th. Mertens introduces his consideration of The Modern Devotion and innovation in Middle Dutch literature. He attributes the dearth of literary-historical research into early Dutch devotional texts to the romantic notion of a literature in which the content prevailed over the form, and the latter was underrated, while in the Flemish Revival such renewed interest as there was, focused on the cognitive-theological value of these writings. Protestant commentators, on the other hand, were ‘primarily interested in late medieval spirituality, considered to be the precursor of the Reformation’ (p. 228). And there is also the ‘massive quantity, which appears to be more extensive and more prominent than in, for instance, Middle High and Low German, Middle English or Middle French’ (p. 228). Conceding that there is much variation in the quality of the texts, Mertens looks at the texts compiled for private, meditational use which, being more subjective, reveal the individual ‘taste’ of the author. One way of establishing some kind of order in the vast corpus is to examine the various genres, according to the two major periods of Middle Dutch religious literature, before and after around 1360. The earlier period contains the names of the great mystics, Hadewijch, Beatrijs van Nazareth, Ruusbroec and the hagiographies (Servaes, Brendan, Lutgart). ‘Between 1357 and 1388 the “Bible Translator of 1360” is active’ (p. 231), supposedly a Carthusian. His ‘tremendous translation activity
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marks the beginning of the period of devotional prose, a period in which the Modern Devout will dominate’ (p. 231). Certainly the simple, early Christian life commended in these writings owes much to the Carthusians, who had remained faithful to their vows. The writings emanating from the Chapter of Windesheim (1387) and the Brethren and Sisters of the Common Life consist of copies and translations of monastic texts (for those who could not read Latin), and new works exhorting the laiety to live according to the spirit of the apostolic tradition.
Among the new genres arising out of the adaptation of old, Latin, writings, was the ‘collation book’ containing thematically arranged texts to provide introductions to discussion among the faithful. Other new genres are the spiritual testament, the vitae, vitae patrum, fratrum and sororum, and the rapiaria, ‘unstructured collections of notes for the benefit of one's personal religious life’ (p. 236).
The sixth section is devoted to ‘Artes’ texts. W.P. Gerritsen, H. van Dijk, Orlanda S.H. Lie and A.M.J. van Buuren have collaborated in A fourteenth-century vernacular poetics: Jan van Boendale's ‘How Writers Should Write’. The text here discussed is part of the third chapter of Der leken spieghel (The Layman's Mirror), a treatise on history from Creation to the present day (1330) and admonitions on the future.
Boendale's instructions for the emergent number of laymen (as against the Latin scholars, the clerici, the traditional literati), is that they should be grammarians (i.e. versed in Latin grammar), write nothing but the truth and be irreproachable in their conduct: truth in the sense promoted by Maerlant (whom Boendale greatly admired) as historical accuracy so travestied by the Arthurian minstrels. The lay writer should be morally irreproachable simply because he could not admonish others if he himself was not blameless.
However, the undertone in these instructions is highly critical of ‘amateurism’. ‘By gradually acquiring literate habits the [laici illiterati] were challenging the age-old monopolies of the [clerici literati]. Learned and lay writers became rivals, competing for the favours of the same patrons. Boendale, loyal to the intellectual and cultural ideals of the clerici, emphasizes the difference between the two groups by painting the lay poets as black as he can’ (p. 250-251). Here, implicitly, speaks a good writer upholding virtue and truth, who is thus worthy of ‘a generous remuneration’ (p. 252)!
The full text of this ‘defence of poetry’ is added, in Erik Kooper's translation.
The burden of Ria Jansen-Sieben's essay From food therapy to cookery-book is that for more than twenty centuries medicine and the art of cooking were closely connected - from Akron of Agrigentum (fifth century bc) to Maino de Maineri (fourteenth century). In the Netherlands there are plenty of medical texts with culinary advice, but not one cookery-book as such before the fifteenth century. Even in the next century the majority of recipe books include medical advice. So ‘culinary literature, with a few exceptions, was mainly the work of physicians’ (p. 271). The explanation for the tardy withdrawal of the physician from the kitchen, is shown by the author to be due to the arrival of exotic spices, long known in pharmacopoeia and the monasteries, on the tables of the more affluent citizens. This is confirmed by the addition of quantities to recipes only in the sixteenth century, since previously doses and weights were known to the practitioners.
Finally, in the section on Drama, H. van Dijk discusses The drama texts in the Van Hulthem manuscript. This addresses the puzzling fact that two widely diverse types of play co-exist in the same ms collection: the early, serious secular plays, the Abele spelen, alongside a number of farces. The three ‘romance’ abele plays follow a tradition of secular(ised) drama in the Netherlands, and the fourth (a debate on the seasons for love-making) has its antecedents in Germany.
Van Dijk considers that the hypothesis that the entire codex forms a repertoire for actors and storytellers is less likely than that the ms was compiled as the standard collection of a scriptorium. He argues that the short epilogues or prologues were added later by the director of a
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company of actors thus bringing them into a company's repertoire.
An examination of the structure of all the plays shows how the monologues can function as setting a change of scene or time, how most of the plays are set in two localities which, in the ‘romance’ plays, exemplify a dichotomy in the characters, and this is similar to the situations in the farces where, however, the generally ‘courtly’ environment of the straight plays becomes the rustic environment of the farces. The general theme of turbulence in courtship and marriage is also a common factor between nearly all the plays. However, the two kinds of play may well have been performed separately until the adaptor-director brought them into his repertoire, when the longer play would have been followed by one of the farces. Van Dijk's conclusion is that probably ‘before they were included in the manuscript, they were on the repertoire of a fourteenth-century company of actors in Brabant, possibly professional, by whom they were staged in pairs’ (p. 294).
There is an index and two valuable appendixes: a Bibliography of translations (into English) and a Chronological table, 1150-1500 of Medieval Dutch literature in its European context.
There can be no doubt that, to quote the blurb, this book offers new insights into the rich and varied Dutch literature of the Middle Ages. Indeed some of the essays introduce topics not dealt within the handbooks, and the sociological and literary-theoretical aspects of some of the contributions provide a welcome context for traditional approaches to Dutch medieval literary studies. What we are offered is an interesting selection of medieval Dutch texts in their European context, but are they representative of Dutch literature? Inasmuch that the title implies the rightful place of this literature as a European literature, it does not altogether fulfil its promise. While some of the topics included here certainly belong to the corpus of literate writing in the vernacular, several of the Middle Dutch works reckoned by German and French students to match the best in those other literatures are not given a fair hearing: Karel ende Elegast, Beatrijs, De Bliscappen, Elckerlijc (Everyman!), Mariken van Nieumeghen. Many of the contributors to this volume are authorities on these works too, so we must hope that the cup will be encouraged by the uptake of this book to publish a second volume.
Adres van de auteur: Eastgate House, Newgate Street, UK-Cottingham, North Humberside hu 16 4dz
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