Queeste - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2023

The manuscript tradition of Jan van Boendale’s Brabantsche yeesten (‘Deeds of the Dukes of Brabant’) is notoriously complicated. Between 1316 and 1351 Boendale regularly updated his chronicle with descriptions of recent events. Later, these new sections were also copied to complement transcriptions of earlier versions of the chronicle. In 1444, Heinricus van den Damme completed a luxuriously decorated copy of Boendale’s Yeesten for the municipal administration of Brussels. In this manuscript, a rubric at the end of the table of contents preceding book five refers to a chapter about an unspecified ‘gathering (‘parlement’) in Mechelen’, but the text of this chapter does not appear in this copy, nor in any of the extant fifteenth-century witnesses of the Brabantsche yeesten. However, the Mechelen chapter is found in two texts that are closely connected to Brussels and Van den Damme’s manuscript: Jan van Edingen’s Livre des cronicques de Brabant (probably composed between circa 1460 and 1470) and an early modern copy of Boendale’s chronicle, made at the beginning of the seventeenth century for Gillis die Voecht, archivist of the abbey of Averbode. In this previously unknown text, an anonymous poet reports on the devastating fire that ravaged Mechelen in 1342 and its political aftermath. This addition to the Brabantsche yeesten, which appears in none of the other known copies, demonstrates the value of (Early) Modern manuscript copies for our understanding of the transmission history of Boendale’s chronicle and medieval literature at large. It is edited as an annex to this article.

In an early sixteenth-century printed book from the Low Countries, we find the first visual images that depict Christ with the attributes of a worldly physician. This imagery was already in use in Middle Dutch literature since the thirteenth century. Building on the Augustinian topos of Christus medicus, these devotional texts display interesting developments towards concretization and interiorization. This article gives a comparative analysis of four of those texts: Boec der minnen, Der suster abteke, Vander dochtere van syon and Vander siecten der broosscer naturen. The findings nuance the notion that concrete images from daily life were only developed to meet the needs of a broad, lay readership.

The sixteenth-century effort to strengthen and improve the Dutch language has long been considered in terms of francophobia: by rejecting French influence, such as loanwords, the Dutch language could emancipate itself. This article explores to what extent the postcolonial notion of Francophonie, used to describe the imposition of the French language in a colonial context, can improve our understanding of the ambivalent sixteenth-century attitude towards the French tongue by native speakers of Dutch. This re-examination of early modern sources on the relation between French and Dutch, mainly the 1584 Twe-spraack, leads to a re-evaluation of the presence of francophobia. Not only is a direct connection between the rejection of French and the support of the Dutch language absent, but, moreover, cases of francofilia can even be attested.

This contribution looks back on a period of 35 years of Middle Dutch Studies, through the perspective of the retirement of Frits van Oostrom, who played a central role in the field in the past few decades. Starting from a 1989 volume in which Van Oostrom, along with Frank Willaert and several other specialists of Middle Dutch Literature, looked towards the present and future of the field, I aim to gauge whether their expectations have come true. Supported by the work of fellow scholars who have discussed general developments in the field of Middle Dutch Studies in the past, I aim to draw a balance of the field’s position in terms of international dialogue, digital research methods, methodological innovation and the broader embeddedness in the (diachronic) study of Dutch literature.

In conclusion to the colloquium organised in his honour, Frits van Oostrom was interviewed by Jaap de Jong. The following article presents a slightly shortened write-out of this interview, in which Van Oostrom shares his secrets as a writer, his passion for storytelling and his encounters with inspiring teachers.