oa Een nieuw onderzoeksproject: ‘Rerouting the Ridderroman. Adaptation strategies in the poetics of the 14th-century Middle Dutch Ridderroman’ (FWO – Universiteit Gent)

Literary historians have often noted the ‘conventional’ nature of the 14th-century Middle Dutch verse romance or ridderroman. While the corpus has long been depreciated as derivative, a mixture of older romance motifs amplified into sometimes grotesque proportions: ‘epic in decay’, this view has slowly been reconsidered. The complicated intertextuality of 14th-century ridderromans is now more understood as part of a literary game of recognition and surprise between creators and recipients. However, little comparative research has been done into the exact nature of such reworking strategies and the ‘game of romance’ in a larger 14th-century corpus. This research projects asks how adaptation as a compositional process is positioned with regards to the poetics of the 14th-century ridderroman. This will be done through an intra-textual analysis of the poetical markers and through a thorough review of the material, performance and socio-cultural contexts of the corpus texts. As such, it also reconceptualizes the corpus of 14th-century ridderromans in terms of 14th-century material production and reception, rather than purely textual composition.