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oa Een bijzondere Brabantse tekstgetuige van de Martijntrilogie van Jacob van Maerlant
De fragmenten Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms 6848
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: Queeste, Volume 29, Issue 1, Nov 2022, p. 36 - 65
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- 01 Nov 2022
Abstract
Whereas classical philological research aimed to present a convincing reconstruction of the original text, more recent philological research, i.e. material philology, focuses on the transmission of texts and their (unique) variation as such. One text in Middle Dutch that had an exceptionally successful transmission is the thirteenth-century Martijn trilogy by the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant. In order to better understand this transmission, this article offers a diplomatic edition of an unpublished fragment, discovered by Herman Pleij in 1986 in the Bibliothèque municipale of Lyon. On the basis of a comparison with other text witnesses, we have been able to observe that the variants of the L manuscript mainly cluster with the F manuscript (c. 1475), the D printing (1496) and with the G manuscript (c. 1375-1400). The variants of K (ca. 1380-1385), the Brabant printing D2 (ca. 1496), the Ge fragment from Cologny (ca. 1375-1400) and the Brabant fragment Y (ca. 1375-1400) also cluster with L. These fragments were mainly written in Brabant at the end of the fourteenth century, demonstrating that Maerlant’s text was also distributed outside Flanders. Moreover, the text witnesses L, Y, Z (ca. 1450) and E (ca. 1400) all come from single-quire manuscripts. The rise of this easily producible text carrier may explain why the Martijn trilogy had such a successful transmission.