Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 137, Issue 2, 2021

Among the many books in Michigan State University’s Criminology Collection is a Corpus juris militaris, published in Germany in 1687. Its binding contains four small parchment strips with medieval Dutch verses. Although the strips are still attached in the spine, the verses can be identified as belonging to the Roman der Lorreinen, and more specifically as remnants of manuscript A, written in the duchy of Brabant in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Manuscript A originally must have consisted of over 400 leaves, containing more than 150.000 verses (note: there are no complete manuscripts of the Roman der Lorreinen). Only 7% of manuscript A has been preserved in several European libraries, mainly in Germany. The new fragment suggests that manuscript A was used as binding material not earlier than the end of the seventeenth century (after 1687). The newly found verses are from the first part of the Roman der Lorreinen, which was an adaptation of the Old French chanson de geste Garin le Loherenc. This article offers a first edition and study of the verses, comparing them to the Old French counterparts. This comparison offers additional evidence for the earlier hypothesis that manuscript A contained the same adaptation of Garin le Loherenc as the fragmentary manuscripts B and C.

The beginning is a foundational element in literary fiction: it is the entrance into a textual world. In this article, I analyse the genesis of the first chapter of Gie Bogaert’s born-digital novel Roosevelt (2016), which was logged with the keystroke logging software Inputlog. The beginning of Roosevelt supplies important information for the understanding of the textual world, takes on a key role in the ‘recentering’ of the reader to this world, and facilitates an immersive reading experience through the use of the second-person singular, and through making an appeal to the readers’ sensory and spatial imagination. Focusing on the textual development, I ask the question how four important aspects of the novel were implemented in the first chapter during the writing process. I will demonstrate how Bogaert experimented with explicating these aspects, but later decided to refer to them rather implicitly. Overall, this analysis demonstrates how Inputlog, in case it is used by literary authors, may facilitate textual genetic research on present-day works of literature.