Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - Volume 138, Issue 2, 2022

In this contribution a fourteenth-century fragment (Leiden, UB, BPL 2387 D) of Jacob van Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen (ca. 1264) is edited for the first time. The fragment is written by the Brabantine Ferguut-scribe and consists of two parchment strips that belonged to the same folio. The sixty – mostly remnants of – verses are situated in a passage that Maerlant borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Until now this passage was known only through the Wissen manuscript, the only fully surviving manuscript of the Historie van Troyen (Brussel, KBR, IV 927). An analysis of the variants and comparison with the Latin source text show that in the Wissen codex this passage is highly corrupt. Previous research suggested that the Leiden fragment belonged to a manuscript that included two other texts of the Ferguut-scribe as well: Alexanders geesten (Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Donaueschingen 173) and Roman van Cassamus (Brussel, KBR, 18.228). However, some deviations in the execution of the Leiden fragment and the foliation of the Cassamus-fragment cast doubt on this hypothesis. The Leiden fragment is probably the only remnant of yet another manuscript by the Ferguut-scribe.

The novelistic cycle is an important literary form in its epic ambition to capture the totality of a historical period, a family, or an individual experiential world. In Dutch literary history, it constitutes a strong tradition, with examples such as S. Vestdijk’s Anton Wachter and Van der Heijden’s Tandeloze Tijd. This article develops a framework for the study of the novelistic cycle and illustrates its richness in Dutch literary history, focusing on the discourse surrounding it and on its core features: part-whole relationships, the return of characters, temporal organization and cyclical structures.