Queeste - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2022

This essay explores the use of nominal address forms in some Dutch medieval secular plays. A mixed qualitative-quantitative analysis along historical-pragmatic lines including the analysis of a wider corpus shows that the nominal address forms in the plays are used to express a variety of meanings that are more specific than the simple lexical meaning of the words used. These meanings are mostly social. Special attention is paid to the use of proper names and the nouns maghet, wijf and vrouwe (maiden, woman and lady), her (lord) and ridder (knight), and vrient (friend). Patterns of use were found related to status differences. Variation could be explained by considering changes in the context and the intentions of the participants. The concluding analysis of four dialogues from the play Lanseloet van Denemerken shows that nominal address forms and their social meanings have an important relational role in the communication between the characters of the play and are also dramatically important as means to characterize the people in the play and to help the plot forward.

In her recent monograph, Cécile de Morrée (Nijmegen) provides a detailed codicological description of five Middle Dutch manuscripts with religious songs – Berlin 185, Berlin 280, Paris 39, Tirs and Werden. In reconstructing the circles in which these manuscripts were written, she analyses their composition and concludes that the songs in these books do not only follow the liturgical calendar, but also reflect the changing of the seasons and the repeating structures of social life. The aim of her research is to assess how the concept of ‘time’ influenced the makers and users of song collections. The Berlin 185 manuscript is central to her reasoning, and is collated with four others. The order of the songs in all of the manuscripts seems to be indicated by the cycle of the year. The five codices contain no less than 323 song texts, including 29 in Latin. Some of them come with a written indication of their tunes, which indicates that they were intended to be sung. The author has provided a chronological list of incipits. This contribution adds to this an alphabetic index of the songs and a comparison of the text of 52 songs that are included in several of the manuscripts, and are therefore believed to be common knowledge to contemporaries.