© Contributors 2022
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2022
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 978-1-84384-634-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-80010-600-0 (ePUB)
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Chapter 10 is available via Open Access thanks to the generous financial support of the Dutch Research Council
The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate
Cover image: Froissart presenting his book to King Richard II, from Jean Froissart, Chroniques (early fifteenth century), Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon, Ms 864-865, f.1. Reproduced with kind permission. Cover design: 1981d.co.uk
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece David Johnson on the Margaree River, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada (2019) moments before hooking a monstrous salmon. Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: Stephen Harris.
Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels, Roy M. Liuzza
Figure 1 Fragment 1 recto: Old English Gospel Fragment 1r, containing John 8:52–53. Reproduced by permission of all parties.
Figure 2 Fragment 1 verso: Old English Gospel Fragment 1v, containing John 9:2. Reproduced by permission of all parties.
Figure 3 Fragment 2: Old English Gospel Fragment 2r, containing John 8:54. Reproduced by permission of all parties.
An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs, Thomas A. Bredehoft and Rachel C. S. Duke
Figure 1 Collectanea Miscellanea, Vols II and III. Reproduced with permission of Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
Figure 2 Collectanea Miscellanea, Vol III front flyleaf. Reproduced with permission of Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
Figure 3 Collectanea Miscellanea, Vol II, Item 23, p. 1: An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues. Reproduced with permission of Florida State University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
The Body as Media in Early Medieval England, Martin Foys
Figure 1 Folio 17r from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Figure 2 Folio 17v from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Figure 3 Folio 18r from Morgan MS M. 736 (c. 1130). Reproduced with permission; photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries, Catherine E. Karkov and Elaine Treharne
Figure 1 The Cloisters Cross. Donated to Wikimedia Commons by the Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Cloisters_Cross_MET_DP102900.jpg.
Figure 2 The eighth-century Ruthwell Cross, south side. Photo, author.
Figure 3 The Leeds Cross, face A. Photo, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Photographers K. Jukes and D. Craig.
Figure 4 The Leeds Cross, face C. Photo, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Photographers K. Jukes and D. Craig.
Figure 5 The Leeds Cross, face D. Photo, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Photographers K. Jukes and D. Craig.
Figure 6 The Leeds Cross, face B. Photo, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Photographers K. Jukes and D. Craig.
Figure 7 The Leeds Cross, Weland the Smith, face C. Photo, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Photographers K. Jukes and D. Craig.
For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript, Frank Brandsma
Figure 1 The Hague, Royal Library, MS 129 A 10. Reproduced with permission of KB, National Library of the Netherlands.
Figure 2 From Marilyn Horne’s annotated score of the modern opera The Ghosts of Versailles (composed by John Corigliano), first performed in 1991, with Marilyn Horne as one of the lead vocalists. Source: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/24/marilyn-horne-stage-archive-collection. Permission provided by the Marilyn Horne Museum and Exhibit Centre, Bradford, and by G. Schirmer, Inc., Santa Monica (for John Corigliano).
Table 1 Marginal lines in the Lanceloet (F 1–98, MS The Hague, KB, 129 A 10).
The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.
CONTRIBUTORS
DANIELLE ALLOR (PhD, English Department, Rutgers University) is a David Bartholomae Postdoctoral Lecturer in Writing at Rutgers University. Her book project, Trees of Thought: Poetics, Form, and Environment in Medieval English Literature, demonstrates that poets such as William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Skelton found the nexus of intellectual history and natural philosophy surrounding the tree invaluable for their theorizations of literary inheritance, poetic authority, and the nature of poetry itself. Her work has been supported by a Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her articles have appeared in Exemplaria and Yearbook of Langland Studies.
ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD (PhD, Medieval Studies, Yale University) is Professor Emeritus of English Studies and former Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society at Durham University (UK). Her publications include Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (1991), Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001), and the edited collections A Companion to Malory, with A. S. G. Edwards (1996), and The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, with Ad Putter (2009). She has published articles on the classical tradition in the Middle Ages, Chaucer, the Arthurian legend, romance, Middle Scots and medieval bathing. She co-edited the journal Arthurian Literature with David Johnson from 2008 to 2020.
BART BESAMUSCA (PhD, Dutch Language and Literature, Utrecht University) is Professor of Middle Dutch Textual Culture from an International Perspective in the Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies at Utrecht University. He has published widely on medieval narrative literature, manuscripts, and early printed editions. His book-length studies include The Book of Lancelot: The Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation and the Medieval Tradition of Narrative Cycles (2003). He co-published the critical edition Of Reynaert the Fox (2009) and co-edited the volumes The Dynamics of the Medieval Manuscript: Text Collections from a European Perspective (2017), Early Printed Narrative Literature in Western Europe (2019), and The Arthur of the Low Countries: The Arthurian Legend in Dutch and Flemish Literature (2021). He manages the research tool Arthurian Fiction in Medieval Europe (www.arthurianfiction.org) and is currently supervising the research project ‘The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders, ca 1200–ca 1500’. He served the International Arthurian Society as its International President (2002–05) and was elected Honorary President of this scholarly organisation.
FRANK BRANDSMA (PhD, Dutch Language and Literature, Utrecht University) is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature (Middle Ages) at Utrecht University. His research focus lies in narrative techniques in Arthurian romance in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries with special attention for the presentation and transfer of emotions. His publications include The Interlace Structure of the Third Part of the Prose Lancelot (2010) and ‘Etat Présent: Arthurian Literature in Middle Dutch’, JIAS 3 (with Bart Besamusca, 2015), and the edited collection Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Mind, Body, Voice (with Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders; 2015). He is one of the editors of Queeste. Journal of Medieval Literature in the Low Countries and, with Bart Besamusca, edited the handbook The Arthur of the Medieval Low Countries (2021).
THOMAS A. BREDEHOFT (PhD, English, The Ohio State University) is the owner of Chancery Hill Books and Antiques, in Morgantown, West Virginia. He is the author of Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (2001); Early English Metre (2005); Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (2009); and The Visible Text: Textual Production and Reproduction from Beowulf to Maus (2014). He has published essays on topics ranging from medieval inscriptions to the comics of Harvey Pekar.
ROLF H. BREMMER JR (PhD, Late-Middle English Literature, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen) is emeritus Professor of English Philology and Frisian at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published widely in the field, including P. J. Cosijn’s Notes on Beowulf, which he introduced, translated, and annotated, together with David Johnson and Jan van den Berg (1991). More recently, An Introduction ot Old Frisian: History, Grammar, Reader, Glossary (2009) and, as co-editor with Kees Dekker, Fruits of Learning: The Transfer of Encyclopaedic Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages (2016). He considers himself privileged to have introduced the honorand to Old English studies.
GEERT H. M. CLAASSENS (PhD, Dutch Language and Literature, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen) is Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at KU Leuven. His recent publications include Gulden Legende: De Middelnederlandse vertaling van de Legenda aurea door Petrus Naghel (with Amand Berteloot and Willem Kuiper, 2 vols. 2011–17), De borchgravinne van Vergi (with Amand Berteloot and Jasmin Hlatky, 2015) and Voorbeeldig en vermakelijk vertellen (2018). With Fritz-Peter Knapp and René Pérennec he edited Germania Litteraria Mediaevalis Francigena. Handbuch der deutschen und niederländischen mittelalterlichen Sprache, Formen, Motive, Stoffe und Werke französischer Herkunft (1100–1300), 7 vols. (2010–15). He has published widely on Middle Dutch Arthurian Romances and Charlemagne epics, Middle Dutch Bible translations and hagiography. He is editor-in-chief of the Mediaevalia Lovaniensia.
RACHEL C. S. DUKE (PhD Candidate, Medieval Literature, Florida State University) is the Rare Books Librarian at Florida State University Special Collections and Archives. Her areas of interest include teaching with primary sources, promoting special collections services to underserved populations, and the history of the book. She is currently writing a dissertation on the Ancrene Wisse under David Johnson’s direction.
MARTIN FOYS (PhD, English Language and Literature, Loyola University Chicago) is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Major publications include the Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition (2003 and 2013), Virtually Anglo-Saxon: Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (2007), and Bayeux Tapestry: New Interpretations (2009). He co-directed Virtual Mappa, a set of digital editions of medieval maps for the British Library (2018), and other recent publications include work on medieval media archaeology and manuscript studies, medieval witchcraft and shady real estate deals, previously unknown Carolingian texts in pre-Conquest England, and a bilingual Old English and Latin edition of a medieval treatise on bells. He is currently the senior editor of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project (2019–), an ongoing digital edition of the complete corpus of Old English poetry, and directs the Digital Mappa project, an open-source Digital Humanities platform for the collaborative annotation, linking and publishing of digital image and text collections, in partnership with the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
JAMIE C. FUMO (PhD, English Literature, Princeton University) is Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception (2015) and The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics (2010), as well as numerous articles on Chaucer, late-medieval intertextuality, and classical transmission. She has edited a volume of essays entitled Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Contexts and Interpretations (2018) and co-edited Vehicles of Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Textual Culture, Cursor Mundi 4 (2012).
STEPHEN HARRIS (PhD, English, Loyola University Chicago) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2003) and Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics (2016).
THOMAS D. HILL (PhD, Medieval Studies, Cornell University) has taught medieval literature at Cornell University since 1967. He studied with R. E. Kaske and collaborated with James E. Cross. He has published and edited books and papers in the field of Old English and papers on Middle English, Old French, Old Norse-Icelandic and various other medieval literatures. He served as the chair of David Johnson’s committee during Dave’s years at Cornell and is currently working on numerous projects in Old English, Middle English, Old Norse-Icelandic, and Old French literature.
MARJOLEIN HOGENBIRK (PhD, Middle Dutch language and Literature, Utrecht University) is Senior Lecturer Historical Dutch literature at the Department of Dutch of the University of Amsterdam. She is the president of the Dutch Branch of the International Arthurian Society. She has published widely on Middle Dutch Arthurian Literature in its broader European context, relations between Middle Dutch and Old French romances and Arthurian manuscripts. In 2011, she published the edition of Walewein ende Keye (Middelnederlandse Lancelotromans X). Together with David Johnson she wrote the chapter on ‘Translations and Adaptations of French Verse Romances’ in The Arthur of the Low Countries.
CHRISTOPHER JENSEN (PhD, Medieval Literature, Florida State University) is Assistant Professor of Arts and Humanities at Albany State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in southwest Georgia. His scholarly and teaching interests include translation, adaptation, the Arthurian legend, and the development of medievalism as a tool of imperialism. In 2019, he defended his dissertation on Middle English Arthurian literature under the direction of David F. Johnson and received the Fair Unknown Award from the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch. His work has appeared in Arthuriana and Studies in Medievalism.
CATHERINE E. KARKOV (PhD, History of Art, Cornell University) is Chair of Art History in the School of Fine Art, History of Art, and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her publications include Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia (2020), Slow Scholarship: Medieval Research and the Neoliberal University (2019); The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (2011); The Ruer Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (2004); and Text and Image: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (2001). She is the author of numerous articles on early medieval English art, manuscripts, and material culture.
STACY S. KLEIN (PhD, English, The Ohio State University) is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she also serves as graduate faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2006) and has co-authored numerous interdisciplinary volumes, including The Maritime World of the Anglo-Saxons, with William Schipper and Shannon Lewis-Simpson (2015), and Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination, with John Niles and Jonathan Wilcox (2016). Klein has published numerous articles on Old English language and literature, the history of gender and sexuality, feminist thought, the natural world, hagiography, and aesthetics. She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Militancy of Gender and the Making of Sexual Difference in Early English Literature, ca. 700–1100 AD.
R. M. LIUZZA (PhD, Medieval Studies, Yale University) is Professor of English and Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he specializes in Old English language and literature. He is the author of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (2011), and has edited a two-volume edition of the Old English version of the Gospels for the Early English Text Society (1994 and 2000), and Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: An Edition and Study of Texts in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii (2010), and is one of the General Editors of the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. He is the author of more than four dozen scholarly essays and reviews.
LARISSA TRACY (PhD, Medieval Literature, Trinity College, Dublin) is Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University. Her publications include Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (2012), Women of the Gilte Legende (2003) and the edited collections Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, with Jeff Massey (2012), Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (2013), Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, with Kelly DeVries (2015), Flaying in the Pre-modern World (2017), Medieval and Early Modern Murder (2018), Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame (2019). She has published articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, romance, gender, hagiography and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; she is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill). In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at St John’s College, Oxford.
ELAINE TREHARNE (PhD, English, University of Manchester) is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Technology, Professor of English, and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where she is also the Robert K. Packard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Director of Stanford Text Technologies. She has published some thirty books and sixty articles, including Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (2021), the Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (2015), Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (2012), and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts (ed. with Orietta Da Rold, 2020), and Text Technologies: A History (with Claude Willan, 2019). She is principally concerned in her research with the handmade book, and with early English literature and textual culture (up to c. 1300). She co-edits Oxford Textual Perspectives, a series for Oxford University Press; and Text Technologies, a series for Stanford University Press. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, of the Royal Historical Society, a Lifetime Fellow of the English Association, and of the Learned Society of Wales. She is a Trustee of the National Library of Wales.
K. S. WHETTER (PhD, Medieval English Literature, University of Wales, Bangor) is Professor of English at Acadia University and a former President of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society (2014–17). His principal research interests are heroic literature, genre theory, and medieval Arthurian literature, especially Malory’s Morte Darthur, upon which he has published widely. He is honoured to follow Dave (and Elizabeth) as co-editor of Arthurian Literature.
ROEL ZEMEL (PhD, Medieval Literature, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) was Associate Professor for Medieval Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam until his retirement in 2014. His research focuses on the relationship between Old French and Middle Dutch narrative literature, specifically the Middle Dutch Ferguut and its Old French source, the Fergus by Guillaume le Clerc. His publications include Op zoek naar Galiene: Over de Oudfranse Fergus en de Middelnederlandse Ferguut (1991) and The Quest for Galiene: A Study of Guillaume le Clercʼs Arthurian Romance ʻFergusʼ (2006). He has published widely on several Flemish literary texts from the Middle Ages, e.g. the Roman van Moriaen and the Roman van Walewein (both Arthurian romances) and the beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde. Together with Simon Smith he authored the chapter on ʻIndigenous Arthurian Romancesʼ, for The Arthur of the Low Countries (2021).
PREFACE
AT THE BEGINNING of the spring semester in 1994, the second half of my second year as an undergraduate, I was sitting in a classroom at Florida State University when our professor, bearded, blazered, and bespectacled, walked in silently. He looked at us, slammed his books on the table at the front of the room, and in a clear resonant voice recited the opening lines of Beowulf: ‘Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum, þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.’ We jumped. This is how Dave Johnson makes an impression, deep and abiding, on his students, professors, and colleagues. My second year at FSU was Dave’s first year, having completed his PhD at Cornell in 1993. From that very first class, Medieval Literature in Translation, I was hooked; over the next year and a half at FSU, through my graduate studies in Ireland, and into my career in medieval literature, Dave Johnson has inspired me, taught me, mentored me, answered my questions, written me countless letters of recommendation, shared his research, and essentially provided the model of what a good scholar, teacher, and colleague should be. In putting together this project, I found that I was far from alone.
Over the last thirty years, Dave Johnson has touched the lives and shaped the careers of dozens of scholars. His professors speak proudly and affectionately of him; his students adore him; and his colleagues respect him. His extensive body of scholarship encompasses Old and Middle English language and literature, Middle Dutch, and Arthuriana. He has translated several works from Dutch and, with Geert H. M. Claassens, has edited and translated five volumes of Middle Dutch literature, opening a whole new world of texts to generations of readers. His research on the Tremulous Hand, Gregory the Great, Beowulf, and Middle Dutch romances is ground-breaking and he has shared that research with his students, encouraging them to find their own avenues of exploration within the field. His mentorship extends far beyond the boundaries of the classroom – he shepherds his students long after they have graduated. When I started the annual undergraduate conference in medieval studies at Longwood University with my colleague in history, Steven Isaac, Dave was one of the plenary speakers at our first meeting. Our award for the best student paper – the Abels-Johnson Award for Excellence – bears his name along with that of the other distinguished speaker, Richard Abels. I was honored when Dave agreed to serve on the board of my series with Brill, Explorations in Medieval Culture, and I have never stopped relying on his good sense and his good counsel. As he once put it, he is not my Doktorvater, but my Dutch Uncle, a relationship that I have and will always cherish. I am honored now to be working with Geert Claassens to put this volume together in recognition of Dave’s sixty-fifth birthday. It took a great deal of conspiring, and whispering, but the original essays in this collection reflect the extensive and lasting impact that David F. Johnson has had, and will continue to have, on our scholarship, on the field of medieval studies, and on generations of scholars to come.
Larissa Tracy
In May 1989, I attended the Kalamazoo conference for the first time. It was very exciting to be there and meet a lot of my ‘footnotes’ (I was still working on my dissertation on Middle Dutch Crusade Epics). It was wonderful and very stimulating to talk to people whose research I was using extensively in my study in Nijmegen. But at the end of a session I was attending, a Dutch colleague (he is also in this volume, Rolf Bremmer Jr) pulled me by the arm and said: ‘Geert, there is someone I want you to meet – he is a young American scholar and wants to do something with Middle Dutch literature’. And so I was introduced to Dave Johnson, who indeed made a vividly young and American impression on me, but soon turned out to be an excellent master of the Dutch language (and slightly older than me). We looked for a quiet place to talk. We found such a place and the talking never ended…
Both of us were convinced that modern research was (and still is) hampered by the fact that modern academic training in languages and literature is dominated by a division along political boundaries and the language barriers implied by them. From my own research I knew that looking at medieval literature from a multilingual perspective could be very fruitful and Dave had been coming to the same conviction from his research. We both agreed that the position of Middle Dutch literature within research done outside the Netherlands and Belgium, was unjustly diminished by the simple fact that too few scholars outside the Low Countries master the Dutch language, let alone the Middle Dutch dialects. But we were also convinced that the corpus of Middle Dutch literature is of such richness that it would be a shame to keep it hidden from the scholarly world abroad. Yet how could we convince the scholarly world that learning Dutch and Middle Dutch is extremely rewarding in the research of medieval literature? By translating texts into English, preferably published with the original in juxtaposition. At that point Dave confessed that he was working on a translation of the Roman van Walewein, an original Middle Dutch Arthurian romance and, in addition, a damned fine and exciting story! He was looking for a Dutch collaborator with whom he could polish his translation for he himself was not a native speaker of Dutch. This started a collaboration that now spans several decades, has engendered a few published volumes, and still continues (as there are still Middle Dutch Arthurian romances left that need translation), a collaboration that is marked by creativity and craftsmanship, sometimes by pressure (the deadline is drawing near!) and perseverance (yes, we made it!), but always with a good sense of humor and a very deep and warm friendship. I will not muse on the many happy and stimulating moments of our meetings, for then I should confess that these meetings are always too few (there is an awful lot of water between Leuven and Tallahassee, I am afraid), but acknowledging this underpins my ‘general opinion’ on Dave Johnson: he is a real bridge builder, in the scholarly sense of that word, but most certainly in its human sense – a true friend.
Geert H. M. Claassens
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS WORK IS a labor of love that has its origins in a conversation at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo in 2016 and has involved much plotting and much conspiring. Several people were part of the initial scheme, and we are very grateful for all the input we have gotten over the last few years as this project took shape. Our thanks go out to our contributors and to those who are part of this project, even if just in spirit: Fred Biggs, Lindy Brady, Niall Brady, Edward Christie, Patrick Conner, Patricia Dailey, Janet Schrunk Ericksen, Thomas D. Hanks, Wendy Marie Hoofnagle, Andrew Pfrenger, Robert Rouse, Carla María Thomas, and Charles Wright. A special thanks goes out to Asa Simon Mittman and Kevin Whetter, who served as sounding boards at various points in this project. None of this would have happened without the collaboration and support of Caroline Palmer.
Above all, we are grateful to our friends and families who provided stability and care as we worked through this volume during a global pandemic that threw so many things into disarray. Larissa Tracy would especially like to thank Parris Jensen for keeping her sane over the last year and a half, which made finishing this volume possible.
ABBREVIATIONS
ASM Michael Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A Bibliographical Handlist of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014)
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1960)
DOE Dictionary of Old English Corpus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)
ECA 2 Epistolae Karolini Aevi. Tomus II, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae 4 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895)
EETS o.s. Early English Text Society, Original Series
EETS s.s. Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series
HE Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (OMT)
L–G Martha Asher, trans., The Merlin Continuation in Lancelot-Grail, ed. Norris J. Lacy, 5 vols (London: Garland, 1993–99), 4.173
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin: Weidmannos, 1916)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
OE Old English
OED Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
ON Old Norse
PASE Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England: http://www.pase.ac.uk
PIE Proto-Indo-European
PLAC 1 Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Tomus I, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Poetae Latini Medii Aevi 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1881)
Suite Merlin: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. Gaston Paris and Jacob Ulrich, 2 vols (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1886), 2.131–36
Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
Larissa Tracy and Geert H. M. Claassens
THE COMPLEXITY OF the medieval world is often obscured by the tendency of many modern scholars to focus on specific areas of research, only occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of their chosen discipline. Despite teaching across the period, Old English critics rarely look forward to later texts, Middle English scholars generally look back only so far and, often, neither looks to continental traditions unless they are searching for sources. But medieval textual traditions were not so isolated, and even though Old English changed over time, giving way to Middle English in its various dialects, they developed into new forms of writing and expression that reflected different social concerns and tastes which crossed geographical and chronological boundaries. One of the strongest cross-cultural currents was that between England and the Low Countries, which exchanged people, ideas, textiles, and were often allied against larger enemies. Both English and Middle Dutch textual traditions owe a great debt to the corpus of medieval French literature, often working from the same (or similar) sources; but they also adapted ideas, motifs, and tropes to suit their own audiences and occasionally shared their literary endeavors between them. Unfortunately, scholarship on these cross-cultural exchanges is not always accessible, especially if it is written in modern Dutch. As Geert Claassens explains, ‘In short, the language barrier that exists … prevents many foreign scholars from becoming acquainted with a broad corpus of texts that in the Middle Ages formed part of a much more homogenous European literary culture’.
1 Geert H. M. Claassens, foreword to Penninc and Pieter Vostaert: Roman van Walewein, ed. and trans. David F. Johnson (New York: Garland, 1992), p. xi. Few scholars have contributed as much to this wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts across the channel than David F. Johnson. His work traces the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, through later medieval romances in both England and the Low Countries, highlighting the connections between texts, motifs, and themes. This volume takes the work of Johnson as its starting point, investigating the intricacies of early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the variations in reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly
Beowulf, and tracking those complexities through later Arthurian English and Middle Dutch romances and drama. While this volume is dedicated to Johnson, it contains original research that engages in a dialogue across multiple medieval disciplines with the aim of providing a richer and more nuanced view of the medieval literary past in England and the Low Countries in their European contexts. These essays show the advantages of working across disciplines, as well as integrating historical discussions with literary analysis and material culture from the pre-Conquest period to the later Middle Ages.
Tracing the connections between Old English texts and manuscripts and Middle English and Middle Dutch romances, including codicological and paleographical analysis, textual motifs, and literary theory may seem a bit of a stretch. However, as the interdisciplinary work of Johnson illustrates, there are far greater similarities between these periods and traditions than differences. Our understanding of the complexities of early medieval English manuscript production is hampered by the limited number of surviving sources, but new ground is being broken constantly in the field of Old English literature, language, codicology, and paleography. In 2010, Johnson and Winfried Rudolf revealed new traces in no fewer than eight late eleventh- and early twelfth-century manuscripts of work by a monk identified as ‘Coleman’ who served as chancellor to St Wulfstan in 1089 and prior of the cell of Westbury-on-Trym in 1093.
2 David F. Johnson and Winfried Rudolf, ‘More Notes by Coleman’, Medium Ævum 79.1 (2010): 1–13 at p. 1. Ultimately, Johnson and Rudolf conclude that the identification of Coleman in one specific manuscript – British Library Cotton Oth C.i – ‘adds further crucial evidence that an Old English life of Gregory, though unknown, was indeed composed by him’.
3 Johnson and Rudolf, ‘More Notes by Coleman’, p. 13. Research on hand-writing samples like this provides important pieces in the puzzle of early medieval England; reconstructing the reading and writing habits of individuals who were part of the larger pre-Conquest English world allows for greater understanding of religious and social concerns in that community, and puts a potential name to previously anonymous works of the Middle Ages. That work is furthered here by the contributions of Roy Liuzza, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Thomas A. Bredehoft and Rachel C. S. Duke, and Elaine Treharne and Catherine E. Karkov.
In the first essay in this collection, Liuzza reconstructs two fragments of a lost manuscript of the Old English Gospels and their potential connection to the important Exeter Book. Next, Bremmer examines the reception of Bishop Wærferth of Worcester’s late ninth-century translation into Old English of Pope Gregory the Great’s Dialogi (The Dialogues) (late sixth-century) by late nineteenth-century editors, particularly those who produced the 1907 edition. Bremmer considers the renewed philological interest in the Dialogi, especially that aimed at establishing a reliable text edition, which would enable its analysis by both linguists and literary critics. The recent discovery of a set of printer’s proofs from Heinrich Krebs’s never-completed and never-published 1878 edition of the Old English Dialogi is the focus of Bredehoft and Duke’s chapter, in which they discuss the contents and condition of this rare find, which has just been presented to the library at Florida State University in honor of David Johnson, who has championed the Dialogi’s value over the years. In a similar vein, Karkov and Treharne turn their attention to the relationship between the makers of artistic objects, including manuscripts, and their art. They investigate the presence of artists within their own work and the way individual craftspeople were identified with those artefacts, specifically regarding handwriting in English manuscripts between the eighth and twelfth centuries.
The first chapters illustrate the continuity between early periods of English book production and later centuries, as well as the continuously shared linguistic and artistic traits. Old English did not die out the moment the Normans conquered the English at Hastings in 1066.
4 Elaine Treharne looks at texts from 1020–1220, arguing that there is not only linguistic continuity in this period, but that texts written during this time consciously participate in a narrative of national identity. While the political entity of pre-Conquest England ceased to exist on 14 October 1066, the language, customs, traditions and even nationalistic sentiments (in whatever form) could not be turned off like a switch. Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 9. See also: Thomas Hahn, ‘Early Middle English’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 61–91 at p. 63. England had been conquered by the Danes before the Normans arrived (1013 – Swein Forkbeard; 1016 – Swein’s son Cnut) and at those times the language of the English did not falter or fade. Old English transformed into a newer, more composite form that integrated both Latin and French loanwords, reflecting a post-Conquest cultural synthesis, but also challenging the primacy of Anglo-Norman French. Middle English first appears as a literary language in the late twelfth century alongside Anglo-Norman French texts written in England by authors of mixed French and English descent. But several Middle English romances develop independently of French or Norman sources. What is frequently thought of as two distinct periods – Old and Middle English – actually share many similarities in poetic structure, content, and ideals.
5 David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne, eds., Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 2–3. Middle Dutch poets adapted the work of French authors into new romances for their own audiences, and these manuscripts raise many of the same questions regarding compilation, construction, and transmission. One of the ‘most significant witnesses to the reception of King Arthur in the medieval Low Countries’ is the
Lancelot Compilation, which survives in The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 129 A 10.
6 Dutch Romances III: Five Romances from the Lancelot Compilation, ed. and trans. David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), p. 3. In his essay, Frank Brandsma focuses on paleographical detail in the same vein as Karkov and Treharne, but with specific attention to the manuscript of the
Lancelot Compilation and the marginal corrections made to four of the Middle Dutch Arthurian romances included in this manuscript.
7 A short introduction to this manuscript (and to Middle Dutch Arthurian literature in general) is offered in Geert H. M. Claassens and David F. Johnson, ‘Arthurian Literature in the Medieval Low Countries: An Introduction’, in King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries, ed. Claassens and Johnson (Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2000), pp. 1–34.As several of the chapters explain, the concerns of medieval authors, compilers, and scribes were consistent through the early Middle Ages into the later centuries and were shared regardless of geography. Other contributions take a similar approach to the continuity of narrative identities – identities that were fashioned in response to cultural concerns specific to their geo-political bodies, but which, at the same time, reveal a number of shared traits regardless of whether they were written in Old English, Middle English, Middle Dutch, or French. In his chapter, Martin Foys applies Media Theory to his analysis of
Beowulf and hagiographic accounts of St Edmund’s martyrdom, illuminating the ways in which somatic violence ‘reveal[s] the medieval body to be a material node in a social network of secular, spiritual, and juridical representations preoccupied with relationships between bodies, body parts, money, worship, words, and information; to employ Armand Mattelart’s term, a
constellation of communicational practices’.
8 Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication, trans. S. Emanuel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3 and 14, quoted in Martin Foys, ‘The Body as Media in Early Medieval England’, in this volume p. 67. He writes, ‘When medieval bodies are physically altered, whether through violence or other technologically-derived means, they can also become inflected bodies, the carriers of new information.’
9 Foys, ‘The Body as Media in Early Medieval England’, pp. 68–69. Stephen Harris explores the violence done to Grendel in
Beowulf, offering new modes of interpreting the verb
onfeng ‘received or snatched’ in relation to Hel and reimagining the diverse interpretations of this moment in the epic poem. Danielle Allor and Stacy S. Klein discuss the episodes of bodily sharing and corporeal fusion found in Goscelin of St Bertin’s
Liber confortatorius (
Book of Encouragement and Consolation) (c. 1080), and the implications for reading anchorite texts like the
Liber through the lens of Disability Studies. While the heroic literature of the pre-Conquest English is, essentially, ‘replaced by the romances of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries’, there are continuities in the literary patterns and influences between the two bodies of work.
10 Johnson and Treharne, eds., Readings in Medieval Texts, pp. 2 and 4. As Nicola Royan explains, ‘like all attempts to put clear dates on cultural phenomena, these boundaries stress discontinuity, whereas literary patterns and influence reach across political and temporal boundaries’.
11 Nicola Royan, ‘Scottish Literature’, in Readings in Medieval Texts, ed. Johnson and Treharne, pp. 354–69 at pp. 355–56. Several of the contributions in this collection address patterns and influences that are not defined by one precise moment in time, nor by geographical or linguistic boundaries, focusing instead on shared thematic concerns such as identity in works that bridge the ‘division’ between English and Continental literatures.
One of the most notable literary figures who emerges in the development of Middle English sources, beginning with Laȝamon’s
Brut written between 1190 and 1215, is King Arthur. As Johnson writes, ‘the undisputed centre-piece of Laȝamon’s poem is the story of King Arthur: his conception, birth, rise to power, reign, and fall, an expansive narrative, which, in Laȝamon’s version, takes the reader almost to the end of the chronicle’.
12 David F. Johnson, ‘The Middle English Brut Chronicles’, in Readings in Medieval Texts, ed. Johnson and Treharne, pp. 213–28 at p. 217. The story of Arthur forms the backdrop for numerous medieval romances and chronicles, in a variety of languages and textual traditions; Arthur and his court feature as intertextual motifs upon which contemporary social and political concerns can be projected. Johnson writes that the corpus of Arthurian romances in Middle Dutch is ‘an incredibly rich manifestation of one of the most enduring textual traditions in European literary history’, one that has been ‘largely overlooked’ by non-Dutch speaking critics.
13 David F. Johnson, ‘Middle Dutch Romances: What are They and Why Should We Read Them?’, Arthuriana 15.2 (Summer 2005): 1–2 at p. 1. Johnson’s edition and translation (with Claassens) of the various texts in the
Lancelot Compilation make these narratives accessible to Anglophone audiences for the first time – as several of the articles in this volume attest – allowing for interdisciplinary, cross-cultural research, and comparative analysis between Middle Dutch texts, French sources, and English variations and analogues. Marjolein Hogenbirk, Bart Besamusca, Roel Zemel, Jamie C. Fumo, K. S. Whetter, Larissa Tracy, Christopher Jensen, Geert H. M. Claassens, Thomas Hill, and Elizabeth Archibald investigate the complexities of Arthurian intertextuality in Middle English, Middle Welsh, Old French, and Middle Dutch sources.
Later chapters focus on influence and adaptation among various medieval literatures, including Latin and vernaculars like Middle English, Old French, and Middle Dutch. Research, especially in literature, is hindered by modern disciplines which are defined by the country/language area where scholars are trained, and which so markedly contrasts with the medieval literary world where political boundaries usually did not coincide with language barriers. Moreover, those political divisions were much more fluid, just as language barriers of the time were more flexible than those of modern, standardized languages. Hence the necessity to take a multilingual approach when studying medieval literature.
Narrative identities were rarely restricted by language and geography; texts and characters were often refashioned to fit the needs of their specific audience, but there are echoes of English traditions in Middle Dutch texts and traces of English motifs, in addition to French, in Middle Dutch literature.
14 This vivid literary and cultural ‘migration’ has been charted for the exchange between the French area and the continental Germanic area (for the period 1100–1300) in Germania Litteraria Mediaevalis Francigena: Handbuch der deutschen und niederländischen mittelalterlichen literarischen Sprache, Formen, Motive, Stoffe und Werke französischer Herkunft (1100–1300), 7 vols., ed. Geert H. M. Claassens, Fritz Peter Knapp and René Pérennec (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010–15). England and the Low Countries, especially (but not exclusively) Flanders, were closely related during the medieval period. Despite the presence of sizeable Flemish communities in England, Anglo-Flemish literary relations in the later Middle Ages ‘have not been subjected to much scrutiny’.
15 Felicity Riddy, ‘Giving and Receiving: Exchange in the Roman van Walewein and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthurian Literature XVII: Originality and Tradition in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein, ed. Bart Besamusca and Erik Kooper (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 101–14 at p. 102. Larissa Tracy discusses these cultural contacts between the Low Countries and England, and the relationship between their literary traditions in specific reference to torture, in Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 70–107. David Johnson directed Tracy to Roman van Walewein when she began her research for that project. However Anglo-Flemish contacts – political, dynastic, economic, and literary – were intense and very visible from the second half of the eleventh century. There were so many Flemings involved in the Norman Conquest that William I singled them out with the Normans and the English in his writs of protection.
16 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 113–14. William was married to Matilda, a daughter of the Flemish Count Baldwin V, so there was a strong dynastic connection between England and Flanders from the start of his reign. Those connections were affected by war, but as Felicity Riddy writes, the ‘vagaries of the war between England and France produced a pattern of shifting Flemish allegiances between then and the end of the century, but trade between the regions was always important, particularly for the English cloth industry.’
17 Riddy, ‘Giving and Receiving’, p. 102. Monks crossed the channel in both directions and this exchange led to the oldest surviving piece of medieval Dutch literature being written in Rochester, England. At the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century, a monk wrote as a
probatio pennae ‘pen test’ on the inside of the back cover of a manuscript of Æelfric’s
Catholic homilies (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 340, fol. 169v), some lines of what might have been a love song: ‘Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan hinase hi[c] [a]nda thu uuat unbidden uue nu’ [All birds have begun to build their nest, except me and you. What are we still waiting for?]. Ever since these lines were discovered by Kenneth Sisam in 1932,
18 K. Sisam, ‘MSS. Bodley 340 and 342: Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies’, The Review of English Studies 9 (1933): 1–12 at p. 11. See also: M. Schönfeld, ‘Een Oudnederlandse zin uit de elfde eeuw’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 52 (1933): 1–9. they have triggered discussions amongst scholars about their background, meaning, and exact linguistic features (West Flemish and/or Kentish?).
19 See: Kenny Louwen, ‘Zur Lesart und Hybridität der altniederlandischen Federprobe’, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 65 (2009): 61–86 (with further bibliographical references concerning this debate). Even though this song fragment is not the oldest specimen of the Dutch language, it is considered the oldest example of
literature in Dutch and, as such, accepted in the canon of Dutch literature. Of course, Dutch literature did not start in England, but the
history of it probably did.
Centrally located between England, France, and Germany, Flanders witnessed the early growth of a ‘centralized feudal principality, had the most important cluster of commercial and manufacturing towns north of the Alps and probably attained a higher population density than any region of comparable size outside Italy.’
20 Bartlett, The Making of Europe, p. 113. It was also pulled between cultural influences. Robert Bartlett argues that even after the crises of the fourteenth century, Flanders had sufficient vitality to produce a vibrant culture of its own, which is misleadingly called ‘Burgundian’.
21 Ibid., p. 113. But this unique identity emerges earlier and is evident in the cultural distinctions drawn in Penninc and Pieter Vostaert’s thirteenth-century Middle Dutch
Roman van Walewein [hereafter
Walewein] (c. 1250), which survives in fourteenth-century manuscripts.
22 The romance of Walewein is preserved in two manuscripts: The ‘Leiden Manuscript’ (MS Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Letterkunde 195, ff. 121–82) which dates to 1350, is localized in West Flanders, and is the only complete surviving text of the romance; and the ‘Ghent Manuscript’ (MS Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, 1619), a fragment dated to the second half of the fourteenth century, of Flemish provenance. Johnson, ‘Introduction’, in Penninc and Pieter Vostaert:Roman van Walewein, ed. Johnson, p. xli. Walewein is a Flemish hero exalted against the French tradition who represents a cultural desire for civility and
courtoisie.
23 Riddy, ‘Giving and Receiving’, p. 102. Riddy writes,
perhaps the self-confident ambition of this thirteenth-century Flemish romance, in which the hero’s prowess earns him the right to a kingdom, picks up some of the drive to achievement that must have powered the social and economic transformation of Flanders and the struggles among the oligarchies of the Flemish towns, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Read this way, Walewein is not an exemplar of courtly conduct but a way of writing social energy. He is the consciousness of the upwardly mobile as well as of the nobility.
24 Ibid., p. 111.Penninc and Vostaert create a protagonist whose qualities could be recognized in any court in medieval Europe, especially in the Low Countries and in England. Riddy makes several compelling comparisons between
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [hereafter
SGGK] and
Walewein, suggesting that perhaps the
Gawain-poet was familiar with the earlier Middle Dutch text.
25 Ibid., p. 102. Literary influence did work both ways.
There are also very strong similarities between Chaucer’s
Miller’s Tale and a Middle Dutch
boerde (fabliau),
Heile van Beersele; both stories tell of a woman who tricks her ‘suitors’ and ridicules all of them. The parallel elements are so strong that a direct connection seems undeniable, but the question remains in which direction does the connection go? Does Geoffrey Chaucer owe a debt to Middle Dutch literature, or is it the other way around?
26 David Johnson examines this issue in relation to the occurrence of a Flemish expression in Sir Degaré in ‘“The Dwerff seyd neyther bow ne be”: ‘ne bu ne ba’ and ‘Sir Degaré’, line 703’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93.1 (1992): 121–23. Peter Beidler says that
The weight of probability is that the Middle Dutch tale, or a version very much like it, was a direct source of the English one. It is at least as old as Chaucer’s, is in a language of which Chaucer knew at least the rudiments, from a country that he visited and with whose merchants he had frequent dealings. […] We can with confidence take
Heile van Beersele as the basis for comparison with
The Miller’s Tale. Scholars wanting to see what is most distinctively original about Chaucer’s tale of Alisoun and her men must look carefully to the story of Heile and hers.
27 Peter G. Beidler, ‘The Miller’s Tale’, in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 2:249–75 at p. 265.Though not everyone agrees with Beidler’s assessment of the direction of that influence,
28 See e.g. Frederick M. Biggs, ‘The Miller’s Tale and Heile van Beersele’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 56 (2005): 497–523. the parallels remain an important witness to cross-channel literary exchange in the wake of commerce and diplomacy. Here, Fumo focuses on the connections between Chaucer’s work and the Low Countries, with particular attention to the
Squire’s Tale and
Walewein.
The rise of vernacular prose histories (and, arguably, Dutch-authored romance) was a ‘traumatic response to a crisis of aristocratic power in Flanders, in the face of an ever more aggressive French monarchy, the challenge to noble status and power from burgeoning mercantile wealth, and the impoverishing effects of rapid economic change.’
29 Daniel Power, ‘The Stripping of a Queen: Eleanor of Aquitaine in Thirteenth-Century Norman Tradition’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), pp. 115–35 at p. 121. Flanders was in danger of being subsumed by France and undermined from within, anxieties captured in the Othering of torture in
Walewein.
30 See: Tracy, Torture and Brutality. Torture is simply not a technique of civilized or courteous men, and so in
Walewein its presence indicates a deep-seated corruption in the societies that use it, and the adaptation of the French Arthurian tradition into a Flemish text brings this disparity into sharper focus. As Matthew James Driscoll writes, ‘Arthur and his knights were by this time quite clearly a mirror for the courts of Western Europe, and the
roman courtois everywhere forwarded the interests of the monarchy.’
31 Matthew James Driscoll, ‘The Cloak of Fidelity: Skikkjurímur, A Late-Medieval Icelandic Version of La Mantel Mautaillié’, in The Arthurian Yearbook I, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), pp. 107–33 at p. 111. These interests involved the appearance of justice and benevolence as much as chivalry, and
Walewein instructs monarchs in proper practice by distancing European courts from the Other. The popular Arthurian tradition provides a model of kingship, chivalry, and courtliness to which the Other can aspire, also aligning the values of thirteenth-century Flemish society with civilized values.
The thirteenth-century Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant, one of the most prolific writers of the medieval Low Countries, produced some Arthurian romances (based on Old French sources) at an early stage of his career, but since he considered himself a historian rather than a poet, he turned his back on the stories about Arthur’s knights of the Round Table when his years advanced. He did not reject King Arthur as a historical figure, but he rejected most of the stories connected with this famous king as being untrue, lies, and fantasy.
32 Claassens and Johnson, ‘Arthurian Literature in the Medieval Low Countries: An Introduction’, pp. 1–5. It seems that Maerlant was convinced of this by reading the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, a great
fabulator who passed off his fabrications as historiography. When, at the end of his career, Maerlant wrote his great world chronicle, the
Spiegel historiael (
Mirror of History) (1283–88), he decided to base his chapters about King Arthur, not on his main source, Vincent of Beauvais’s
Speculum historiale (
Mirror of History), but on a ‘specialized monograph’, Geoffrey’s
Historia regum Britanniae (
History of the Kings of Britain)
[hereafter
Historia]. Maerlant was convinced that Geoffrey’s pages on King Arthur were historically more reliable than the Old French works he must have known. His main criterion for trusting this book was Geoffrey’s use of Latin, not realizing that lies can be produced in Latin as well as in any other language.
33 For Maerlant’s use of the Historia regum Britanniae in the Spieghel historiael, see: Willem P. Gerritsen, ‘Jacob van Maerlant and Geoffrey of Monmouth’, An Arthurian Tapestry. Essays in Memory of Lewis Thorpe, ed. Kenneth Varty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981), pp. 368–88. Maerlant fell victim to his own principles as a historian but, in doing so, testifies to the influence of the
Historia on the Continent. Geoffrey’s invention of Arthur in the
Historia laid the foundation for centuries of medieval Arthuriana, culminating in Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur [hereafter
Morte]
(completed 1469–70; published 1485)
. Here, Christopher Jensen considers the rehabilitation of Guinevere in the later variations of the Arthurian tragedy, the stanzaic
Morte Arthur [hereafter s
MA]
(c. 1400), in contrast with Geoffrey’s account. Geoffrey’s influence is also visible in a specific feature of Middle Dutch Arthurian romances:
In the wider European tradition Walewein is one of the most important, if not uncontroversial, Knights of the Round Table, although he usually goes by another name: in Old French it is ‘Gauvain’, in Middle English ‘Gawain’ and in German ‘Gawan’. The fact that ‘Walewein’ is the name most commonly used in Middle Dutch may well point to a very early connection between the County of Flanders and Anglo-Norman England. Indeed, the resemblance to Geoffrey’s ‘Walwanius’ is at the least remarkable and Walewein’s presence in Geoffrey’s
Historia is sufficient reason for Maerlant to treat his as a historical figure: ‘About Lancelot I cannot write, nor about Perchevael or Eggravein, but the good Walewein I found included in his history [Geoffrey’s
Historia]’.
34 Geert H. M. Claassens, ‘A King and Two Foxes: Middle Dutch Literature on European Crossroads’, Dutch and Flemish Literature as World Literature, ed. Theo D’Haen (New York: Bloomsbury 2019), pp. 5–20 at p. 8.But Middle Dutch literature is not completely tied to the Old French tradition. Penninc, in the prologue of
Walewein, informs his audience that despite the great respect with which French literature was held in the Low Countries, his story is not a translation but a local romance,
35 Bart Besamusca, ‘The Low Countries’, Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), pp. 211–29 at p. 211. and in doing so he clearly separates his text and the actions of the story from French influence. The Flemish poets adapt and transform their material, most significantly in the figure of their protagonist whose blazon, compared to the Old French tradition, is highly polished, albeit there are indications in the story that his blazon is not entirely spotless, as Johan Winkelman has convincingly argued.
36 Johan H. Winkelman, ‘Arturs hof en Waleweins avontuur. Interpretatieve indicaties in de expositie van de Middelnederlandse Walewein’, Spiegel der Letteren 28 (1986): 1–33. For a different reading of Roman van Walewein see also: Veerle Uyttersprot, ‘“Entie hoofsche Walewein, sijn gheselle was daer ne ghein”: ironie en het Walewein-beeld in de Roman van Walewein en in de Europese middeleeuwse Arthurliteratuur’, PhD dissertation (Katholieke Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 2004). Unlike French manifestations of Gawain, the Walewein of the Middle Dutch tradition usually ‘makes his appearance as the ideal courtly knight, who does not lack a single virtue.’
37 Bart Besamusca, ‘Gauvain as Lover in the Middle Dutch Verse Romance Walewein’, Arthurian Yearbook II, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), pp. 3–12 at p. 4. The authors capitalize on an unfamiliar conception of Gawain/Walewein, manipulating reader response, rehandling and sometimes renewing ‘numerous themes and motifs already familiar to readers of Arthurian romance.’
38 Norris J. Lacy, ‘Convention and Innovation in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein’, Arthurian Literature XVII: Originality and Tradition in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein, ed. Bart Besamusca and Erik Kooper (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 47–62 at p. 50. The
Walewein-poets present their hero as the ideal knight and lover, in contrast with the Old French tradition that generally vilifies Gawain. Johnson and Claassens explain that one of
the most striking features of the representation of Gawain in Arthurian literature of the medieval Low Countries is his nearly universal portrayal as an exemplary figure. This is in contrast to the familiar trajectory of Gawain’s character in the long course of medieval Arthurian romance, especially in the French tradition, where Gawain’s Old French career takes him in a steadily descending arc, from ‘First Knight’ to womanizing scoundrel.
39 Dutch Romances III, ed. Johnson and Claassens, p. 6.This treatment of Gawain was not a universal phenomenon; northern French, Middle Dutch, and Middle English sources tend to rehabilitate Gawain.
40 Ibid. In the Low Countries specifically, Walewein was the ‘First Knight’ rather than Lancelot, and the Middle Dutch romances frequently refer to him as
der avonturen vader ‘the father of adventures’.
41 Ibid. In this volume three essays explore this shifting characterization of Gauvain, Walewein, and Gawain embodied in texts like
SGGK and
Walewein (Zemel, Whetter, Tracy).
First, Zemel looks at the three characters who also function as narrators in Walewein, including the titular character, Walewein, and considers the intentions of the poet in giving them this narrative platform. Next, Whetter reconsiders the supposed failure of Gawain in the exchange contests of SGGK through the lens of heroic isolation, generic trouble, and honour. He argues that Gawain is not a shameful failure, as many (but not all) Arthurian critics suggest, a but a great hero who is marked by his emotional rather than physical trauma because of his isolation from the Arthurian court. Larissa Tracy’s essay centers less on the rehabilitated figure of the English Gawain in SGGK, but on the natural form of the Green Knight. She argues that rather than being a fay entity who masquerades as the jovial host of Hautdesert, the Green Knight’s true form is that of the very human Lord Bertilak, magically transformed by Morgan le Fay to instruct and save Arthur’s court from its own failures.
This portrayal of Gawain fits perfectly in the Arthurian literary development outside France and is perhaps grounded in the oral tradition of the
matière de Bretagne circulating in Flanders as early as the beginning of the twelfth century.
42 Besamusca, ‘Gauvain as Lover’, pp. 9, 10–11. Here, Hogenbirk, Besamusca, Zemel, Fumo, and Claassens consider various aspects of Middle Dutch texts, many of which are multilingual themselves, and their relationship with English, French, and Latin sources. As Johnson writes, ‘while the examination of the sources, where known, of a medieval work should never eclipse consideration of the work itself, scrutinizing those sources may yield information about a medieval author’s attitudes, tastes, intentions, and methodology that he or she would never share with us directly’.
43 Johnson, ‘The Middle English Brut Chronicles’, p. 227. The essays on Middle Dutch literature in this volume highlight the political and social concerns of Dutch audiences, many of which were exactly the same as, or at least very similar to, those of their contemporaries across the channel with whom they shared ideas, materials, goods, skills, faith, and stories.
These shared motifs are also evident in construction of narrative identities across the corpus of medieval romances. One such reoccurring motif is the relationship between knights and their mothers. First, Thomas Hill analyses Chrétien de Troyes’ romance Perceval (c. 1180–90) and its parallels to the Welsh Math uab Mathonwy, the fourth branch of The Mabinogi in the complex matrix of names, gifts, and curses bestowed upon sons by their mothers. Later, Claassens examines the fraught conflict between lover and mother in the Middle Dutch Lanseloet van Denemerken, in which the ‘hero’ chooses to please his mother at the expense of his love for the beautiful Sanderijn with disastrous consequences for Lanseloet himself. Finally, Elizabeth Archibald surveys the often-absent connections between knights and their mothers in a range of Arthuriana from Chrétien’s Perceval to Guillaume le Clerc’s comic Fergus of Galloway (c. 1200), the Vulgate Cycle Estoire du Merlin, to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (published between 1859 and 1885), and modern popular culture.
The volume is arranged chronologically to encompass the scope of transmission and contact among Old and Middle English literature, Latin texts, and other vernaculars, specifically Middle Dutch. Essays include discussions of manuscript production and preservation, and reinterpretations of Beowulf that emphasize physicality, literary kin groups, and family identity – two areas to which David Johnson has made lasting contributions. Later chapters trace the inheritance of early medieval English literature in later textual traditions including Latin and vernaculars like Middle English, Old French, and Middle Dutch, with particular emphasis on the Arthurian tradition. Despite the diversity of subjects covered in this volume, the individual articles often share sources and the authors have tried to engage in dialogue with each other as much as possible. We have, therefore, compiled a select bibliography of primary and secondary texts which focus on the various aspects of medieval English and Dutch literatures. We have also included a bibliography of Johnson’s published works. Each author addresses Johnson’s work in their essay or explains the context in which Johnson inspired their arguments, while crafting their own innovative contribution to the field of medieval studies. This collection is not simply a showcase of affection for David Johnson, but a work compiled in the spirit of his own; engaging with interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research and sources in order to open new avenues of inquiry into the vast and intriguing world of the Middle Ages. Interdisciplinary work which challenges divisions of time, place, and language, and examines the diversities of identities in medieval Europe in the wider context has begun to shift conversations about the Middle Ages towards one of inclusion rather than exclusion. David Johnson has long been an advocate and a pioneer of such work, and this volume continues that task in his honour.