The Arthur of the Low Countries: The Arthurian Legend in Dutch and Flemish Literature

In the medieval Low Countries (modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands), Arthurian romance flourished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Middle Dutch poets translated French material (like Chrétien’s Conte du Graal and the Prose Lancelot), but also created romances of their own, like Walewein. This book provides a current overview of the Dutch Arthurian material and the research that it has provoked. Geographically, the region is a crossroads between the French and Germanic spheres of influence, and the movement of texts and manuscripts (west to east) reflects its position, as revealed by chapters on the historical context, the French material and the Germanic Arthuriana of the Rhinelands. Three chapters on the translations of French verse texts, the translations of French prose texts, and on the indigenous romances form the core of the book, augmented by chapters on the manuscripts, on Arthur in the chronicles, and on the post-medieval Arthurian material..

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786836847

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Bart Besamusca and Frank Brandsma

In 1951, Maartje Draak (1907–95) published Arthur en zijn tafelronde, an anthology of Middle Dutch Arthurian stories for high school pupils, one of the first of its kind (Gerritsen 2019, 154–6). Offering modern Dutch translations of unfamiliar medieval words in the margins of the page, she presents episodes of the texts to her readers without any introduction, providing general information on the genre and historical context at the end of the book. In that final chapter, she writes:

Waardevolle verhalen hebben een heel lang leven, en omgekeerd: hun lange leven bewijst hun waarde. Soms duiken ze op in een ander milieu, soms lijken ze een eeuw te slapen, maar ze bezitten het vermogen om hun onvergankelijke waarheid aan telkens nieuwe geslachten van mensen te doen zien. De beste ervan kunnen zich bovendien steeds vernieuwen. In verschillende tijden kunnen ze geladen worden met verschillende problemen, de aandacht kan vallen op verschillende aspecten. Iedere generatie ‘haalt er iets uit’. (Draak 1979 (reprint of 1951), 116–17)

(Great stories have a very long life, and their longevity proves their worth. Sometimes they re-emerge in a new environment, sometimes they seem to sleep for a century, but they have the power always to show their eternal truth to new generations of people. Moreover, the best of them are able to renew themselves time and again. In different times they may be made to present different issues, our attention may be drawn to different aspects. Each generation ‘takes something from them’.)

This book is about Draak’s subject, the Arthurian stories of the medieval Low Countries, their heyday in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and their afterlife. This corpus was for the first time introduced to international Arthurian scholarship in Roger Sherman Loomis’s Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Sparnaay 1959). Almost forty years later, the chapter in this book was updated in Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, edited by Norris J. Lacy (Besamusca 1996a). More recent overviews appeared in the third volume in the series ‘Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages’, The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature, edited by W. H. Jackson and S. A. Ranawake (Besamusca 2000), in the introduction to King Arthur in the Medieval Low Countries, edited by Geert Claassens and David F. Johnson (Claassens and Johnson 2000), and in A History of Arthurian Scholarship, edited by Norris J. Lacy (Besamusca 2006). As yet, however, a major book-length reference work on Middle Dutch Arthuriana does not exist. As we were preparing our contribution ‘État présent: Arthurian literature in Middle Dutch’ for JIAS (Besamusca and Brandsma 2015), the plan for this book was made, stimulated by the welcome invitation from the Series Editor, Ad Putter. The fascinating Arthuriana in Middle and modern Dutch deserve a volume of their own in this authoritative series, since the texts have a special and intriguing position in the European Arthurian literature of the Middle Ages and in the vestiges of Arthurian culture today.

The corpus of Middle Dutch Arthurian texts consists of translations from the French alongside original compositions. Verse predominates as the literary medium, yet there are also texts in prose. Sometimes the author is a famous or at least known Dutch poet, but more often the writers remain anonymous; the texts were composed in different regions and dialects; they were occasionally transmitted in single-text manuscripts, but mainly in collections of romances. The historical situation of the Low Countries and especially the multilingual culture of the county of Flanders was conducive to the emergence of romances in the vernacular, and from Flanders the texts moved east to the duchy of Brabant and other regions. Chapter 1 describes the historical background and analyses the social and cultural contexts. Although few patrons are known for Middle Dutch Arthurian texts, observations on where and when the romances were produced lead to the hypothesis that they were meant for a broad audience of cultured laymen, rather than for members of the highest court circles, who would enjoy their Arthurian tales in French. This audience is to be found in the circles where well-to-do city dwellers and nobility meet.

Although issues of patronage often remain unresolved, it is possible to locate and date the texts with reasonable certainty. Likewise, we may reconstruct from the surviving fragments the texts that were composed at a certain time and in a particular area, even if they have come down to us only in an adapted version inserted into the showpiece of Middle Dutch Arthuriana, the Lancelot Compilation. This cycle of romances is preserved in a codex that came into being in Brabant around 1320 and is the object of much research and speculation. Originally a set of two volumes, only one codex has been preserved. In spite of this loss, the extant volume contains no less than ten of the nineteen Arthurian romances of the Low Countries that are known to us today.

The multilingual culture of Flanders and the preference of the highest nobility for French as the language of culture led to the production of French Arthurian romances in this region. Well-known examples are Chrétien’s Conte du Graal and Manessier’s Perceval Continuation, composed for the Flemish courts of Philippe and Jeanne de Flandre, respectively. Manuscripts containing French Arthurian romances were also commissioned in Flanders. These codices form an important part of the Arthurian corpus, as Chapter 2 explains.

The manuscripts and manuscript fragments of the Middle Dutch texts are discussed in the third chapter, ranging from the luxurious codex of which the fragments of Lantsloot vander Haghedochte are the remains to the rather shabby working copy of the Lancelot Compilation. Some texts, like the Graal–Merlijn romances by Jacob van Maerlant and the Merlin Continuation by Lodewijk van Velthem, have been preserved both in Middle Dutch fragments and in a more or less complete form in a Middle Low German copy. In Chapter 3, pride of place goes to the intriguing Lancelot Compilation manuscript, now MS The Hague, KB, 129 A 10, which apart from revealing telling traces of the phases of its making also features unique annotations by a contemporaneous corrector. The words and signs the corrector added in the margins and interlinearly provide insight into the performance of a medieval story to a listening audience.

In addition to the chivalric romances, references to and stories of Arthur are also found in Middle Dutch historiographical sources. The two authors already mentioned, Jacob van Maerlant and Lodewijk van Velthem, produced most of this material, but other chroniclers were also interested in Arthurian history. The fourth chapter discusses these texts.

The analysis of the Arthurian romances in the central chapters (5–7) of this book is organised on the basis of the source material. As translations of French verse romances were the first Arthurian texts to be produced in the Low Countries, they come first in Chapter 5, followed by the original compositions that appeared in the wake of these translations, in Chapter 6. Many of the romances examined in these two chapters were included in the Lancelot Compilation, which in Chapter 7 is treated within the larger framework of renditions of the French prose romances. For the texts that were not based on French sources, the anthropological term ‘indigenous’ has been in use for some time in Dutch and Flemish Arthurian scholarship. It conveys the status of these texts adequately, as products of the imagination of Middle Dutch authors and original contributions to the Arthurian genre, following the generic pattern of the chivalric quest and making use of the standard cast of Arthurian characters, with special attention to Gauvain, called Walewein in Dutch. In Chapters 6 and 7, the striking appreciation for Walewein – evident in his recurring epithet ‘Father of Adventure’ – is illustrated.

The various translations of the French Prose Lancelot (at least three independent renditions, possibly five) feature prominently in Chapter 7, together with the two text collections that could be described as a Merlin Cycle and a Lancelot Cycle which appear in the manuscripts Burgsteinfurt MS 28 and The Hague MS 129 A 10, respectively. The genesis of the Lancelot Compilation, to which much research has been devoted in the past few decades, is discussed here in full, with special attention to the role Lodewijk van Velthem played in this process. This author features in several of the chapters in this book. He owned the codex, may have been the compiler of the Lancelot Cycle and/or its corrector, and may even have read aloud from his codex to a listening audience.

In Chapter 7, the final Dutch representative of the Arthurian genre, dating from c.1540, concludes the analysis of the medieval texts. This text is a prose rendition of the Merlin story produced in the form of an early printed book. It is exceptional as the only Dutch Arthurian text to make it to the printing press and because it is translated from English rather than French.

Arthurian authors were accustomed to looking to the south for inspiration, yet there is also a considerable amount of material that tends eastward and is situated in the Germanic regions, especially the Rhineland. Chapter 8 takes up this issue, discussing texts like the Rhineland Merlin and the Middle Franconian Parcheval. It also examines the Blankenheim Lancelot manuscript, in which the story is said to be based on a Flemish source text.

After the Middle Ages, it took a while for the Arthurian material to re-emerge and take up its cultural role again. Only in 1888, as Chapter 9 reports, did Arthur return to Dutch literature. Until the Second World War, Arthurian retellings appear incidentally, but after that, the production and diversity of Arthurian material grows exponentially, especially in media like the comic book and plays for children and adults. This final chapter proves, together with all the previous chapters, Draak’s words to be true. The Arthurian stories have the capacity to renew themselves and provide each new generation with new messages. Arthur is the ‘Koning voor eens en altijd’, the Once and Future King, as the title of a still popular Dutch translation of T. H. White’s classic calls him.

Taken together, the chapters of this book reveal several tendencies, which are not all central to the argument in those chapters, but deserve to be mentioned and briefly explained here:

•the meaning of the Arthurian tales for their contemporary audiences:

•leadership and other lessons,

•prodesse et delectare ,

•chivalry as a code of conduct;

•the importance of the father-motif in many of the texts;

•the key roles of Lanceloet and Walewein;

•the incorporation of most of the romances into a pseudo-historical framework (the Lancelot and Merlin Cycles);

•the tendency in Dutch and Flemish scholarship either to study one romance in detail or to focus on the Lancelot Compilation.

In many of the romances, exemplary leadership in military, political and domestic matters is presented to the medieval audience. These stories frequently contain educational elements. For the Graal–Merlijn texts by Jacob van Maerlant, a didactic function has quite convincingly been argued by scholars on the basis of its patronage and the author’s function as sexton of the church that was supported by the patron’s family. At Voorne in Zeeland, the seat of rather influential noblemen in the Holland court circles, Jacob may well have been in charge of educating a group of aristocratic boys, including the future Count Floris V. In his classroom, the story of Merlin and the young Arthur, with its lessons on how to gain and keep power and how to manoeuvre politically, would have been excellent educational material. Moreover, the figure of the father, often missing or unavailable to the protagonist, is an important motif in many of the romances and that would perhaps be a recognisable family situation for members of a young aristocratic audience.

There are more stories which have a prominent didactic slant, like the lessons in courtliness provided by Walewein to the impetuous young knight Moriaen in the romance of the same name. In Torec, wise men in a ‘Chamber of Wisdom’ discuss how the nobility should behave. The utilitas of the texts, however, always goes hand in hand with delectatio: these are stories to enjoy, exciting and sometimes funny, about emotionally engaging characters.

In a very general sense, the image of chivalry as it emerges from the Middle Dutch romances is that of a rather down-to-earth code of conduct, connected to the everyday life of the characters. The translation of the Queste del Saint Graal, for example, faithfully recounts the events of the Grail quest, but downplays the religious and biblical dimensions of the French original. The Walewein presents a flying chessboard as a worldly alternative to the Grail. In the Lancelot Compilation, no extra Grail romances or episodes were added (e.g. taken from the Perceval Continuations in French that were popular in Flanders), but stories about the worldly adventures of a young knight coming to Arthur’s court, about the great heroes Walewein and Lanceloet, rather than the lofty Galahad.

Walewein is the main man in Middle Dutch Arthurian romance. In Penninc and Pieter Vostaert’s Walewein he is the protagonist, whereas in many other (French) romances he serves as a foil to other main characters. Even in the short Lanceloet en het hert met de witte voet (Lancelot and the Stag with the White Foot) it is Walewein who steals the show, and in Walewein ende Keye Walewein proves to be the ideal Arthurian knight. The hypothesis that the alternation between Walewein and Lancelot was one of the guiding principles in the composition of the Lancelot Compilation helps explain the sequence of inserted romances, even when the dominating core texts based on the French Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu trilogy will keep us from calling the codex the Walewein and Lancelot Compilation. Whereas in French romance, the character of Gauvain loses prestige in texts like the Queste del Saint Graal and the Prose Tristan, no such thing happens in the indigenous Middle Dutch romances. Walewein rules.

The appreciation of the Walewein figure is a good example of how Dutch and Flemish Arthurian scholarship could benefit from more comparative studies, with both the Middle Dutch corpus and the international Arthurian literature as material. Intertextuality, multilingualism, the processes of cyclification and the emotional impact of the stories have been studied within just such a framework and this focus has turned out to be productive and inspirational. The imagery of love and the ideology of chivalry as a (didactic) code of conduct could also be studied from this point of view. Fortunately, many romances are available in English line-by-line bilingual translations, thanks to the prodigious efforts of David Johnson and Geert Claassens: Walewein (Johnson 1992; Johnson and Claassens 2000a), Ferguut (Johnson and Claassens 2000b) and the five romances that are interpolated between the Queeste vanden Grale and Arturs doet in the Lancelot Compilation (Johnson and Claassens 2003). Baukje Finet-Van der Schaaf has published bilingual French translations of Moriaen, the Ridder metter mouwen and Lanceloet en het hert met de witte voet (2009, 2012). Johan Winkelman and Gerhard Wolf have produced a bilingual German translation of the Walewein (2010).

Since its start, in 1991, the series Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages has done much more than replacing the collective volume that was published under the same title, edited by Roger Sherman Loomis (and included a chapter on ‘The Dutch Romances’, Sparnaay, 1959). It offers in-depth and comprehensive overviews of the Arthurian legend in the various cultures of medieval Europe, allowing scholars to connect the Arthurian material in their own language to the Arthurian production of other cultures. It is our hope that this volume on the Arthurian legend in the medieval Low Countries will likewise serve the needs of both Dutch Arthurian scholarship, in presenting an up-to-date survey, and the international community, in facilitating access to a fascinating body of Arthurian manuscripts and texts.

1

THE CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE LOW COUNTRIES

Bram Caers and Mike Kestemont

1. Prologue

The famous Manesse codex (Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Pal. germ. 848) features a series of full-page miniatures illustrating the monumental anthology of medieval lyrics that it contains.¹ On one of these (fol. 18r), we find a dramatic depiction of the Duke of Brabant, John I, who leads his troops into the Battle of Worringen (5 June 1288). The image shows a crucial episode in the history of the Low Countries when the duke decisively defeated the Archbishop of Cologne in the Limburg Succession War. Arguably the most striking pictorial element in this image is the conspicuous dragon helmet covering John’s head. Scholars have been quick to identify this as a reference to King Arthur’s legendary helmet with an engraved dragon. The helmet was famously introduced into Arthurian lore in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, with a playful allusion to the Celtic name of Arthur’s father – the ‘pen-dragon’ or head of dragons. This well-known illustration is but one of the many attestations of the cultural prominence of Arthurian literature in the medieval Low Countries, pervading all layers of society, especially the highest nobility, who sought to identify with the Celtic leader on many occasions.

It is not an exaggeration to state that the matière de Bretagne, as elsewhere in medieval Europe, was a defining characteristic of the Low Countries’ courtly culture during the high Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the Arthurian literary heritage extant from this part of Europe, and especially the specific historical context in which it arose, has not always received the international scholarly attention it deserves. In his acclaimed history of thirteenth-century vernacular Dutch literature, Frits van Oostrom, for instance, emphasised that the fact that the very first chivalric Grail romance was produced in the Low Countries merits a more prominent place in our collective cultural memory (Oostrom 2006, 218). At the very height of his fame, Chrétien de Troyes was asked by the Count of Flanders, Philip of Alsace, to write Perceval or the Conte du Graal, one of the most remarkable products of medieval Arthurian literature. Additionally, there are few places in the world where the medieval Grail legend is more alive than in Flanders, even today – in Bruges, for instance, the Procession of the Holy Blood has been held annually (with some exceptions) for over seven hundred years.²

To understand the unique contribution of the Low Countries to medieval Arthurian literature, it is crucial to gain insight into the complex political history of the region, taking account of its singular position on a linguistic and cultural crossroads. In the Middle Ages, the Low Countries consisted of an archipelago of local centres of political power, connected to each other through political alliances, marriages and intense cultural exchange. In the present contribution, we aim to introduce the reader to this complicated historical reality. At the core of our argument lies the observation that a defining feature of the Low Countries has been the region’s role as a mediator and link between different cultures and linguistic regions in Europe, most notably as an active interpreter between the Romance and Germanic spheres.

2. Geography and Politics

The term ‘Low Countries’ (Du.: ‘Lage Landen’ – Fr.: ‘Pays-Bas’ – Ger.: ‘Niederlände’) is nowadays taken to roughly correspond to the territories of Belgium and The Netherlands – sometimes including the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg – seen from a historical perspective. In English, the term was coined only fairly recently, to distinguish the ‘Low Countries’ from ‘The Netherlands’, which only refers to a single country. The plural in ‘Netherlands’, however, already shows that the term covers a diverse set of regions. Indeed, the Low Countries never constituted a unified political entity in the Middle Ages so that the term is somewhat anachronistic. Only from the sixteenth century onwards, in the wake of political and ideological unification, did the usage of the singular noun ‘Nederland’ become widely accepted, after a period in which singular and plural were used interchangeably.³ Throughout the medieval period, however, the Low Countries never constituted an individual kingdom in its own right, such as the neighbouring states of England or France, as they were mostly part of either France or the German Empire.⁴ In fact, the area now known as the Low Countries in late medieval times was divided by the northernmost border between France and the Empire, with the eastern area answering to the Holy Roman Emperor, and the county of Flanders to the west, (mostly) answering to the King of France.⁵

Where then, does this idea of a ‘Low Countries’ come from? The origin of the Low Countries as an imagined territory between the Kingdom of France and the German Empire has its roots in the well-known division of the empire of Charlemagne among his grandsons in the treaty of Verdun in 843. Upon the death of Charlemagne’s heir Louis the Pious, the vast Frankish empire was divided into three roughly equal parts, each ruled by one grandson. The eldest, Lothar I, inherited what has been called ‘Middle Francia’, extending from the estuary of the great rivers in the north (Scheldt, Meuse and Rhine), to that of the Rhône in the south, including the north of the Italian peninsula, linking the North Sea coast to the Mediterranean.

Further divisions among subsequent heirs, in 855 (Treaty of Prüm), in 870 (Treaty of Meerssen), and in the course of the tenth century, gave rise to the Duchy of Lower Lotharingia, a territory which in theory included the entire Low Countries east of the river Scheldt. At this point in time, the Low Countries were settling into the basic layout that would remain essentially unchanged for over five centuries: a loose collection of regions in the estuary of the rivers Scheldt, Meuse and Rhine, answering mostly to the Holy Roman Empire, and partly (only the county of Flanders, and only for part of its territory) to the King of France. However, the idea that most of these territories at some point in time formed part of one powerful and supra-regional duchy, such as Lotharingia, would continue to feed the imagination of princes and chroniclers for centuries.⁶ As will become apparent below, this early medieval history of the Low Countries also partly explains the differences in appeal of Charlemagne and Arthurian literature throughout the Low Countries.⁷

The Low Countries we speak of today is, however, an imagined territory that differs from the historical layout of Lower Lotharingia. For one, it does not stretch as far south as the old Duchy and neither does it include the County of Flanders which, historically speaking, did not always form part of Lower Lotharingia, answering instead to the French crown. To find the reason for this geographical shift, we have to move our focus from the early to the late Middle Ages. In 1384, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy and brother to the King of France, married Margaret, daughter of Louis of Male and sole heiress to the County of Flanders. In less than a century, four generations of Burgundian dukes were to succeed in acquiring most of the Low Countries through marriage, inheritance, conquest or purchase. While the importance of their northern territories did not cease to grow, the dukes continued to rule over their home territories in Burgundy, in present-day eastern France. It was mainly Charles the Bold (ruled 1467–77) who actively sought to establish a land corridor between the northern territories and Burgundy, thereby effectively striving to restore the old Duchy of Lower Lotharingia, which used to cover exactly these regions (Vaughan 1973, 100–7). In 1473, when he entered into negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor to acquire a royal title for himself, it was also the old Duchy that formed the basis of his claims to royalty (Vaughan 1973, 151–2). Negotiations failed, however, and when Charles died in 1477, the incapacity of his young daughter and heiress Mary to defend the Burgundian territories against French invasions meant the definitive end of the ambition to unite the northern and southern regions of the Burgundian territories. Through inheritance, the northern territories passed into the Habsburg line, to Philip the Fair and then to Charles V, who decided in 1549 to formally unite them so that they would never be divided by questions of succession. This decision has been of vital influence to the perception of the ‘Low Countries’ as a cultural and political unity of sorts, even if it was to be rather short-lived in the context of the Eighty Years’ War. From the 1570s onwards, north and south definitively went their own ways, only to be united for a short time between 1815 and 1830.⁸

For the topic under discussion here, the crucial time period lies between the two formative periods of the Low Countries, as both a geographical and cultural unity, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. During this time, the region was divided by two important frontiers, one political, the other linguistic. As mentioned, generally speaking the river Scheldt divided the Low Countries into a western part (the greater part of the County of Flanders) answering to the King of France, and an eastern part (with all the other territories) falling under imperial authority. The eastern group included, in alphabetical order, the following main entities: Brabant, Frisia, Guelders, Gulik, Hainaut, Holland/Zeeland, Liège, Limburg, Loon, Luxembourg, Namur and Utrecht. Included among these regions was ‘Rijks-Vlaanderen’ (‘Imperial Flanders’), the part of the County of Flanders on the east bank of the river Scheldt, for which the Count of Flanders answered to imperial authority.⁹

This schematic overview requires at least two qualifications. One is that in the midst of the bigger players, certain smaller feudal domains of lesser political and historical significance succeeded in retaining relative independence for centuries. A good example is the city of Mechelen (Fr.: Malines), a separate seigneurial entity that constituted an enclave within the Duchy of Brabant. The second observation is that the various separate territories shifted their political allegiances according to military conflicts or matters of inheritance and succession. This is the case for the County of Hainaut, united subsequently with Flanders and Holland, but these shifts were also very important in the east of the region, for Guelders and Gulik, as well as in the territories surrounding the powerful and expanding prince-bishopric of Liège, or those territories coveted by the neighbouring Brabantine dukes (e.g. Loon, Limburg, etc.). For literary historians, these political developments can be crucial, as literature all too often travels along unexpected paths traced by family relations, diplomatic contacts and the like, or indeed in the footsteps of conquering armies.¹⁰

In discussing Arthurian literature, we have to turn our attention mostly to the Counties of Holland, Hainaut, Flanders, the Duchy of Brabant, and to the politically complex region of smaller and culturally interrelated domains in the region of the Rhine and Meuse rivers. These latter include the prince-bishopric of Liège, the territories of Loon, Limburg, Guelders, Gulik and the scattered smaller entities lying in between these bigger players.¹¹ While these regions were loyal either to the King of France or the German Emperor, it is fair to say that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they all enjoyed a relative degree of independence from their respective sovereign authorities.¹² For the regions protected by the Emperor, that is no surprise as the Holy Roman Empire did not have a tradition of enforcing imperial sovereignty in its vassal states. The empire was and, well into the nineteenth century, would continue to be a loose collection of semi-independent states loyal to one ruler only when it came to great military campaigns, the administration of justice and matters of religion. In France, however, authority worked altogether differently, with a king who actively sought to rule over the marginal parts of his kingdom. Though likewise governed through vassalage, it is fair to say that the sovereign enjoyed far greater authority – and was far more eager to enforce it – than in the Holy Roman Empire. Unlike in the Empire – at least theoretically speaking – kingship in France was also hereditary, which helped to strengthen claims to power (and family feuds) that spanned several generations. The complex relationship with the kingdom of France has had both positive and negative effects on the history of Flanders and that of the Low Countries. There were recurring conflicts between the regional and royal authorities, certainly when the County of Flanders developed into one of the most prosperous regions in the known world. At the same time, the cultural competition between the royal court and that of the Flemish counts and the dukes of Burgundy (or the courts of other vassals) has been the driving force behind some of the greatest achievements in the fields of art, literature and architecture, especially in the French-speaking medieval world, often employing artists from the Low Countries.

The latter aspect is important. Before going into the several regions in any detail, we should look at another border that has defined the Low Countries in cultural terms, and continues to do so to the present day: the linguistic border between French and Dutch/German, or more precisely, the border between the Romance and Germanic dialects. The linguistic border was, and still is, subject to change, having shifted over time to the north as well as to the south.¹³

Speaking in modern geographical terms, this border runs through Belgium from the shores of the North Sea in northern France, east all the way to the river Meuse, where it bends south to pass through Luxembourg into the border regions of present-day France and Germany. In historical terms, it divided the Low Countries into a large, northern Dutch-speaking part, and a smaller French-speaking part in the south. Of course, if we look at the language division from a socio-linguistic point of view rather than from a merely geographical one, the story becomes far more complex. During the course of the Middle Ages, French increasingly became the lingua franca of the high nobility, gaining importance in the leading courts of the Low Countries even in Dutch-speaking regions.¹⁴ Because the use of French and Dutch differed greatly among various regions and in different contexts, we will deal with this question in more detail below.

While less well-defined and less easily discernible, there is another linguistic border that ought to inform our understanding of the Low Countries: the more permeable transition area between the linguistic variants that would eventually develop into modern Dutch on the one hand and modern German on the other. In medieval times, the difference between both languages was less clear-cut and contemporary assessments of the situation are typically confusing. For quite some time now, scholars have thought of these linguistic variants in terms of a dialectal continuum.¹⁵ The easternmost dialect of the Low Countries, then, must have been difficult to understand for people living along the coast, but very easy for their neighbours to the east. This situation, while still sometimes occurring in present-day dialects, has gradually faded as standard varieties emerged, both in the Low Countries and in Germany, from the sixteenth century onwards.¹⁶

Sources indicate that contemporaries were well aware that they shared a common tongue but also noted the differences between regional variants. In medieval booklists, for example, some notaries have distinguished between Flemish and more eastern variants of Dutch (‘in flamingo’ versus ‘in theutonico’).¹⁷ In one notorious – and probably exaggerated – instance, a group of western Flemish Cistercians even asked the famous mystic John of Ruusbroec, who lived near Brussels in Brabant, for a Latin translation of one of his vernacular texts, because they purportedly could not understand his Brabantine dialect (Willaert 2010, 5–9). Likewise, Jacob van Maerlant, the so-called ‘godfather’ of Middle Dutch literature, provided a nice sample of the linguistic diversity of the multilingual setting in which he worked in his Sinte Franciscus leven (Life of Saint Francis):

Ende om datic Vlaminc bem

Met goeder herte biddic hem,

Die dit Dietsche sullen lesen

Dat si mijns genadich wesen

Ende lesen sire in somich woort,

Dat in haer land es ongehoort

Men moet om de rime souken

Misselike tonghe in bouken:

Duuts, Dietsch, Brabants, Vlaemsch, Zeeus,

Walsch, Latijn, Griex ende Hebreeus.

Om vray thoudene rijm ende zin (Maximilianus 1954, ll. 125–33)¹⁸

(And because I am Flemish, I ask wholeheartedly that the people who will read this Dutch text will have mercy with me, when they read words which they are not familiar with in their lands. To find rhymes, one must search diverse languages in books – German, Dutch, Brabantine, Flemish, Zeelandic, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew – to keep correct the rhyme and meaning.)

Situated on the crossroads of both linguistic – and therefore also cultural – frontiers and great political blocks, the Low Countries can be said to have been a melting pot and a thoroughfare of cultural and political ideas throughout the ages. This intermediary position has allowed for the development of a unique literature, taking the middle ground between French and German high culture. This contribution will show how the Middle Dutch Arthurian romances, as a socio-historical phenomenon, can only be understood against this backdrop. It is fair to say, for example, that ‘most Middle Dutch authors were of Flemish origin’, and that most Arthurian stories were translated from Old French, but when we take into account the reception stages of manuscript production, the picture becomes much more complex.¹⁹ In the following sections, we will take a closer look at the most important regions in the Low Countries, with a special focus on the production and reception of Arthurian literature. We will show that Arthurian material was not introduced in the Low Countries in one go but that its circulation, reception and adaptation tell a nuanced story related to the complex make-up of the Low Countries and of local traditions of courtly culture and vernacular literature.

3. The ‘River Lands’ of the Meuse and Rhine

While the ‘river lands’ of the Meuse and Rhine did not form a united political entity in the Middle Ages, they are generally grouped together as an overlapping cultural area of mutually enforcing and influencing regions.²⁰ Broadly speaking, this area includes the greater part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège and the interrelated regions of Loon and Limburg, stretching east into the lands of Aachen and Cologne, and north along the valley of the Meuse towards cities such as Maastricht and Nijmegen and regions such as Guelders and Gulik. Certainly, in the early and high Middle Ages, these regions produced art of the highest quality in various media. Under the patronage of Charlemagne, who held court in the city of Aachen, and in the following centuries as well, the region fostered a rich culture that defied political and linguistic boundaries. In this context, authors such as Hendrik van Veldeke (second half of the twelfth century) were active, using the region as a gateway to some of the most important cultural circles in imperial Germany.²¹

Looking at this region from an Arthurian perspective, however, there is not much to report, certainly as regards the production of indigenous texts or translations. That fact alone is very interesting. While the region is home to some of the earliest verse narratives in Dutch – including Tristant (possibly late twelfth century²²), Aiol (c.1200), Floyris ende Blantseflur (c.1170) – it seems to have missed out on the upsurge of narrative literature in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries entirely.²³ The Tristant may well be the earliest example of a Middle Dutch adaptation of Arthurian fiction that has been preserved in material form (cf. Chapter 5); apparently it was not followed by other translations. Even in terms of manuscript reception in later centuries the region does not have much to offer. This is all the more surprising insofar as research has shown that epic material generally speaking migrated from west to east through the Low Countries, which should theoretically have brought at least some of the growing