Een nieuwe tekstgetuige van de Historie van Troyen van Jacob van Maerlant

Abstract

A hitherto unknown fragment of Jacob van Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen has been discovered in the binding of a composite volume of three post-incunables in the library of the Abbey of Berne in Heeswijk-Dinther, Netherlands. It is the nineteenth text witness of Maerlant’s text, which was already known as the most widely spread chivalric story in Middle Dutch, although only one complete manuscript has survived. This article offers a first edition of the tiny fragment (25 incomplete lines on each side) and discusses its variants in comparison with the complete manuscript and one other fragment with which it shows overlap. The new fragment seems to be the only known remnant of this manuscript, which probably had three columns per page (56 lines each). The form of the letters suggests that it dates from the first quarter of the fourteenth century, which makes it the third-oldest text witness of the Historie van Troyen. The linguistic characteristics of the verses suggest that this manuscript was written in the county of Flanders.