Queeste - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2025

This article examines the use of French terms for casting dice in the fourteenth-century Middle Dutch satirical nonsense poem Dit es de frenesie. Rather than to consider the codeswitch from Dutch into French in this text as a tool to showcase the French linguistic skills of the narrative’s protagonist, this study suggests the use of French in dice games was a wider cultural phenomenon that is displayed in various medieval texts of different linguistic traditions. Through a comparison with these works, in particular Middle English poems, a richer understanding of the text is worked towards that suggests the dice terms in the Frenesie are used in a proverbial sense, to both comment on the actions of the protagonist and respond to a medieval literary tradition that connected gambling, fools, and fortune.

This article discusses the authorship of the Roman van Limborch, an early fourteenth-century Dutch epic romance. A recent reconsideration of the historical references in the text allows us to connect the Limborch to (the interests of) the dynasty of Luxemburg, in particular the emperor Henry VII and his sister Felicitas. Within the entourage and literary culture of the Luxemburg family the jurist, secretary and diplomat Hendrik van Geldenaken (Henri de Jodoigne or Hendricus de Geldonia) can be singled out as a familiaris that shares important characteristics with the author of the Limborch (who introduces himself only as ‘Heinriic’). A detailed discussion of Geldenaken’s biography, his attachment to the Luxemburg dynasty and his familiarity with Dutch and Francophone literature provides a corpus of (circumstantial) evidence to identify him as the Limborch author and to introduce a new name and a new individual in the history of medieval Dutch literature.

Die Rose is one of two Middle Dutch adaptations of the Old French Roman de la Rose (c. 1278). It was written before 1325 in the Duchy of Brabant by an author named Heinric van Brussel. Divergences from the French source text primarily occur in the translation of the second part of the romance, attributed to Jean de Meun.

This article focuses on a section of the adaptation of Jean de Meun’s sequel: the sermon of Vrient, which is based on the speech of Ami. First, the current editions of both the French and Brabantine Rose are examined to decide on the most suitable edition for this comparative analysis. Variant readings in the manuscripts of the French Rose are compared with the text of the Brabantine Rose, in order to determine the manuscript family to which the French source text may have belonged.

Second, the hypothesis that Die Rose was (partially) retranslated in the Comburg manuscript (ms. C) is tested. For this purpose, the sermon of Vrient in Die Rose as found in ms. C is compared to the corresponding passages in the other Middle Dutch manuscripts and in the French Rose.

Finally, the stylistic and thematic shifts introduced by Heinric in his translation of Ami’s sermon are described and discussed.