Queeste - Current Issue

Jan van Boendale, the most important author writing on matters of lay morality and everyday ethics in Middle Dutch, lived in Antwerp from (before) 1312 until (maybe his death in) 1351. The article first concentrates on Boendale’s profession as a clerck, which, as it appears, has been a determining factor for his self-conception and identity together with the Latin artes dictaminis, from which he embraced the idea that the noble art of professional writing was also very usefull for the writer himself as it held promises of social promotion and prestige.

To correlate this to the historical reality, we try to draw up an image of what it meant to be a clerk in the Low Countries by the end of the thirteenth century, the time of Boendale’s youth. We conclude that vernacular clerks not only were by then very numerous, but also had remarkably diversified functions and careers, reaching from the simple production of documents, to very influential positions as secretaries of cities, lords and noblemen. The requirements to access the profession were quite modest. Training in the writing of specific documents would generally have taken place on the spot, under the guidance of an experienced master in the trade. So, Boendale, not only by his writting on the subject, but also by his own properous career as a scrivener and as a literary authority on ‘how to behave’, illustrates the emancipation and self-confidence of the ‘new’ clerck.

This contribution introduces the project Pages of Prayer: The Ecosystem of Vernacular Prayer Books in the Late Medieval Low Countries, c. 1380-1550 [prayer] (erc Starting Grant, grant no. 101041517), which started at Leiden University on 1 March 2023. The aim of the project is to conduct the first large-scale investigation into the vast corpus of Middle Dutch prayer books of which the mainstay are books with one or more of the texts of ‘the Book of Hours’ in the translation ascribed to Geert Grote (1340-1384). Pages of Prayer aims to chart the entire ‘ecosystem’ in which the Dutch-language prayer books flourished and thrived. Apart from the shared transmission of texts in manuscripts and printed books, the project aims to map the inclusion of images, the roles of producers, owners, patrons, places, devotions, and the relations between all of these aspects over a long period of time by developing a cross-disciplinary approach: network philology. This approach aims to combine quantitative network analysis with advanced qualitative analysis to reach meaningful interpretations of the data.