Tradition and innovation in Middle Dutch chivalric romances from the fourteenth century.

In the fourteenth century, the genre of Middle Dutch chivalric romance entertains various relations with other genres, and with texts from different language areas and periods. In this research project, these connections will be examined in order to gain more insight into the development of the text corpus concerned. The romances continue the different subgenres of earlier periods, but the intertextual references belong increasingly to other genres, such as religious, practical or didactic literature, and historiography, thus creating hybrid texts and new subgenres (intertextual perspective). Many Middle Dutch romances from this period still follow an Old French model, but the adaptations and original texts seem to develop an individual character. Which developments in French literature are followed and which are not (and why)? Which elements undergo parallel developments in both Old French and Middle Dutch literature (comparative perspective)? Moreover, some of the innovations continue to be succesful and determining for literary taste in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, for instance in the so-called chapbooks (diachronic perspective). The aim of this project is to establish a more detailed picture of the backgrounds and effects of these connections and of the innovations in a corpus that has been known for too long as traditional and derivative.

Keywords:Chapbook romances, Intertextuality, Chivalric romance, Middle Dutch literature

Disciplines:Linguistics, Language studies, Literary studies