Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
16 - The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson
- 1 Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels
- 2 The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- 3 An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs
- 4 The Body as Media in Early Medieval England
- 5 Who Snatched Grendel in Beowulf 852b?
- 6 ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the Liber confortatorius
- 7 The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries
- 8 Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother
- 9 A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch Ferguut
- 10 Multilingualism in Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in Reynardus Vulpes
- 11 Three Characters as Narrator in the Roman van Walewein
- 12 As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Roman van Walewein
- 13 For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch Lanceloet Manuscript
- 14 ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and its Consequences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 15 Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- 16 The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in Lanseloet van Denemerken
- 17 Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur
- 18 The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother
- Select Bibliography
- Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
IN A DISCUSSION of the meaning of ‘individuality’, Terry Eagleton cites two examples: ‘Homer's Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare's Hamlet most definitely does not’. Eagleton does something here that readers frequently do: he treats fictional characters like real, living, thinking people. It is a natural reflex to fill out the always-incomplete information in a story to make from it a plausible whole. The branch of literary criticism most commonly known as ‘cognitive literary studies’ takes this tendency as a point of departure for textual analysis. From this perspective, we may potentially resolve a conundrum found at the very heart of the Lanseloet van Denemerken, a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch play. Lanseloet van Denemerken [hereafter Lanseloet] is one of the so-called abele spelen ‘artful plays’ contained in the famous Hulthem manuscript (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 15.589–15.623), where the play is recorded (on fols. 223rb–230ra) along with 210 other, mostly Middle Dutch, texts. The author is unknown (although he is likely to have come from the southern Netherlands), and its date is just as difficult to determine. The codicology of the manuscript itself does provide a terminus ante quem: the watermarks in its paper point to a production date between 1405 and 1410, and it was written by one scribe. The play itself likely dates to the late fourteenth century.
The play is not very long (no more than 952 lines) but still brings quite a few players on stage. Lanseloet (crown prince of Denemerken), his mother, Sanderijn (the woman he loves), an anonymous knight (whom Sanderijn eventually weds), Reinout (Lanseloet's servant) and the anonymous knight's forester. The play is well-structured, and the actions of the characters are usually clearly motivated. But Lanseloet, of all people, does something that initially seems counterintuitive (and that turns out to be very counterproductive in his attempts to win over Sanderijn): he agrees to a ruse his mother devises. Precisely at this point, the text does not give unequivocal information about the choices Lanseloet makes. This lack of information is not a problem only if the audience fills in the gaps in the text based on the context, giving them more or less free rein as long as they do not make assumptions that are clearly contradicted by the text.
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- Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European ContextEssays in Honour of David F. Johnson, pp. 291 - 310Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022