Abstract
Recent international research increasingly focuses on the spread and survival of medieval literature. During the Middle Ages, the material transmission of texts depended entirely on the manual transcription of literature, granting texts a fluid character. This project will investigate which coping mechanisms helped to guarantee the sustainable exchange of information in textual cultures that are characterized by unstable transmission modes. An important aspect of the survival of literature that deserves further empirical research is the text form. To examine whether formal aspects can be labelled as 'constraints' that limit changes, the complete transmission of two short 13th-century Middle Dutch texts will be compared in a digitally supported way, namely: the Martijn trilogy of the Flemish poet Jacob van Maerlant, and Dietsche Catoen, a translation of the Latin Distichs of Cato. The results will be controlled with a control corpus, namely Maerlant's voluminous Scolastica (1271). Because the texts differ significantly in terms of formal characteristics, this project wants to examine whether and which formal aspects of a text (such as rhyme and text structure) can be considered as 'coping mechanisms' in the transmission. It can be expected, for instance, that the Martijn trilogy, which is built according to complex rhyme schemes, shows less variation in the transmission than Dietsche Catoen, in which the only formal requirements are the four-line stanzas and the paired rhyme.
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