Een verloren hoofdstukje van de Brabantsche yeesten?

Abstract

The manuscript tradition of Jan van Boendale’s Brabantsche yeesten (‘Deeds of the Dukes of Brabant’) is notoriously complicated. Between 1316 and 1351 Boendale regularly updated his chronicle with descriptions of recent events. Later, these new sections were also copied to complement transcriptions of earlier versions of the chronicle. In 1444, Heinricus van den Damme completed a luxuriously decorated copy of Boendale’s Yeesten for the municipal administration of Brussels. In this manuscript, a rubric at the end of the table of contents preceding book five refers to a chapter about an unspecified ‘gathering (‘parlement’) in Mechelen’, but the text of this chapter does not appear in this copy, nor in any of the extant fifteenth-century witnesses of the Brabantsche yeesten. However, the Mechelen chapter is found in two texts that are closely connected to Brussels and Van den Damme’s manuscript: Jan van Edingen’s Livre des cronicques de Brabant (probably composed between circa 1460 and 1470) and an early modern copy of Boendale’s chronicle, made at the beginning of the seventeenth century for Gillis die Voecht, archivist of the abbey of Averbode. In this previously unknown text, an anonymous poet reports on the devastating fire that ravaged Mechelen in 1342 and its political aftermath. This addition to the Brabantsche yeesten, which appears in none of the other known copies, demonstrates the value of (Early) Modern manuscript copies for our understanding of the transmission history of Boendale’s chronicle and medieval literature at large. It is edited as an annex to this article.