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Among the many books in Michigan State University’s Criminology Collection is a Corpus juris militaris, published in Germany in 1687. Its binding contains four small parchment strips with medieval Dutch verses. Although the strips are still attached in the spine, the verses can be identified as belonging to the Roman der Lorreinen, and more specifically as remnants of manuscript A, written in the duchy of Brabant in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Manuscript A originally must have consisted of over 400 leaves, containing more than 150.000 verses (note: there are no complete manuscripts of the Roman der Lorreinen). Only 7% of manuscript A has been preserved in several European libraries, mainly in Germany. The new fragment suggests that manuscript A was used as binding material not earlier than the end of the seventeenth century (after 1687). The newly found verses are from the first part of the Roman der Lorreinen, which was an adaptation of the Old French chanson de geste Garin le Loherenc. This article offers a first edition and study of the verses, comparing them to the Old French counterparts. This comparison offers additional evidence for the earlier hypothesis that manuscript A contained the same adaptation of Garin le Loherenc as the fragmentary manuscripts B and C.

The Special Collections department of the University of Antwerp Library recently acquired a small fragment of Jacob van Maerlant’s Wapene Martijn (‘Alas, Martijn’, the first of Maerlant’s three Martijns). This new fragment – Ant – can be dated in the last quarter of the fourteenth century or around 1400. Comparison with other text witnesses, brings to light that Ant stems from a quire of six bifolia with the three Martijns that functioned autonomously as a self-contained booklet. The lay-out is exactly the same as in text witnesses Br and Ge and a now lost fragment in Leuven. This suggests that these booklets were produced in series.

A hitherto unknown fragment of Jacob van Maerlant’s Historie van Troyen has been discovered in the binding of a composite volume of three post-incunables in the library of the Abbey of Berne in Heeswijk-Dinther, Netherlands. It is the nineteenth text witness of Maerlant’s text, which was already known as the most widely spread chivalric story in Middle Dutch, although only one complete manuscript has survived. This article offers a first edition of the tiny fragment (25 incomplete lines on each side) and discusses its variants in comparison with the complete manuscript and one other fragment with which it shows overlap. The new fragment seems to be the only known remnant of this manuscript, which probably had three columns per page (56 lines each). The form of the letters suggests that it dates from the first quarter of the fourteenth century, which makes it the third-oldest text witness of the Historie van Troyen. The linguistic characteristics of the verses suggest that this manuscript was written in the county of Flanders.