Thanks Olivia! ☺️

Bonus bonus round: the initials in LTK 191 aligned next to each other reminded me of a flipbook, and the last page of the "Roman van Ferguut" (facing F&B) even has a space in which the illustrator (or maybe someone else?) practiced drawing them!

This version may not have 159 colourful miniatures but it does have cute little faces and animals in its initials – the same kind that graces almost every page of LTK 191‘s first text: the only Dutch version of the OF "Roman de Fergus".

These initials reveal one scribe across two manuscripts!

Bonus round for those who made it through the thread: one of LTK 191‘s scribes has been identified as the same person who penned an otherwise unrelated MS: LTK 1205, a plain and unassuming variation of "the" Rijmbijbel by Jacob van Maerlant – the oldest illustrated manuscript in Dutch.

LTK 2040 is tiny by comparison – an open spread is considerably smaller than a single page from LTK 191, and only four short segments survive.
What jumps out besides this are multiple instances of censorship: an owner of this MS has erased mentions of love and tenderness between the main characters…

What follows is a third, 10-page segment with folios that are damaged to varying extents. They are narrower and shorter than those of the "main" segment and those of the following text, and the last page‘s verso side is completely empty, implying again that the MS was re-bound at least once.

A very clearly legible main segment of the text follows after two folios that are smaller in dimension, partly dirty and partly faded. Between these two segments are traces of the compiler/binder‘s work: two pages that were cut and removed from the "better" segment.

LTK 191 has the more "complete" version, collated with five other texts and preserving almost all of Diederic van Assenede‘s spin to the story.

I was excited to see, though, that its version is far from perfect, having been spliced together from various previous witnesses, all lost to history.

Thank you! :)

I’d also love to be added, please! :)
(doctoral student in Düsseldorf who‘s sure to teach Old English sooner rather than later)

Hi there, I’d also like to be added if possible, please! Long-time lurker on medievalist Twitter who just started his PhD in Düsseldorf and wants to put himself out more :)

Moritz’s own doctoral work is focused on the English, Dutch and Norman traditions interwoven across the Channel and North Sea

Moritz Draschner’s telling us about the use of OCRKit Pro and Transkribus as part of the project of editing 40 different versions of the text.

Next up is a team from Düsseldorf led by the ever-awesome Miriam Edlich-Muth, talking about the Post-REALM project postrealmproject.wordpress.com and the different engagements the team is making with retellings of the Flores et Blancheflour narrative across medieval Europe.