By acquiring the ‘Dyck manuscript’, the Münster University Library has acquired a Central Dutch treasure. The codex, which contains 124 pages written in two columns, was written by a single hand around the middle of the 14th century. Hermann Degenng, who discovered it in Dyck Castle in 1907 and edited the Reynaert section in 1910, still thought it was written on the Lower Thein, where it had already been found in the late Middle Ages, but we now know more about its geographical origin. The manuscript contains two texts. The first and longest is one of the eleven more or less complete copies of a scientific encyclopedia in almost 16,700 verses, written by the most famous Dutch poet of the 13th century, Jacob van Maerlant: Der naturen bloeme, that is: the flower, the best of nature. The work is a translation and reworking of a Latin compendium: De naturis rerum by the Brabantian Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré, a student of Albertus Magnus. De naturts rerum was completed before 1244. ... On page 102 recto, Der naturen bloeme ends in the middle of the left column. In the right column, the second poem begins, which has no title here, but does have one in the only other manuscript that has it: Van den vos Reynaerde. This text is even more famous than Maerlant's poem. It is the masterpiece of medieval European animal epics. ... There are two complete manuscripts of this poem, the so-called Comburger (A) [Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Cod.poet. et phil.fol.22], which is kept in the Württemberg State Library in Stuttgart, and the Dycksche (F) [Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster, Cod 59]. ... Towards the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century, Reinaert | was revised and expanded by an unknown poet. The new poem, Reynaert's History or Reinaert II, is more than twice as long as Reinaert I. - [Author]

Language: German