THE COMPLEXITYOF the medieval world is often obscured by the tendency of many modern scholars to focus on specific areas of research, only occasionally stepping outside the boundaries of their chosen discipline. Despite teaching across the period, Old English critics rarely look forward to later texts, Middle English scholars generally look back only so far and, often, neither looks to continental traditions unless they are searching for sources. But medieval textual traditions were not so isolated, and even though Old English changed over time, giving way to Middle English in its various dialects, they developed into new forms of writing and expression that reflected different social concerns and tastes which crossed geographical and chronological boundaries. One of the strongest cross-cultural currents was that between England and the Low Countries, which exchanged people, ideas, textiles, and were often allied against larger enemies. Both English and Middle Dutch textual traditions owe a great debt to the corpus of medieval French literature, often working from the same (or similar) sources; but they also adapted ideas, motifs, and tropes to suit their own audiences and occasionally shared their literary endeavors between them. Unfortunately, scholarship on these cross-cultural exchanges is not always accessible, especially if it is written in modern Dutch. As Geert Claassens explains, ‘In short, the language barrier that exists … prevents many foreign scholars from becoming acquainted with a broad corpus of texts that in the Middle Ages formed part of a much more homogenous European literary culture’. Few scholars have contributed as much to this wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts across the channel than David F. Johnson. His work traces the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, through later medieval romances in both England and the Low Countries, highlighting the connections between texts, motifs, and themes. This volume takes the work of Johnson as its starting point, investigating the intricacies of early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the variations in reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly Beowulf, and tracking those complexities through later Arthurian English and Middle Dutch romances and drama.

AT THE BEGINNING of the spring semester in 1994, the second half of my second year as an undergraduate, I was sitting in a classroom at Florida State University when our professor, bearded, blazered, and bespectacled, walked in silently. He looked at us, slammed his books on the table at the front of the room, and in a clear resonant voice recited the opening lines of Beowulf: ‘Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum, þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.’ We jumped. This is how Dave Johnson makes an impression, deep and abiding, on his students, professors, and colleagues. My second year at FSU was Dave's first year, having completed his PhD at Cornell in 1993. From that very first class, Medieval Literature in Translation, I was hooked; over the next year and a half at FSU, through my graduate studies in Ireland, and into my career in medieval literature, Dave Johnson has inspired me, taught me, mentored me, answered my questions, written me countless letters of recommendation, shared his research, and essentially provided the model of what a good scholar, teacher, and colleague should be. In putting together this project, I found that I was far from alone.

Over the last thirty years, Dave Johnson has touched the lives and shaped the careers of dozens of scholars. His professors speak proudly and affectionately of him; his students adore him; and his colleagues respect him. His extensive body of scholarship encompasses Old and Middle English language and literature, Middle Dutch, and Arthuriana. He has translated several works from Dutch and, with Geert H. M. Claassens, has edited and translated five volumes of Middle Dutch literature, opening a whole new world of texts to generations of readers. His research on the Tremulous Hand, Gregory the Great, Beowulf, and Middle Dutch romances is ground-breaking and he has shared that research with his students, encouraging them to find their own avenues of exploration within the field. His mentorship extends far beyond the boundaries of the classroom – he shepherds his students long after they have graduated. When I started the annual undergraduate conference in medieval studies at Longwood University with my colleague in history, Steven Isaac, Dave was one of the plenary speakers at our first meeting.

IN A DISCUSSION of the meaning of ‘individuality’, Terry Eagleton cites two examples: ‘Homer's Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare's Hamlet most definitely does not’. Eagleton does something here that readers frequently do: he treats fictional characters like real, living, thinking people. It is a natural reflex to fill out the always-incomplete information in a story to make from it a plausible whole. The branch of literary criticism most commonly known as ‘cognitive literary studies’ takes this tendency as a point of departure for textual analysis. From this perspective, we may potentially resolve a conundrum found at the very heart of the Lanseloet van Denemerken, a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch play. Lanseloet van Denemerken [hereafter Lanseloet] is one of the so-called abele spelen ‘artful plays’ contained in the famous Hulthem manuscript (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 15.589–15.623), where the play is recorded (on fols. 223rb–230ra) along with 210 other, mostly Middle Dutch, texts. The author is unknown (although he is likely to have come from the southern Netherlands), and its date is just as difficult to determine. The codicology of the manuscript itself does provide a terminus ante quem: the watermarks in its paper point to a production date between 1405 and 1410, and it was written by one scribe. The play itself likely dates to the late fourteenth century.

The play is not very long (no more than 952 lines) but still brings quite a few players on stage. Lanseloet (crown prince of Denemerken), his mother, Sanderijn (the woman he loves), an anonymous knight (whom Sanderijn eventually weds), Reinout (Lanseloet's servant) and the anonymous knight's forester. The play is well-structured, and the actions of the characters are usually clearly motivated. But Lanseloet, of all people, does something that initially seems counterintuitive (and that turns out to be very counterproductive in his attempts to win over Sanderijn): he agrees to a ruse his mother devises. Precisely at this point, the text does not give unequivocal information about the choices Lanseloet makes. This lack of information is not a problem only if the audience fills in the gaps in the text based on the context, giving them more or less free rein as long as they do not make assumptions that are clearly contradicted by the text.