Continuities and Discontinuities in the Production and Reception of Middle Dutch Narrative Literature

Persenober oc Constantianobis, published in 1572 by Laurentz Benedicht in Copenhagen, is an early modern Danish translation and adaption of the Old French ‘roman courtois’ Partonopeu de Blois (twelfth century). This article outlines the way in which different forms of transformation and rewriting, or Retextualisierung (Joachim Bumke), have been realized in this edition. Another, now lost, edition from 1560, as well as a manuscript in Old Danish from ca. 1500, originally derived from the Partalopa saga, which is a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Old Norse-Icelandic prose adaption of the French romance, can be considered as precursors in this complex process of translation, adaptation and rewriting. The 1572 edition, the oldest complete Danish version in print, reveals some characteristics of paratextual and rewriting which seem to be unique in the Danish transmission: an epilogue and the transformation of an important passage (the first meeting between Persenober/Partonopeu and the princess Constantianobis/ Melior) that strengthens the importance of the moral choices of the noble protagonists. Thus, the narrative can offer both nutz und kurtzweyl (usefulness and entertainment) and models for identification to its (mostly aristocratic) readership in sixteenth-century Denmark.