Religious Literature between Middle Dutch and French:Textual Mobility and Shared Reading Culture

Making use of ideas and concepts from Barbara Cassin’s philosophy oftranslations and of l’histoire croisée, this essay explores the shared cultures of religious reading between the Dutch and French languages in the late medieval period.While religious literature disseminated in both Dutch and German has receiveda fair amount of attention in recent scholarship, religious and devotionaltexts that were available to readers in both Dutch and French have remained understudied. By providing an overview of the most important religious literaturethat was translated from French into Dutch and the other way around, and of textsoriginally composed in Latin in the Low Countries and translated into both vernacularlanguages, we argue that textual mobility between the two languages wasfrequent and reciprocal. Case-studies of two texts – Pierre Michault’s La Danseaux aveugles and Gerrit van der Goude’s Boexken vander Missen – further indicatethat changes – or the lack thereof – in texts that moved between the two languagespoint to shared cultures of religious reading on equal terms.