Gheraert Appelmans' Glose op den Pater Noster. An exploratory literary investigation on a remarkable Middle Dutch mystical text in the context of late-medieval spiritual developments

Abstract

Scholarly research on late-medieval mystical literature in the Low Countries particularly concentrates on the Middle Dutch corpus of mystical ‘great masters’ like Hadewijch and Jan van Ruusbroec. That there has been another mystical author in the fourteenth century, Gheraert Appelmans, who wrote a remarkable mystical text in Middle Dutch, Glose op den Pater Noster, is far less known. Moreover, the scarce research to date on the Glose (a scholastically learned and mystic-theological Paternoster commentary), shows a rather one-sided, mainly doctrinal-theological line of approach. By exploring Appelmans’ Glose from another, contextual-literary point of view, in particular concentrating on the text itself (as for genre, composition, structure, vocabulary), not only deeper insight was gained into the supposed function of Appelmans’ mystical text, but also into the literary relationships within the mystical discourse of the late-thirteenth and fourteenth century Low Countries.