splendour in medieval Bruges
De Blijde Inkomste relates Margaret of York's wedding and Joyous Entry into the city of Bruges on July 3rd, 1468. A Joyous Entry was the ceremonial entry of a ruler into a city with enormous pageantry and festivities. Margaret of York was the sister of the English Kings Edward IV and Richard III. When she was 22 years old, she crossed the Channel to marry Burgundian Duke Charles the Bold. The report in Special Collections relates how the city of Bruges received her with unequaled splendor for forty days.
The 54-folio manuscript was signed by "A Roouere 1468". The name refers to the Bruges' bricklayer and rhetorician Anthonis de Roovere (ca. 1430-1482). De Roovere was a learned man who received a pension from the city of Bruges as its 'city poet.' He wrote exclusively in Middle Dutch. This is why his colleague Eduard de Dene jokingly called him "an idiot and simple layman, unschooled worker" with "nothing but the Flemish tongue or language that he was born with." However, Anthonis works reveal that he had a grasp of both French and Latin.
After some discussion about the authorship of this text, Johan Oosterman has shown that De Roovere wrote this short chronicle. De Roovere would later re-use this text for his longer Excellente cronike van Vlaenderen (Excellent Chronicle of Flanders).
De Roovere's Joyous Entry has cultural as well as political significance. It relates how Margaret married Charles the Bold at seven in the morning in the dining room of the Bailiff of Damme. Two hours later, she approached the town gate of Bruges 'in a splendid sedan, preceded by 1100 horses, by Charles' servants on 200 horses, by ten bishops, noblemen, heralds, knights of the Golden Fleece, bowmen, an altogether colorful sight, enlivened by the ringing of trumpets and clarions.' Wine streams from the breast of a pelican, there is jousting in the evenings, and De Roovere needs more than fifty pages to do justice to all this magnificence.
Tjamke Snijders, Valentina Viana Pereira
Bibliography
Lievens, Robrecht. “De Blijde Inkomst van Margaretha van York”. Vlaanderen, vol. 188, 1982, pp. 171–73.
Oosterman, Johan. "De Excellente cronike van Vlaenderen en Anthonis de Roovere". Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 118:1, 2002, pp. 22-37.
Smets, An. “Zeeridders en zeemeerminnen”. Anima Academiae Bibliotheca, onder redactie van Pierre Delsaerdt e.a., Leuven, Universiteitsbibliotheek KU Leuven, 2010, p. 19.