Park Abbey brings with it almost 900 years of history. The rich abbey archive of the Norbertines offer a glimpse into this uninterrupted past and here, in 2023, among centuries-old documents and forgotten writings, we are still discovering new elements about the past. This collection of dozens of metres of paper and parchment has been carefully preserved over the centuries and is still to be found in Park Abbey today. The archive also contains a remarkable collection of cut-up and loose pieces of old parchment. In earlier times, parchment was a precious material that was reused rather than thrown away, a philosophy of sustainability that was deeply ingrained within the monastery walls of Park Abbey. It was two PhD students who, as part of the initiative "Medieval Manuscripts in Flemish Collections", found their attention drawn to a small piece of parchment dating from around 1300.
Pen test as a reflection of the mindset
This piece of parchment, no bigger than 9 by 15 cm, bears the written words of a Norbertine from Park Abbey. These words and sentences are the work of an experienced copyist or scribe. Before the copyist dared to transcribe the original version, he sharpened his goose feather quill and wrote a few sentences or text fragments as a pen test. Only then did he feel ready to continue reproducing the next passage from the Bible or the world chronicle that he was working on. It is possible that this sheet or part of it was later reused as a flyleaf for a manuscript or as a cover for an account.
On one particular day in Leuven, around 1300, our Norbertine, as a test, wrote out a verse from the animal epic "Van den vos Reynaerde". This masterpiece of Middle Dutch literature from the Low Countries was written forty years earlier, in about 1260, in the County of Flanders by the anonymous friar Willem, known as "Willem die Madoc maecte". De Vos, a critical epic, masterfully written in rhyme and intended to be performed in public, cost its author a great deal of effort and delivered many sleepless nights, as he himself says “daer hi dicke omme waecte”.
Sophisticated
It is not coincidental, but rather a significant discovery, that this one verse remained hidden in the abbey archive all that time and it is unmistakably from "De Reynaert". It means that, around 1300, the text was also known and read in the Duchy of Brabant and even outside the borders of the County of Flanders. It is testament to the intellectual activity that took place in monasteries, and in particular in Park Abbey, where the residents were well aware of the social developments and issues of the time.
