Jacob van Maerlant

From this time Jacob rejected romance as idle, and devoted himself to writing scientific and historical works for the education and, enlightenment of the Flemish and Dutch nobility.

His Heimelicheit der Heimelicheden (c. 1266) is a translation of the Secreta secretorum, a manual for the education of princes, ascribed throughout the Middle Ages to Aristotle.

Van der Naturen Bloeme[2] is a free translation of De natura rerum, a natural history in twenty books by a native of Brabant, Thomas of Cantimpré; and his Rijmbijbel is taken, with many omissions and additions, from the Historia scholastica of Petrus Comestor.

Jacob's most extensive work is the Spiegel Historiael, a rhymed chronicle of the world, translated, with omissions and important additions, from the Speculum historiale of Vincent de Beauvais.

[1] He wrote three Arthurian works: Torec, which survives in the massive Lancelot Compilation, and two romances based on the works of Robert de Boron: Historie van den Grale and Boec van Merline, which tell the stories of Joseph of Arimathea and Merlin.

[1] Other poems of this kind are Van ons Heren wonden, a translation of the hymn Salve mea!

The work had a profound and lasting impact on the honor code of the Western European knightly elite.

The greater part of his work consists of translations, but he also produced poems that prove him to have had real original poetic faculty.

[3] Although Jacob was an orthodox Roman Catholic, he is said to have been called to account by the priests for translating the Bible into the vulgar tongue.

His language was analyzed by the Dutch linguists Amand Berteloot and Evert van den Berg, who came to the conclusion that he learned to speak in the County of Flanders, somewhere south of the city of Bruges, Belgium.