This article examines the concept of kingship in the Middle Dutch Roman van Walewein, a thirteenth-century Arthurian romance from Flanders, by analyzing the roles of the six different kings in the work from different perspectives. The rulers are studied based on their depiction within the story in relation to historical views on kingship, their actions in relation to the narrative’s plot, and finally their role as king in relation to the narrative’s hero, Walewein. This analysis lays bare a pattern in which problematic aspects of kingship are connected to the different rulers, resulting in a lack of social order that needs to be restored by Walewein, whom in doing so proves his excellence and fitness to rule as a king himself. These problematic aspects include a lack of measure from the kings, the frustration of social integration at their courts, and finally their common use of the ‘don contraignant’ motif in a negative manner. In this light, I argue that the Roman van Walewein can be read as a type of ‘mirror for princes’.

Recently new attention has been paid to the presence and use of French outside of France in multilingual regions, one of them being the Southern Low Countries. Scholarship focusing on this area has emphasized the presence of French within the Dutch literary culture as well as studied the language attitude of Dutch authors towards French. This article adds a third focus to this scholarship, namely that of the use of French found within multilingual texts from the Southern Low Countries. Through an analysis of a selection of bilingual and trilingual texts, it is determined how French is incorporated in these texts, what functionality it serves and to what extent this function reflects or contradicts findings from the other two views on French in medieval Dutch literary culture.

The Dutch Arthurian romance Walewein contains an intriguing dream passage in which the character Ysabele describes a handsome knight with on his shoulders the image of a maiden, wearing a coat of armor made from the hide of a lion and wielding in his hand a fire-breathing serpent. This article offers a theoretical explanation for the origin of these elements and their possible connection to the theme of kingship in the romance, suggesting the imagery was possibly inspired by the description of King Arthur in the Latin chronicle Historia Brittonum.

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