Jacob Van Maerlant and the Papacy: A Middle English Misreading of Middle Dutch Verse

During the English Reformation, William Barlow and John Foxe found an unlikely champion for the translation of scripture into the vernacular in the prolific thirteenth-century Flemish author Jacob van Maerlant. His fame in England was based on the only known recorded mention of a Middle Dutch author by name in a Middle English text, and rested on a case of mistranslation between Middle Dutch and Middle English.