The source from which we choose to translate the poetry of Petrus Pictor is determinative of the translation practice, as we learn in what ways the modern text edition is a heavily mediated source of his poetry.L. Van Acker (1972) published all the poems attributed to Petrus Pictor (eighteen poems in total) at Brepols. This critical text edition compiles the poems of Petrus Pictor as a whole. In doing so, it brings texts together that were never transmitted together. 
The actual manuscript tradition of Petrus Pictor tells another story: some manuscripts yield only one poem, others a group, and some only fragments. No manuscript contains all eighteen poems included in the edition. 
Considering this, Van Acker's edition is in fact a *Petrus Pictor that has never been handed down as such in a pre-modern manuscript. It is, however, a collection and adaptation of all the poems attributed to Petrus Pictor: a reconstructed version of Petrus Pictor that aims to reconstruct the original poems as they would have flowed from Pictor's mind. A modern concept of the author underlies this focus. 
From which source does one depart to translate Petrus Pictor? 

Another consequence of accepting the critical text edition as the source for translation is the fact that the pre-modern contexts in which these poems were actually transmitted are not taken into account. 
A beautiful example which concretizes this problem is one of Petrus Pictor’s satirical poems De Denario (about money) in which Money is presented as a God more powerful than Jupiter, undermining all Christian morals and threatening the virtues of men. In the decontextualisation of the text edition, De Denario is listed rather arbitrarily as number XIII, while in the context of a pre-modern manuscript, the Liber Floridus (nota bene the earliest source of Petrus Pictor’s poems), De Denario is embedded in a chapter about Christian ethics and morality. 
This chapter opens with a miniature of an arbor palmorum ( (see background)). In-between its leaves 12 virtues and 12 vices are written down, some of which reappear verbatim in De Denario. A dialogue between De Denario and the chapter in which it is embedded is created. Translating De Denario in the context of Christian ethics and morality (created by the miniature, but also by the content of the surrounding texts i.e the manuscript context) is completely different from translating it out of the (de-)context of the modern edition. Only by translating the manuscript one can discover the pre-modern context in which Petrus Pictor’s poems might have actually functioned, and -maybe even more important- only by translating the manuscript one can capture the actual function(ing) of Petrus Pictor’s poem in translation. 
As was mentioned, Petrus Pictor’s poetry was never transmitted as a closed off entity: it always stood in dialogue with other texts. For example, Pictor’s poem Fides Catholica De Essentia Divina (on the essence of the godly) is transmitted in a manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. 16699, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9067151s/f182.item) which also transmits -among others- Alcuin’s Cur Deus Homo and excerpts from Vergil, Ovid and Iuvenal. Petrus Pictor’s work -and he is definitely not alone in this- has always functioned in dialogue with other texts, even in dialogue with the classical canon. 
Focussing on manuscripts for translation could reveal the diversity of pre-modern Latin textual tradition and its meaning to a broader public.

When comparing the way in which Petrus Pictor’s poems Fides Catholica De Essentia Divina (on the essence of the godly) and De Trinitate (on the holy trinity and its form(s)) are visualized in the critical text edition by L. Van Acker (1992, see slider) and the way in which the poems are laid-out in the Liber Floridus manuscript (Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, Ms. 92, f. 83v-84r., see slider) we encounter a huge difference. The extraordinary layout of the poems in the manuscript is not reproduced in the text edition, even though this layout is an essential part of the poems.
‍An essential lay-out: Both De Essentia Divina and De Trinitate deal with the essence of the divine and the divine form. Both poems are written in a tiradenreim, meaning that the last word of every verse is the same; in this case esse. In the manuscript, this final word, esse, is visually dislocated from the rest of the verse as a chain of esse’s forms to the right of the verse. Moreover, all these esse’s are specially designed as if they were symbols/shapes.
The chain of esse is broken twice by se, a reflexive pronoun that -in the particular poem- refers back to God, the essence himself. Both De Essentia Divina and De Trinitate deal with the essence of the divine and the divine form so it is very significant that being, the being, esse (which is always at the end of the verse), is also se, - a more concrete - Deus. Esse, the essence of the divine, Deus, is also se. The lay-out of the poem makes the reader visually aware of this play between forms and meanings.

In the Liber Floridus this play with word-imagery is an essential part of Petrus Pictor’s poems but -as it appears- not only in the Liber Floridus. In other -later- pre-modern manuscripts which transmit these two poems, the lay-out is indeed kept, i.e the esse is dislocated to the right and reproduced as a symbol, with se disturbing the chain again (Bibliothèque publique de Saint-Omer, Ms. 0115, f. 141v.). 
However, this play of visual form and language is completely ignored in the critical edition. To translate these poems, you need to translate the lay-out which is only accessible through the manuscript.