Philologist born in Sint-Truiden (in the east of present-day Belgium), Bormans studied in nearby Liège. When he was appointed at the University of Gent in 1835, he became involved in Flemish-minded circles around Jan Frans Willems and joined the association De Tael is Gansch het Volk. He remained close to its ideals, although in 1837 an appointment back to the (French-speaking, Walloon) University of Liège (where he died in 1878) removed him, much to his regret, from the immediate sociability of Flemish intellectuals. He was involved, with Willems, in the committee that imposed a unified Flemish spelling between 1839 and 1841, curbing a tendency to develop a separate writing norm from Netherlandic Dutch.

Bormans collaborated with Willems on the government-sponsored editions of prestigious Brabantine or Flemish authors (the Gests of Brabant, Maerlant) who were seen as illustrious cultural ancestors to the recently-established Belgian state. Ultimately more important for the study of medieval Netherlandic was his interest in the MS remains of his region of origin, in the east of the country. Early texts like the Borgloon MS and various saints’ lives from the area were entrusted to him for publication. One of these was a life of St Lutgardis (d. 1246), a Flemish-speaking nun who, when placed in a Walloon monastery, modestly prevented herself from being chosen as abbess by affecting an incapacity to learn French. Bormans celebrated this in his 1855 edition of her vita as an inspiring act of resistance against French cultural hegemonism and suggested she be chosen as the Flemish Movement’s patron saint – a suggestion influentially taken up by the leading priest-poet Guido Gezelle and others.

In 1858 Bormans edited a recently discovered poetic vita of St Servatius, patron saint of Maastricht, which identified as its author Henric van Veldeke (fl. 1180s). This was the oldest literary text in the Netherlandic language and created a century of tensions between Netherlandic and German medievalists, because until then “Heinrich von Veldeke” had been known as a German Minnesänger. The problematic demarcation between medieval Netherlandic (Flemish/Dutch) and German, and the ambivalent position of Veldeke as a prestigious author straddling that demarcation and claimed by both literary traditions, remained a contentious issue until the mid-20th century.