1. Vinaver identifies Malory’s source as a version of the narrative for which he cites several manuscripts as close cousins, among them BN fr. 103, 334, and 99 (Commentary, 3:1449), but Michael N. Saida, “Reconsidering Vinaver’s Sources for Malory’s ‘Tristram,’” Modern Philology 88 (1991): 373–81, suggests a composite text, closer to the manuscript that would have served as a base text for the 1489 printed edition of Tristan. Renée Curtis’s edition covers the story up to Tristan’s period of madness in the forest, with MS Carpentras 404 as the base text. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS 2542, continues and concludes the narrative; gen. ed. Philippe Ménard, 9 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1987–1997). References to these editions will be by editor, volume, and page number. Neither of these manuscripts fully represents Malory’s source. Tristan 1489 is a facsimile edition of the printed text, with an introductory note by C. E. Pickford (London: Scolar Press, 1976).
2. Gerald L. Bruns, “The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” Comparative Literature 32 (1980): 113–29, notes writing is “always mediated by the texts that provide access to the system. To write is to intervene in what has already been written” (123).
3. Van Coolput, Aventures quérant et le sens du monde: Aspects de la réception productive des premiers romans du Graal cycliques dans le Tristan en prose (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1986). See also Janina P. Traxler, “Ironic Juxtaposition as Intertextuality in the Prose Tristan” in Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 147–63.
4. Lyn Pemberton, “Authorial Interventions in the Tristan en Prose,” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 481–97, notes how, when the narrator continually highlights his own narrative’s structure, “the referential function almost becomes subsidiary to the artistic function” (p. 496).
5. For Van Coolput, the work makes no claims to possessing transcendent truths, but recognizes the limits of its own narration (Aventures quérant, p. 220). See also Baumgartner, La Harpe et Yépée: tradition et renouvellement dans le Tristan en prose (Paris: SEDES, 1990), pp. 43–61.