A New Witness to Béroul’s Tristan

Abstract

This article introduces a new fragmentary witness to Béroul’s Tristan, which was previously thought to survive only in a single copy made in the thirteenth century. This fragment appears in a sixteenth-century English bookbinding containing Josephus’s History of the Jews printed in Lyon in 1528. This article considers how the evidence of the binding and the fragment reveal new routes for the transmission of Béroul’s poem, with implications for our understanding of the circulation of French in later medieval England.