The Arthurian hero Tristan enjoyed great popularity in medieval Italy as attested by various translations from the French prose Roman de Tristan. Two of these adaptations are preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. The better known Tristano Riccardiano, MS 2543, has been edited, re-edited and translated. However, the fourteenth-century MS 1729 has suffered almost complete critical neglect, perhaps due to its complex amalgam of regional dialects and its idiosyncratic script.

Shorter than its sister, this other Riccardian Tristan demonstrates important links among extant Tristans in Italy. Most of the material (Tristan's birth, early adventures and love affair with Yseut) follows that of MS 2543, with certain noteworthy variants. The famous three-day tournament conserved in the Tristano Panciatichiano and that constitutes the bulk of the Tristano Corsiniano does not appear, probably due to a faulty model. From a different model, MS 1729 contains the final episodes (Tristan's fatal wounding, the lovers’ deaths, lamen¬tation at Arthur's court) that do not appear in MS 2543.

This volume includes the previously unedited original text accompanied by a facing-page English translation, bibliography and index.