This volume presents the first complete transcription of a unique redaction of the prose Tristan found in a fourteenth-century miscellany that was copied in a single hand. Like the more famous Tristano Riccardiano edited by E. G. Parodi in 1896, this manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. Its modern shelf mark is Ricc. MS 1729. Its former shelf mark N.IV.40 was assigned by Giovanni Lami, the librarian who was responsible for cataloguing the Riccardian collection in the early eighteenth century. An additional uniden-tified number – ‘63’ – is written in red pencil on the first original front guard leaf. The manuscript contains no notes of possession, dates or marginalia, but on the first of the two original guard leaves, there is an accurate table of contents written in a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Tuscan mercantesca. On a front guard leaf that was attached to the codex much later, the contents of the manuscript are printed in a clear book hand. The copyist's name ‘Johannes’ appears in a rubricated colophon at the end of the Fior di virtù section (fol. 63r).2 His is the text hand for the entire manuscript.

According to library records,3 on 10 January 1972 the manuscript was restored, disinfected and rebound in white parchment over stiff cardboard to resemble the original Riccardian books; however, there is no title or lettering on the spine or on the new cover. A small, printed paper label with the words ‘Biblioteca Riccardiana’ and the machine-stamped shelf mark ‘1729’ is glued onto the base of the spine. Another such label appears on the inside front cover, at the top left corner. A late fifteenth-century (?) page was added at the front only, to cover the original two flyleaves. At the time of its modern rebinding, three pages of paper were inserted as additional flyleaves at the front, thus: iii (modern restoration) + i (c. 1500?) + ii (original). At the end are two original pages, left blank, which serve as end papers, followed by another three modern restoration ones, thus: ii + iii. None of the front flyleaves are numbered; the two blank original folios at the end are numbered 189 and 190 in the same mercantesca hand as the index on one front guard leaf.