The story of the pagan and Christian childhood sweethearts fired the imagination of many authors, translators and redactors, as well as that of the audience, and the physical artifacts of that imagination are no less powerful: since the middle of the nineteenth century, literary historians have endeavored to unravel the tangled skein of manuscripts and printed editions of Floire and Blancheflor in order to ascertain origin and routes of transmission. While definitive statements about origin are difficult, the present study sheds further light on the development and evolution of the legend of Floire and Blancheflor in Europe in the Middle Ages, and enables us to move closer to answering the question of origin and transmission of the legend in Europe.

The nineteenth-century positivist critics, such as Gaston Paris and Edélestand Du Méril, believed that the thirteenth and fourteenth-century French manuscripts of the legend that Du Méril christened the aristocratic and popular versions (or I and II) contained the oldest surviving versions of Floire and Blancheflor in Europe. Most of their criticism centered on three manuscripts of the aristocratic version. Even though critics now believe that another French manuscript, often called the Palatine fragment (c. 1200–25), discovered by Karl Christ in 1916 in the Biblioteca Vaticana, is older than any other version (with the exception of the Low Rhenish Trier-fragments), this manuscript did not receive the attention it deserved.