This book set out to explore both the making of a romance – Partonopeus de Blois – and its impact on the making of Old French romance as a genre. In the process, it has become clear that one of our poem's key contributions to the development of twelfth-century fiction was to validate the notion of vernacular romance as a form that is always in the making, never definitively made. In some ways, then, it seems to go against the spirit of open-endedness embodied in Partonopeus to try to impose on this book the conventional mark of closure represented by a chapter headed ‘Conclusion’. Perhaps it would have been better to call this chapter the ‘Epilogue’, on the tacit understanding that, as in our romance, a first epilogue may be succeeded by a second prologue, in a potentially endless chain of continuation. On the other hand, an ending of sorts has been reached, in that the results of many years of work are finally to appear in print, and a number of conclusions – some of them tentative, others less so – have emerged about facets of this text that have remained under-researched until now.

As anticipated, exploring the highways and byways of the manuscript tradition has proved essential for understanding how Partonopeus took on the form(s) in which we know it. Complex and fragmented as it is, this tradition has helped us to tease out answers to questions about the likely configuration of the first version of the text as well as the type and extent of interpolation in subsequent additions.