The few references to a ‘Crestien’ or ‘Christianus’ unearthed in archival documents cannot with any certainty be related to our author, so we can know him only through his own writings. And even here we are at some remove from Chrétien himself, for the manuscripts that preserve his works all date from at least a generation after the time he composed them.

The most important manuscripts containing Chrétien’s romances date from the thirteenth century. All five of his Arthurian romances are found in MS Bibliothèque Nationale f. fr. 794, known as the Guiot Manuscript after the scribe who copied it in the mid-thirteenth century. The romances appear there in conjunction with four other works, all set in Classical times: Athis et Profilas, Le Roman de Troie, Wace’s Roman de Brut, and Les Empereurs de Rome. Chrétien’s five poems are also found together in Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 1450, where they are inserted into the middle of Wace’s Roman de Brut – the French adaptation of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniœ – evidently with the purpose of fleshing out the legend of Arthur recounted therein. Another key manuscript that once probably contained all of Chrétien’s romances, and which would have been the earliest and best copy of them, is the so-called Annonay Manuscript. Unfortunately it was cut apart to be used as filler for book-bindings in the eighteenth century, and only fragments of Erec, Cligés, The Knight with the Lion, and The Story of the Grail have been recovered. Also fragmentary is the MS Garrett 125 (Princeton Library), one of the rare illuminated texts of Chrétien’s poems, which has preserved extensive fragments of The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion. Three other manuscripts containing two or more of Chrétien’s romances can be found today in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris: Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 375 (Cligés, Erec), Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 1420 (Erec, Cligés), and Bibl. Nat. f. fr. 12560 (The Knight with the Lion, The Knight of the Cart, Cligés). In addition, Rome Vat. 1725 contains both The Knight with the Lion and The Knight of the Cart, and Chantilly 472 has Erec, The Knight with the Lion and The Knight of the Cart. Both Bibl.