For much of the critical history of twelfth-century French romance, Partonopeus de Blois has been one of a group of texts that have existed on the periphery of mainstream scholarship (others include the romances of Hue de Rotelande, especially Proteselaus, Aimon de Varennes's Florimont and the anonymous Guillaume de Palerne). Writing in 1953, Sikko Pieter Uri lamented the fact that ‘the romance of Partonopeus seems nearly forgotten in the twentieth century’. Even in 1999 a critic could still claim, with some justification, that ‘the medieval bestseller Partonopeu […] is scarcely known today even by specialists in the field’. It is only in the last twenty years that it has really started to come out from under the critical radar and take its rightful place in discussions of how the genre evolved. The marginalising of Partonopeus is less a function of its intrinsic quality – the great Edmond Faral described it as one of the most elegant of all Old French romances, while Jean Frappier pronounced it a masterpiece – than of its complex manuscript tradition and its chequered history as a published text.

Partonopeus survives in seven complete or near-complete manuscripts, three fragments of lost manuscripts and thirty-three extracts – probably from three more lost manuscripts – incorporated into an anthology codex and two later vernacular texts (a checklist of all these witnesses, together with the sigla that will be used to refer to them, is given in Appendix 1). The romance also exists in three different versions.