The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

The oldest of the great adulterous love stories, reassembled from the surviving twelfth-century fragments into one continuous telling: the potion drunk by mistake, the sword laid between them, the black sail and the white. Bédier was a medievalist by trade and built the version everyone now reads out of Béroul, Thomas and the Norse. Sixty plates from 1830 to 1924, among them Rossetti and John Brett, gather the legend's coasts, castles and questing hounds into a single visual companion.