ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three manuscripts with illustrations of the verse Tristan, that is, versions of the story in the tradition of Eilhart von Oberge, Thomas d'Angleterre, Beroul Gottfried von Strassburg and his continuators Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von Freiberg as well as Brother Robert's Norse saga and the English verse Sir Tristrem. The love potion scene depicts Tristan and Isolde in blue on a red background in a boat on a green sea, drinking from a huge vessel that looks as though it were modeled after the urine specimen bottles depicted so often in medieval medical manuscripts. They were isolated like the British Library illustrations, we would perhaps find an even better negative exemplum, beginning with Tristan's birth and concluding with Tristan's and Isolde's deaths. Since they are an integral part of the manuscript, it useful at another time to examine them again in conjunction with later manuscripts and incunabula, where there are many more intertextual illustrations.
