The cycle has not survived in any manuscript in its entirety and has been reconstructed from French, Spanish, and Portuguese fragments in several medieval languages.

The Post-Vulgate Cycle, written anonymously probably between 1230 and 1235 (different estimates of the beginning date) to 1240, is an attempt to create greater unity in the material, and to de-emphasise the secular love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere in favor of the Quest for the Holy Grail.

It omits almost all of the Vulgate Cycle's Lancelot Proper section, making it much shorter than its source, and directly condemns everything but the spiritual life.

Earlier theories postulated that the so-called "pseudo-Boron" cycle, named so due to one manuscript's attribution of its original authorship to Robert de Boron, was either older than the Vulgate or derived from the same common and now lost source.

[3] The Post-Vulgate (or at least its Suite du Merlin section[4]) was also one of the most important sources of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.