[2] The Old French poems of Tristan and Iseult, whose origins and influences are the subject of scholarly debate, include lengthy works by the 12th-century poets Béroul and Thomas of Britain and several shorter texts.

[12] The former is an extended passage from the late 12th-century Anglo-Norman poem Le Donnei des Amants, detailing Tristan's adventures with several knights including Percival and Gawain, while the latter is an excerpt from Gerbert de Montreuil's continuation of Perceval, the Story of the Grail and features Tristan signalling to Iseult by singing like a bird outside her room.

[17] The chapter for each major work is organised in up to nine subsections, presenting the original manuscript, translations, and studies on its authorship, context, and style.

[16] On the other hand, Francesco Benozzo criticised the bibliography for omitting the studies of Italian scholars, though he called it a "fundamental" work and conceded that the problem was common to other English-language resources.

[21] Several reviewers specifically praised the inclusion of a verse index mapping each line of Béroul's Tristan to the corresponding articles that discuss it,[16][19] given the large body of work analysing the poem's origin, style, and themes.

[18][22] A reviewer for Romanische Forschungen [de] wrote that Shirt's index would be a valuable supplement to any researcher's personal copy of Béroul's text.

Albert Gier of Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie [de] commented that restarting the numbering of the references within each subsection made it harder to follow the cross-references, and observed that this was the case for many books in the Research Bibliographies and Checklists series.

[19][16] In his review, Blakeslee commended Shirt for presenting the content objectively, without judging the value of any particular study, and called it "one of the most salutary features" of the bibliography.