Manuscript Comparison
The five witnesses
The whole art — the fullest witness (302 plays, ~20,700 words). Our base text.
Swords onward only — no grappling, dagger, baton, or axe (114 plays). Defective at the front.
Nearly the whole art in mnemonic couplets (272 plays, ~7,700 words).
Partial (184 plays); water-damaged in places. The verse recension in Latin.
The preface only — a copy three centuries later, from a Morgan-like exemplar.
Coverage — plays with text, per witness
Counts are computed from the collated transcriptions. The Getty is the fullest and wordiest witness; the Pisani Dossi matches its scope in couplet form; the Morgan and Paris are partial.
| Section | Getty | Morgan | Pisani D. | Paris |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grappling | 20 | — | 21 | 20 |
| Baton | 4 | — | 2 | — |
| Dagger | 93 | — | 83 | 56 |
| Dagger vs Sword | 9 | 6 | 9 | 4 |
| Sword in One Hand | 13 | 5 | 14 | 9 |
| Sword in Two Hands | 69 | 41 | 63 | 40 |
| Sword vs Spear | 2 | 1 | 1 | — |
| Sword in Armor | 25 | 17 | 17 | 18 |
| Axe in Armor | 17 | — | 12 | 8 |
| Spear | 9 | 8 | 9 | 5 |
| Spear vs Other Weapons | 9 | 5 | 7 | 6 |
| Mounted Fencing | 30 | 30 | 31 | 17 |
| Total numbered plays | 302 | 114 | 272 | 184 |
| Approx. word count | ~20,700 | ~9,200 | ~7,700 | ~3,300 |
What is common to all witnesses
- The same curriculum, in the same order — grappling → dagger → sword → armor → polearms → mounted, wherever a witness has the material at all.
- The same pedagogical engine — the Remedy Master → scholar → Counter Master chain, with the crowns and garters marking the roles in every witness.
- The same guards, blows, and named actions — the twelve longsword guards, the six blows and the thrust, the three locks and three sword-takings.
- A shared verse substrate. The Pisani Dossi's rhymed couplets reappear, nearly verbatim, inside the Getty and Morgan prose — the prose grew around the verse, and in the mounted section the prose itself still rhymes.
- The same dedication — Fiore's biography and the address to Niccolò III d'Este, shared by the prose witnesses.
In short: the witnesses agree on the art and differ on the telling.
What differs
The deepest split. Getty and Morgan are discursive prose (why a play works, its conditions and counters); the Pisani Dossi is a two-line mnemonic boast per play, and the Paris renders that verse into Latin. The Getty needs ~20,700 words for what the Pisani Dossi says in ~7,700 — and the prose owns nearly all the counters.
The Morgan lacks the entire opening of the art (no grappling, dagger, baton, or axe); the Paris thins out in the long dagger and longsword runs; the San Daniele is the preface alone. Two play numbers are absent from every witness — Sword in Two Hands [13] and Dagger [99] — shared gaps in the tradition, not losses in one copy.
The Getty is ç-heavy (armiçare, çoventu, açça) where the Morgan prefers z (armizare, zoventu, azza) — the clearest surface difference between the two prose copies carrying nearly identical text.
The standout: the armored Middle Iron Gate boasts of "strong thrusts" (punte forte) in both prose witnesses, but calls itself vain at throwing great thrusts (vana / inanis) in both verse witnesses — the two recensions disagree on the doctrine ([SwordArmor 5]). Elsewhere: the Paris names a guard the "leopard's stance" where the Italian has the True Cross; the Peasant's Blow is named only in the prose; and twice the families narrate the same plate from opposite sides ([Grappling 11], [Mounted 10]).
The two families
Near-verbatim text, differing mainly in orthography and small slips. Shared corruptions (the same garbled words in both) put their common source upstream of each. The prose carries the system: entries, counters, conditions, reasoning.
The Latin Florius reads as a counterpart of the Pisani Dossi couplets — same terse structure, same guard-name choices, same "vain" Iron Gate. But they are not one copy: each carries plays the other lacks.
Because the Pisani Dossi couplets sit embedded inside the Getty/Morgan prose, the verse is the older kernel and the prose the expansion. The 1699 San Daniele copy sides with the Morgan's phrasing against the Getty at a diagnostic spot, so it descends from a Morgan-like prose exemplar — a witness to the tradition, not an independent witness to Fiore. (This is a reading of the collated material, consistent with the standard two-recension view, not a formal stemmatic proof.)
Our translations use the Getty as base because it is the fullest and most explanatory witness; the verse is translated in full where it exists, and the Morgan where it meaningfully diverges. Where a play matters doctrinally, check both families — the prose tells you how and why, but the verse occasionally preserves a different, and sometimes contradictory, claim. Every folio's own comparison lives on the section pages.