Mounted Fencing
Lance against lance, sword against lance, mounted grappling, horse-throws, and the pursuit — with the richest Morgan coverage in the book.
Folios
Folio summary — Mounted Fencing
| Getty folio | Plates | Content | Getty images | Verse witnesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (none — Morgan 9r) | [1] | The rubric of the lance | — | PD 29a |
| 41r | [2], [3] | Short lance and counter | — | PD 29a · Paris 2r |
| 41v | [4], [5] | Woman's Guard with the lance | [5] | PD 29b · Paris 2r |
| 42r | [6], [7] | The flight; sword against lance | [7] | PD 30a–30b · Paris 2v–3r |
| 42v | [8], [9] | Two counters of lance against sword | [8], [9] | PD 30a–30b |
| 43r | [10], [11] | Sword awaits the lance; counter | [10], [11] | PD 31a · Paris 2v |
| 43v | [12], [13] | The two guards of the Long Tail | [12] | PD 31b · Paris 3r |
| (none — Morgan 6r) | [14] | The even crossing: little, less, nothing | — | PD 32a |
| 44r | [15]–[18] | First–fourth plays of the Long Tail | [15]–[18] | PD 32a–32b · Paris 3v–4r |
| 44v | [19]–[22] | Fifth–eighth: taking, throw, counter of all | [19]–[22] | PD 32b–33a · Paris 4r–4v |
| 45r | [23]–[26] | End of the sword; mounted grappling | [24], [25], [26] | PD 33a–33b · Paris 5r–5v |
| 45v | [27]–[30] | The horse as lever; taking the rein | [27]–[30] | PD 33b · Paris 4v–5v |
| 46v | [31], [32] | Corded lance; the pursuit and colophon | [31], [32] | PD 34b–36b · Paris 44r |
Eleven Getty folios plus two Morgan-only pages, 32 plates, 50 illustrations — 31 of them the Getty's own. The pattern is the section's own argument, made three times over. In the actions: the fight walks down the length of the weapons — lance against lance (41r–42r), sword against lance (42r–43r), sword against sword (43v–45r), and finally bare arms against the man, his stirrup, and his horse (45r–45v), closing on a pursuit in which the last blow of the Fior di Battaglia goes into an armpit. Each stage is entered because the stage before it failed, exactly as [Mounted 1] promised at the top of the page: the lance clears the shorter weapons if its first blow does its duty. In the counters: nothing is ever answered on its own terms — the beat is never beaten back but ducked under ([Mounted 8]), stepped around ([Mounted 9]), or fed on ([Mounted 22]); and once the sword is gone, Fiore's answer to nearly everything is the arm around the neck ([Mounted 20], [Mounted 27], [Mounted 29]). In the witnesses: this is the one section where Morgan coverage is essentially complete — 30 of 32 plays — and it changes the textual picture entirely. Twice the Getty has no text and the Morgan is our base ([Mounted 1], [Mounted 14]), and on the second occasion it alone preserves the pocho, meno, e niente rule. It alone lets the swordsman answer back at [Mounted 5] and [Mounted 7]–[Mounted 9], alone supplies the spurs at [Mounted 28], and alone corrects the Getty's misnumbered counter at [Mounted 20]. Against that, the Getty is alone in carrying [Mounted 29] as a play and [Mounted 32] at all. The old division still holds at the family level — prose gives the mechanics and verse the inventory, and at [Mounted 10] the two families hand the victory to opposite riders — but the "defective" witness of Manuscript comparison §4C is, here, the indispensable one. One further thing is audible only in the originals: from [Mounted 20] to the colophon the Getty's prose rhymes (subito/dubito, volta/tolta, lasena/brena, parechio/vechio), and the Morgan rhymes with it — the verse kernel showing through the prose in the very plays where the prose runs longest, precisely as §6 argues. Foliation says the same thing about the section as a whole: the Getty and the Pisani Dossi close their books with the mounted material (41r–47r; 29a–36b), while the Morgan and the Paris carry it at the front (2v–9r; 2r–5v) — and only the Getty's copy runs on to the end, where a poor old man commends himself to the reader.