Manuscript Comparison

The Zettel was composed in the fourteenth century (Liechtenauer was a late-14th-century master; the earliest witness already treats the verses as an inherited authority). Its manuscript life, however, is overwhelmingly a fifteenth-century phenomenon: the working copies that define the text — Nuremberg (ca. 1390s), Gotha (1448), Rome (1452), Copenhagen (1459), the Kal group (ca. 1470-1480s), Salzburg (1491) — all fall within or beside that century, in Early New High German, in the milieu of the judicial duel and the knightly household the preface addresses ([P 1]). The sixteenth-century copies (1505-1588) are inheritors: fuller in coverage, more uniform, and explicit that they are closing a finished monument ("thus ends Master Liechtenauer's art," [LS 24]).

No autograph or archetype survives; Wiktenauer's infobox lists the archetype as "hypothetical." Every witness is a use-copy of someone else's — a gloss's spine, a master's compilation, an heirloom anthology.

Transcribed on the page (19 columns, 18 codices — Dresden holds two copies):

✓+ = complete plus bonus material (extra verses or colophon row). Listed but untranscribed on the page: Ortenburg Fechtbuch (1400s), Pirckheimer/Nuremberg Ⅱ (ca. 1500), Erhart/Glasgow Ⅱ (1533), Cgm 3712/Munich Ⅲ (1556).

One structural absence matters: the page's long-sword concordance has no MS 3227a column. 3227a's long-sword verses are embedded couplet-by-couplet inside its gloss (Wiktenauer files them under the Pol Hausbuch page), so within this corpus the oldest standalone long-sword recital is the Gotha (1448), and the oldest complete framed one is the Rome (1452).

From the corpus coverage matrix (liechtenauer_data.json):

• Preface (2 rows): the prose preamble [P 1] only in Gotha, Rome, Vienna Ⅰ, Dresden A — the "titled" copies; the verse prologue [P 2] in eight witnesses.
• Long sword (24 rows): rows 1-23 stable across ten witnesses; row 24 (colophons) only in Copenhagen, Wolfenbüttel Ⅰ+Ⅱ, Munich Ⅱ, Augsburg Ⅰ, Krakow. Bologna breaks off after row 1; Munich Ⅰ carries only rows 4-8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22-23 (the five hews and selected pieces); Dresden B rows 4-19 (the body without frame or conclusion); Augsburg Ⅱ starts at row 4 (no general teaching).
• Mounted figures (29 rows): the 26 figures ([F 3]-[F 28]) in Gotha, Rome, Glasgow Ⅰ, Krakow, Augsburg Ⅱ; heading row only in Augsburg Ⅱ; prefatory catch-lines and closing verses only in Rome and Augsburg Ⅱ; 3227a has only [F 4], [F 6], [F 13], [F 15].
• Dueling (13 rows): mounted rows 1-8 + armored rows 9-13 in Nuremberg, Gotha, Rome, Vienna Ⅰ, Krakow, Augsburg Ⅱ; Salzburg, Vienna Ⅱ and Rostock carry rows 10-13 only — the foot-combat verses circulating alone.

The Nuremberg Hausbuch is not simply "the same text, older":

• Fuller where the mainline is lean: its mounted text [D 2] carries a long run of couplets no other witness keeps — girth-check, bridle-length, choosing the side, lance-vs-lance setting-aside, the escape-turns. This reads like praxis the abridged mainline pruned to tactics (translated in full in Mounted and Dismounted Dueling translation).
• Leaner where the mainline is full: four figures instead of twenty-six; the preface reduced to three couplets and "ut supra in praeambulo" — the compiler had quoted it already and expects a reader with the text in memory.
• Different in kind: its long-sword verses live inside a gloss; the Zettel functions there as lemmata for commentary, not as a standalone recital. It also famously does not attach the formulaic blessing for the dead to Liechtenauer's name (page note 1), while the Rome's "God be gracious to him" ([P 1], 1452) presumes him dead — the two poles of the master's lifetime sit inside this corpus.
• Reordered: the folio references in its dueling column (53r → 55r → 57v → 58r → 59r → 60r → 61v → 59v → 60v) show Wiktenauer re-sequencing its rows to match the Rome order — its native arrangement differs.

The tradition visibly accretes across the fifteenth century:

1. The figure-layer. 4 figures in 3227a → 26 in Gotha/Rome (1448-52) and thereafter, with Augsburg Ⅱ (1553) adding a formal heading and only Rome/Augsburg Ⅱ framing them with catch-lines and closing verses. The mnemonic digest grew around the mounted verses during the century (see Technical grouping §9).
2. Bonus verses inside rows. Gotha's preface inserts extra didactic couplets ("many an honest man… if he knew art, he might well win honor"); Copenhagen interpolates courage-lines into [LS 6] and hilt-work into [LS 20]; the page's own selectors flag further extra verses in Bologna, Dresden B, the Wilhalm pair, and Augsburg Ⅱ.
3. The colophon row [LS 24]. Absent from Gotha/Rome/Vienna Ⅰ/Dresden A; present as Talhoffer's personal couplet (Copenhagen 1459), a bare "etc. & finis" (Wolfenbüttel Ⅰ), and the full "thus ends Master Liechtenauer's art of the long sword" in the sixteenth-century line — the moment the living Zettel becomes a closed, authored classic.

What coverage plus sampled readings support:

• An independent early branch: 3227a (see §4).
• The mainline recital: Rome (1452) with Vienna Ⅰ and Dresden A (matching preface, full frame, no colophon); Krakow and Augsburg Ⅱ continue this text into the sixteenth century with modernized spelling and added apparatus.
• The Talhoffer line: Gotha (1448) is mainline text under Talhoffer's editing — per-piece rubrics ("das ist võ … dy außrichtu~g"), a dated title, small corruptions (§8). Copenhagen (1459) is a free Alemannic rework that reassigns the teaching voice ("here Talhoffer teaches…") and signs off in his name — the page accordingly attributes its verses to Talhoffer, not Liechtenauer.
• The Kal group: three copies from one master's circle (Bologna, Munich Ⅰ, Vienna Ⅰ) with wildly uneven completeness — fragment, selection, and full text respectively; evidence that even within one workshop the Zettel was copied to need, not to completeness.
• The excerpt line: Salzburg (1491), Vienna Ⅱ (1505), Rostock (1570-71) transmit only the foot-combat wrestling verses [D 10]-[D 13], Salzburg under its own rubric "the Zettel teaches wrestling for the duel on foot" — a detached quotable unit inside gloss anthologies.
• The Wilhalm pair: Munich Ⅱ and Augsburg Ⅰ (both 1523) share coverage, bonus rows, and a near-identical colophon — patently one exemplar behind both.

All witnesses are Early New High German, and the corpus is a dialect map of the German fencing world: the Rome/Vienna/Dresden mainline is Bavarian-Austrian ("dÿe zegt," "chümpt," "plösen"); 3227a is East Central German ("her" for "er," "keyn" for "gegen," "czu," "awge"); Gotha is heavily abbreviated Franconian scribal usage (võ, u~, °); Copenhagen is Swabian-Alemannic ("gaut," "lauß," "zwierh," "aulber"); Rostock (1570-71) already punctuates like print. Anyone collating the Zettel is therefore reading one poem through five spelling systems — which is precisely why rhyme, not orthography, is the text's error-correcting code (Technical grouping §11).

Beside the workspace's other fourteenth-century master: where Fiore dei Liberi individually names twelve longsword poste and pictures every play, the Zettel compresses guards to four generators ([LS 11]) and pictures nothing — a text built for memory under secrecy ([P 1]) rather than for illustrated patronage. The two traditions solve the same pedagogical problem from opposite ends; the Fiore corpus notes (docs/fiore/) make the systematic comparison.

• The composition is fourteenth-century: Liechtenauer appears in no dated life-record; the only biographical notice is 3227a's, whose compiler may have known him alive, and whose text already calls the verses an inherited authority.
• The document base is fifteenth-century: of the eighteen transcribed codices, one is dated ca. 1390, eight fall 1448-1508, and the rest are sixteenth-century copies of fifteenth-century material. The core of every reading in this corpus — Rome, Gotha, Copenhagen, the Kal copies, Salzburg — is mid-to-late fifteenth century, contemporary with the harness, the judicial duel, and the master-guild world the verses assume.
• On 3227a's "1390": the page dates it 1390 (the traditional ca. 1389 dating from its calendar); more recent codicological argument places the compilation in the early fifteenth century. Nothing in our analysis leans on the difference: it is the earliest witness on either dating, and its textual independence (§4) — not its year — is what carries weight.
• Terminus of the living tradition: the excerpt copies (Salzburg 1491 → Rostock 1570-71) and the colophon line (§5) bracket the shift from teaching text to heritage text; by 1588 (Wolfenbüttel Ⅱ) the Zettel is copied as a monument, three centuries after its composition.