The fifteenth-century manuscript MS 157 of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna belongs to a series of books related to the task of comforting those condemned to death in Bologna. To carry out such comforting, the local Confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte (founded 1336) used, among other things, a corpus of 211 laude, 106 of which are found in MS 157, more than half of which are still unpublished. Eleven of these texts were written by the nobleman Giovanni Marco Pio da Carpi (d. 1469), an interesting example of a literate prisoner who expressed his morals and thoughts in poetry. This article examines the contents of Pio’s poems, nine of which are known only through MS 157, in order to analyse their edifying and exemplary function for those condemned to death.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Filocamo, G., (2025), "The Thoughts of a Noble Prisoner: Giovanni Marco Pio da Carpi’s Laude as Examples of Good Morality", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

  Copy Citation | Export metadata as... | JSON | CSV | RO-Crate | BibTex | EndNote

Original publication: Filocamo, Gioia. “The Thoughts of a Noble Prisoner: Giovanni Marco Pio da Carpi’s Laude as Examples of Good Morality.” Confraternitas 30 (1-2): 2020. 6-17. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.