Musica dagli Statuti della Confraternita di S. Maria della Morte di Bologna: «letanie, laude et altre oratione cum canto digando»

The art of executing well — to quote the evocative title of a beautiful book edited by the Canadian historian Nicholas Terpstra — in vogue in Bologna between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also included the use of an interesting corpus of 211 laude. The poetic texts are irregularly distributed in twelve manuscripts compiled between the end of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries for the local Confraternita dei Battuti of Santa Maria della Morte, the richest of which hosts 106 laude (MS 157 of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, a collection clearly coming from Emilia, probably Bologna). The mode of performance for this large corpus is, strangely, never clarified in any of the books that contain the poetic texts, but the occasions of their use are offered in the oldest Statutes of the brotherhood, recently come to light: those of ca.1393 and of 1522. The collective performance of the laude was authorized by the Prior in some private and public moments of confraternity life, including accompanying prisoners sentenced to death to the gallows. The spiritual and material care of the last hours of condemned people constituted, in fact, a special activity of the Bolognese brotherhood, which was the first in the world to set about pacifying the terrified souls of the prisoners with accurate and systematic activity.