Composing in Prison between the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: an Unpublished Letter from the Stinche

Abstract

The essay brings to light an unpublished anonymous letter composed in the Stinche prison of Florence, transmitted in two collections of prose of rhetorical and civic interest (mss. Ricc. 1200 and Magl. VIII.1440). Through internal textual analysis corroborated by archival evidence, the letter is attributed to the poet Iacopo del Pecora of Montepulciano, and its composition is dated around 1398. The text represents a further witness to the largely overlooked practice of prison writing in medieval Italian literary culture. Its inclusion in two scholarly miscellanies may reflect its exemplary value, situating it within a rhetorical tradition that identified the Stinche as one of its loci of textual production.