Iacopone da Todi

Abstract

Iacopone da Todi (b. 1230/36–d. 1304/06) is the most important writer of laude between the 13th and 14th centuries and is considered an unavoidable model for laude collections of subsequent centuries. The genre of laude, which are religious poetic texts in the vernacular, came to life in the 13th century under the impulse of penitential movements, within the mendicant groups and the newly constituted religious confraternities. It prospered in the context of paraliturgical celebrations in the vernacular, thanks to which the faithful lay people reinterpreted the official Latin liturgy in forms that were more suited to them. After a worldly youth—according to ancient biographical accounts—Iacopone joined the Franciscan Order and participated in the bitter disputes between Spiritual and Moderate Franciscans, siding with the Spirituals and defending a more rigorous interpretation of Francis’s Rule. His inflexible stand also originated his conflict against Pope Boniface VIII, which caused his incarceration between 1298 and 1303, after the fall of the fortress of Palestrina where Iacopone was involved in a resistance together with other papal opponents. He wrote a collection of approximately one hundred spiritual laude and two Latin texts, the Tractatus utilissimus and Verba. The attribution to him of the Latin sequence “Stabat Mater” is debated. Some of Iacopone’s laude are catechetical texts, moral exhortations, political and ideological diatribes (for example, against incoherent Franciscan friars and clerics), ascetic meditations, and mystical confessions. At the heart of Iacopone’s mysticism is the concept of esmesuranza (extra-measure), or the infinite love human beings are called to give back for God’s infinite love on the cross. That is how human beings can transcend themselves, transforming into the image of God. Iacopone’s language includes the most disparate expressive registers, oscillating between a jongleur’s vigorous realism and passionate lyrical outbursts. His relationship to his contemporary Dante Alighieri is still much debated by literary criticism, although no philologically credible proof exists that the two ever knew of each other’s work or existence. Dante’s passion for Franciscan themes, such as poverty as an essential component of church purification and the mystical union with divinity, creates interesting parallels in the works of the two poets. Over the years, criticism has acknowledged the importance of the Iacoponian poetic model for the construction, over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, of a lyrical grammar of divine love, which was shared by the European tradition of ecstatic confessions.