Jacopone da Todi

Jacopone was born around 1236 in Todi, a fortified hill town in Umbria that governed itself as a free commune during the thirteenth century ^[1]. His family, the Benedetti, belonged to the town's minor nobility, and the name by which history knows him, Jacopone, is an Umbrian augmentative of Jacopo, roughly meaning big or rough Jacopo. The nickname stuck to him for life and later became a badge of the deliberately foolish persona he adopted ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Jacopone da Todi in his early decades would have received a thoroughly worldly answer. He trained in law, possibly at Bologna, the leading law school of medieval Europe, and returned to Todi to practice as a notary and procurator ^[1]. Thirteenth-century Umbria offered steady work to such men: communes, guilds, and feuding families all needed contracts drafted and lawsuits argued. The early biographical tradition, recorded in the fourteenth century, describes him as ambitious, sharp in his dealings, and fond of display ^[3].

Around 1267 he married a young noblewoman named Vanna di Bernardino di Guidone. The marriage appears in every early account of his life, because what happened to it changed everything that followed ^[2].

The story that anchors every Jacopone da Todi biography concerns his wife's death. According to the early lives, Vanna attended a public festivity, probably a wedding celebration, when a platform or balcony collapsed under the guests. She was fatally injured. When Jacopone reached her and loosened her clothing, he discovered a hair shirt worn against her skin, a hidden instrument of penance ^[3]. The realization that his wife had been quietly atoning, perhaps for his own vanities, broke him. Scholars treat the details with caution, since the earliest written versions date from decades after his death, but the sudden conversion around 1268 is accepted as historical ^[2].

Jacopone gave up his legal practice, sold or gave away his property, and spent roughly ten years as a bizzocone, a lay penitent bound by no formal rule ^[1]. He made himself a public spectacle in Todi. One famous anecdote has him appearing at a family wedding tarred and feathered; another describes him crawling on all fours wearing a donkey's saddle ^[3]. Fellow citizens who had known the polished lawyer now saw a holy fool, and the humiliation was the point. In his own verse he later prayed for illness, disgrace, and universal contempt as gifts.

In 1278 he sought admission to the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans. The friars at first hesitated, reportedly doubting the sanity of the notorious penitent, and accepted him only after he presented a doctrinal poem on the vanity of the world ^[2]. He remained a lay brother, never seeking ordination as a priest.

Jacopone's principal achievement is a body of about ninety laude, religious poems in the Umbrian vernacular, whose attribution modern editors regard as secure, with others of doubtful authorship circulating under his name ^[4]. The lauda was a popular form in his day, a hymn of praise sung by confraternities of lay penitents, but Jacopone stretched it far beyond convention. His poems argue, mock, lament, and blaze. They dramatize the soul's ascent toward God, satirize corrupt clergy, catalogue the miseries of the body, and describe mystical union in language of startling force ^[1].

The most famous of the laude is Donna de Paradiso, a dialogue on the Passion in which a messenger, the Virgin Mary, and the crucified Christ speak in turn. Because it distributes the narrative among speaking voices, historians of theater count it among the earliest dramatic texts in Italian and a forerunner of vernacular sacred drama ^[5]. Other laude, such as O Segnor per cortesia, in which the poet begs for every conceivable disease as a favor from God, show the extremism that made contemporaries think him mad and later readers think him a genius.

His mysticism drew on Franciscan sources, on the theology of divine love, and possibly on the tradition of mystical annihilation of the self ^[4]. Yet the poems never read as treatises. They swing between coarse realism and abstraction, between self-mockery and rapture, in short punchy lines built for singing. Among the memorable Jacopone da Todi facts is that he wrote in dialect for ordinary listeners at the very moment Italian literature was being born; he was an older contemporary of Dante Alighieri, and the two men shared a talent for turning theological fire into vernacular verse ^[1].

Jacopone belonged in spirit to the Spiritual Franciscans, the rigorist wing of the order that demanded absolute poverty as Francis of Assisi had practiced it, against the moderate majority known as the Community ^[2]. In 1294 the hermit Pietro da Morrone became Pope Celestine V, and the Spirituals briefly won protection from him. Jacopone addressed a remarkable poem to the new pope, warning him that the papal office would test him severely. The warning proved apt: Celestine abdicated within months, and Benedetto Caetani was elected as Boniface VIII ^[1].

Boniface revoked the concessions to the Spirituals and pursued his enemies energetically. Chief among them were the Colonna, a powerful Roman family with two cardinals, Giacomo and Pietro, who questioned the legitimacy of Celestine's abdication and therefore of Boniface's election. In May 1297 Jacopone signed the Longhezza manifesto alongside the Colonna cardinals, calling for a general council to judge the validity of Boniface's papacy ^[6]. It was an extraordinary act for an elderly lay brother, and it made him a marked man.

Boniface excommunicated the rebels and preached a crusade against them. The Colonna stronghold of Palestrina surrendered in September 1298, and Jacopone, then past sixty, was captured there ^[6]. He was stripped of his habit, condemned, and confined in an underground cell, by tradition in the fortress convent of San Fortunato in Todi. From prison he wrote some of his most searing verse, including a grimly comic inventory of his chains, his basket lowered for food, and his own stench, and two poems addressed directly to Boniface, one begging for absolution, the other flinging defiance at the pope's ambition ^[4].

The jubilee year of 1300 brought amnesties to many, but not to Jacopone. Boniface excluded him from pardon, and the old friar stayed underground while pilgrims streamed to Rome ^[2]. His release came only through the pope's downfall. In September 1303 agents of the French crown and the Colonna family seized Boniface at Anagni; the pope died a month later. His successor, Benedict XI, lifted Jacopone's excommunication late in 1303, and the prisoner walked free after five years ^[1].

Jacopone spent his final three years in retirement at Collazzone, a small hill town between Todi and Perugia, in the care of the Poor Clares of the convent of San Lorenzo ^[6]. The combative poems ceased. The laude assigned to this last period turn toward serenity, contemplating divine love beyond struggle and self.

He died on the night of December 25, 1306, at Collazzone, with a tradition holding that his friend Giovanni della Verna arrived in time to give him the last sacraments on Christmas night ^[3]. His remains were later moved to Todi, where they rest in the crypt of San Fortunato beneath an epitaph, added in 1596, describing him as the fool for Christ who ravished heaven ^[2].

Assessments of Jacopone da Todi achievements begin with literature. His laude form one of the founding monuments of Italian poetry, admired for a rawness and emotional range that few later religious poets matched. The first printed edition appeared in Florence in 1490, and modern critical study rests on the edition of the Laude prepared by Franco Mancini from the earliest manuscripts ^[4]. Writers and critics from the Renaissance onward have returned to him; in the twentieth century the English scholar Evelyn Underhill devoted a full study to his poetry and mysticism ^[5].

His name is also permanently linked to the Stabat Mater dolorosa, the Latin sequence on the sorrows of Mary at the cross that composers from Palestrina and Pergolesi to Rossini, Dvorak, and Verdi have set to music. The attribution to Jacopone appears in early manuscripts and was long accepted, but modern scholarship treats it as uncertain, with Innocent III and various Franciscan authors proposed as alternatives ^[7]. Whether or not he wrote it, the pairing reflects how completely his reputation came to embody Franciscan devotion to the Passion.

Jacopone was never canonized, a consequence in part of his war with a pope, yet Todi has long venerated him as a local blessed, and his cult persisted in Umbria for centuries ^[2]. Historians of religion read him as the great poetic witness of the Spiritual Franciscan movement, and historians of theater as a pioneer of sacred drama in the vernacular. Seven hundred years after his death on Christmas night, the lawyer who chose to be called a fool remains among the most arresting figures medieval Italy produced ^[5].