Iacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry

This volume represents the first essay collection in English on the thirteenth-century Italian poet Iacopone da Todi. It offers a range of perspectives on Iacopone’s complex body of work: his laudario, consisting of around a hundred compositions known as laude, situated between lyric poetry and performative song and comprising various themes: autobiographical, devotional, theological, didactic. As the volume editors argue, this pluridimensional oeuvre requires a pluridimensional interpretative approach, encompassing “multidisciplinary and ‘global’ readings” (2). The volume’s chapters thus aim to bridge numerous disciplines: literary studies, musicology, performance studies, theology, history, philology.Additionally, the volume’s contributors span seven countries, representing a milestone in the effort to foster international exchange in the field, particularly between scholars inside and outside of Italy. As Claudio Peri and Andrew Halperin recently observed, the dialogue between Anglophone and Italian-language scholarship on Iacopone has historically been somewhat unbalanced, with Italian criticism often engaging primarily with its own traditions.1 As such, this volume may implicitly aim not only to contribute to anglophone scholarship but also to enrich Italian-language criticism, placing contributions by Italian scholars at its core and thus fostering engagement with anglophone studies on Iacopone within Italy.The book is divided into four sections. The first focuses on formal, stylistic, rhetorical, and musical dimensions of Iacopone’s laude. Erminia Ardissino opens by discussing prayer as a neglected genre for Iacopone’s laude, fruitfully shedding light on the unacknowledged literary qualities of prayerful enunciation more broadly. Nicolò Crisafi offers a comparative reading of Iacopone and Dante, considering how each poet constructs a personalized “proto-modern form of authorship” (42). A strength of this essay is Crisafi’s refusal of the value hierarchy traditionally established between these poets, highlighting areas where Iacopone may be more subversive and original than Dante. Federica Franzè explores the musical dimensions of the laude, considering music both as a structural principle of the laude as performance texts and as a motif expressing the subject’s relationship to God. Estelle Zunino concludes this section with an examination of techniques drawn by Iacopone from classical rhetoric, mnemonics, and preaching to produce affective and didactic effects upon his audience.The second section consists of two chapters on translations of Iacopone’s laude. Magdalena Maria Kubas reads a late twentieth-century Polish translation of two laude alongside Italian and English editions from earlier in the century, examining how twentieth-century translators filter Iacopone’s idea of mystical ineffability through a modern sensibility regarding language’s expressive capacities. Oana Sălișteanu discusses her experience translating the laude into Romanian, reflecting on the difficulties of rendering the dialectical variability of Italian into a more geographically homogenous language, while also capturing the specific challenges posed by a poet whom Sălișteanu labels a “word adventurer” (136) due to the lexical, semantic, and formal complexity of his poetic expression.The third and largest group of essays interrogates Iacopone’s engagement with spiritual themes from multiple theological and devotional traditions, under the headings of mysticism and asceticism. Anne-Gaëlle Cuif opens with an analysis of the concept of sweetness across Iacopone’s oeuvre, a traditional attribute of Divinity in the Christian tradition that, for Iacopone, represents “a synthesis of the whole mystical experience” (180), an index of both pleasure and suffering in the movement towards God. Alexander J. B. Hampton considers the connection between poetic form and mystical praxis in Iacopone’s laudario through the idea of rhythm. The pertinence of this extends beyond Iacopone to the broader question of ineffability in mystical discourse, suggesting that the formal structures of mystical texts may enable the communication of an extrasemantic dimension of meaning. Matteo Leonardi examines Iacopone’s discourse on the senses. While, frequently, Iacopone’s attitude has been interpreted as monolithically dualistic, Leonardi productively complicates this, demonstrating that Iacopone’s attitude is characterized by an “incessant dialectic between contempt and exaltation of the senses” (232) and situating him within a long Christian tradition of the spiritual senses inherited by Franciscanism.Brian K. Reynolds continues this section with a chapter on the Marian laude, offering an overview of their relation to, yet also originality with respect to, numerous thirteenth-century devotional and theological trends centered around the Virgin. Particularly compelling is Reynolds’s emphasis on the theological robustness of Iacopone’s Mariology, distinguishing him from earlier laudari. Finally, Carlo Zacchetti explores Iacopone’s engagement with Victorine theology, tracing manuscript evidence for the impact of Hugh of St. Victor’s discussion of seraphic love on a tradition of arboreal diagrams connected to a particular lauda of Iacopone’s (78), thus identifying this lauda as a crucial indicator of Victorine influence on Iacopone’s conception of love.The final section focuses on Iacopone’s connection to Franciscanism. Alvaro Cacciotti discusses the presence of Francis of Assisi in Iacopone’s laudario, particularly in two laude (61 and 62) dedicated to the saint. While internal conflicts within the Franciscan Order indelibly marked Iacopone’s biography, particularly surrounding the events of his imprisonment, Cacciotti demonstrates that these conflicts are entirely obscured in Iacopone’s portrait of Francis, which presents him primarily as an exemplar of loving union with God and as a reminder of the era of salvation inaugurated by Christ. Samia Tawwab explores the use of images in Iacopone’s laudario as a didactic and performative strategy aligned with Franciscan preaching. She analyzes Iacopone’s use of metaphorical imagery to facilitate his audience’s absorption of abstract concepts, before turning to the case of lauda 78, where Iacopone uses not just poetic imagery but an actual concrete image, a painting that accompanies this lauda in the manuscript tradition, for dramatic and evangelical effect. Tawwab’s discussion of lauda 78 and its associated arboreal image complements Zacchetti’s treatment of these materials from a very different perspective in the preceding section. The volume concludes with Alessandro Vettori’s examination of the centrality of physical suffering and malady in Iacopone’s oeuvre as components of a Franciscan theology of poverty and imitatio Christi.As the editors note in their introduction, the theological and literary importance of Iacopone’s laude has long been underestimated. The volume aims to contribute to the ongoing effort to rehabilitate Iacopone’s poetic legacy and demonstrate his intricate engagement with multiple strands of late medieval Italian culture, rendering him a crucial node for interdisciplinary dialogue. The volume generally delivers on its promise of interdisciplinarity. In particular, the weight given to literary criticism represents an important effort to recognize the poetic, as well as devotional, value of his compositions. However, certain disciplinary perspectives remain underrepresented: A greater quantitative emphasis on the musical and performative dimensions of the laude and on their manuscript tradition (addressed by Franzè, Tawwab, and Zacchetti, respectively) would have thus been especially welcome. However, this is, overall, a varied and engaging collection that makes a compelling case for Iacopone’s relevance to scholars across various areas of medieval studies.