Iacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry, ed. Matteo Leonardi and Alessandro Vettori. The Medieval Franciscans, 23. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024, 397 pp., six figures and one table.

Iacopone da Todi (ca. 1230‒1306) is an important cultural figure of thirteenth-century Italy. A member of the Dei Benedetti family in Todi (Umbria), Iacopone (also spelled Jacopone) began life as a successful lawyer, but around midlife he abandoned his career in law and petitioned to enter the Minor Order of the Franciscans. Iacopone left a corpus of 92 poems of reliable attribution that reflect his firm adherence to the Franciscan teachings. Although predicated on Occitanic poetic models, Iacopone’s laude (poems of praise) are exemplary of medieval religious poetry. In them, he expressed his affinity to the Spiritual branch of Franciscanism, which interpreted Francis’s teachings about poverty strictly. He composed laude in praise of his physical illnesses, for instance, because the suffering they bring aids him spiritually. In others, he employed themes of contemptus mundi, decrying the corruption of the world, and memento mori, portraying the decay of the body after death. He is often compared to the two more famous religious writers of medieval Italy, Saint Francis and Dante. Relative to Francis, Iacopone is stereotyped as dour, and when he is compared to Dante, he is said to express a simple, “primitive” faith. This volume, edited by Matteo Leonardi and Alessandro Vettori, amply demonstrates that both stereotypes of Iacopone are unwarranted. Instead, Iacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry is comprised of fourteen essays that consistently highlight Iacopone’s literary and cultural impact in the Middle Ages and beyond as a religious writer.