(b Todi, between 1228 and 1236; d Collazzone, ?1306). Italian poet. He appears to have been a lawyer but, according to the hagiography, he was converted in about 1268 to the life of religion by the tragic death of his young wife. In 1278 he was admitted to the Franciscan order, attaching himself to their most rigorous branch, the Spirituali (zealots). He may have begun to write laude at about this time; several of these poems have polemical contents. As a result of his actions against Pope Boniface VIII, in 1298 he was imprisoned for five years. His main poetic output is represented by 92 laude that are definitely attributable to him; the attribution to him of Latin prose works and that of the sequence Stabat mater is more doubtful. The early transmission of his poetry was within the boundaries of the Franciscan repertory, but his laude later spread into the repertory of the Tuscan confraternities of laudesi, whose oldest surviving musical collections are the Cortona laudario (I-CT 91; 1260–91), which includes two poems by Jacopone, and the Florence laudario (I-Fn Magl.II.I.122, B.R.18; early 14th century), containing five more.
F. Liuzzi: La lauda e i primordi della melodia italiana (Rome, 1935), i, 143ff
F. Ageno, ed.: Jacopone da Todi: Laudi, trattato e detti (Florence, 1953)
F. Mancini, ed.: Iacopone da Todi: Laude (Bari, 1974/R)
A. Ziino: ‘Laudi e miniature fiorentine del primo Trecento’, Studi musicali, vii (1978), 39–83
C. Barr: The Monophonic Lauda and the Lay Religious Confraternities of Tuscany and Umbria in the Late Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI, 1988)
B.McD. Wilson: Music and Merchants: the Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence (Oxford, 1992), 27, 37ff, 149–82
For further bibliography see Sources, MS, §III, 7
DAVID FALLOWS, JOHN STEVENS/GIANLUCA D’AGOSTINO