Podcast
Claudio Peri has produced a podcast series reviewing various aspects of the life, work and mysticism of Jacopone da Todi. In each issue of this newsletter we will present two episodes of this podcast, recorded both in Italian and in English.
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Episode 4
Having discussed the years spent as a Franciscan tertiary, now is a good time to say something about Jacopone’s hagiography – that is, the biography written for devotional purposes almost three centuries after his death. It contains a lot of invention, describing a Jacopone engaged in such extreme and ridiculous self-abasement as to look almost crazy. Dressing in chicken feathers or a donkey’s pelt, filling his chamber with rotting meat, subjecting his body to extreme, humiliating austerities...
In reality Jacopone was by no means extreme in penitence; in fact, he explicitly criticised others whose displays of devotion bordered on fanaticism.
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Episode 3
In this third podcast we’ll look at the ten years after Jacopone’s conversion, spent as a Franciscan tertiary – that is, a member of the ‘Third Order’ who followed a special rule of life, written for lay people by St. Francis. Jacopone took on the role of an itinerant missionary in Todi and the surrounding countryside. He shared the Gospel and the doctrines of the Church in the Italian vernacular – not in Latin, which was the language of formal religious celebrations but was incomprehensible to poor people.
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Episode 2
Jacopone 's conversion followed the model set by St. Francis and repeated in Italy and around the world by hundreds and then thousands of people, young and older, male and female. This involved responding to the recommendation Jesus gave to a rich young man: “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have, give it to the poor ... then come and follow me”.
Jacopone was not a man of half measures:
One fine day in the year 1268, …
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Episode 1
The information Jacopone gives us about his life before conversion is summarized very effectively in two autobiographical poems. The first, ‘O me lascio dolente (O unhappy and sorrowful, I)’ refers to the period of youth including when he studied law in some university of the time, perhaps Bologna. Jacopone is aged between 20 and 30 years and has all the characteristics of a young man from a good family: joyful, conceited and vain. He can write about poetry and music, he participates in parties, courts women, gives expensive gifts and squanders the modest economic resources of the family.
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