Jacopone da Todi
Italian Franciscan friar, mystic, and the probable author of the Stabat Mater.
Jacopone da Todi was a 13th-century Italian Franciscan friar, poet, and mystic from the Umbrian town of Todi, in central Italy. Born Jacopo dei Benedetti to a noble family, he trained as a lawyer and lived a worldly life until the sudden death of his wife in a building collapse around 1268 turned him toward religion. He entered the Franciscan Order around 1278 and became one of the most important voices of the Spiritual Franciscan movement, the strict observance party that sought to preserve Saint Francis's radical commitment to poverty against what they saw as the order's compromises with wealth and ecclesiastical power. Jacopone's vernacular religious poems in Italian, known as laude (praises), are among the foundations of early Italian literature and pioneered the use of the vernacular for serious religious expression in Italy decades before Dante. He wrote scathing political poetry against Pope Boniface VIII, for which he was imprisoned from 1298 to 1303. The Stabat Mater, traditionally attributed to him on the basis of stylistic analysis and the dating of the earliest manuscripts, is among the most famous medieval Latin religious poems and has been set to music by composers including Palestrina, Pergolesi, Haydn, Schubert, Rossini, Verdi, and Dvorak.
This is the traditional attribution; modern scholarship is divided. See the prayer page for details.