La vita e l'opera di Iacopone da Todi. Atti del Convegno di studio. Todi, 3–7 dicembre 2006 (review)

This very thick and impressive-looking volume contains the proceedings of a congress that celebrated the 700th anniversary of Iacopone da Todi's death in 1306. It features the contributions of illustrious experts on the topic, as well as the articles of younger and upcoming scholars.

The collection revolves around the vexata quaestio—unavoidable in Iacopone studies—on the lack of a critical edition for the Laudeand the possibility of creating one. The consensus is on the difficulty of identifying an archetypal manuscript to proceed to the establishment of a secure critical text. There is also a lot of uncertainty about Iacopone's original language and the attribution to him of a conspicuous number of poems. This overall panorama of nebulousness and shifting ground is common to both Iacopone's life and poetry. Even the information transmitted by tradition about Iacopone's conversion and his subsequent religious life is dubious. The entire volume focuses on the importance of establishing a secure text for the Laudeand reliable sources for his life.

While the majority of articles are devoted to Iacopone's poetic production, three (out of twenty-four) of them deal with his biographical materials. Enrico Menestò (an authority on Iacopone), Emore Paoli, and Laura Andreani offer the results of their studies on the truthfulness of traditional biographies, Iacoponian hagiographies, and the poet's burial, respectively.

With the exception of Carlo Delcorno and Alvaro Cacciotti, who give new and original interpretive tools to read Iacopone's poems, most other contributions concentrate on ecdotic issues to do with reconstructing and editing the texts of the Laude. Lino Leonardi, as a longtime researcher and undisputed authority on Iacopone's canon, details the status quaestionisand the progress toward establishing a new edition of Iacopone's poetry. He voices the necessity to replace the two existing editions, one by Franca Brambilla Ageno and the other by Franco Mancini, which, although crucial reference points for reading and studying Iacopone, are not fully acceptable as faithfully representing the original collection of poems (p. 85). Despite his open admission that a critical edition is still far from being accomplished, Leonardi speaks of cooperative group work, the results of which are already evident in the proceedings of this congress itself. In particular, Angelo Eugenio Mecca has identified 337 manuscripts containing a varying number of Iacopone's laude, and Paola Allegretti has rediscovered the Mortara Codex, a lost manuscript that may be of fundamental importance for a new edition of the Laude. These are important steps in the direction of a new edition.

Other studies focus on language, the second crucial point of Iacopone scholarship. Maria Sofia Lannutti studies the possible influence of medieval Latin poetry on Iacopone, Massimo Lucarelli identifies traces of juridical language, Giovanni Boccali highlights biblical quotations, Enzo Mattesini and Ugo Vignuzzi focus on the language of two manuscripts (London and Chantilly), and Marcello Ravesi offers the results of his analysis of the Oliverian manuscript. Matteo Leonardi beautifully combines philology and interpretation by underlining how a commentary needs interpretation and, especially, a philologically reliable text.

Other contributors give the results of their investigation on a variety of aspects of Iacopone's poetic production. Stefano Brufani researches Iacopone's possible reading material during the writing of his poems and finds that the Legenda franciscana, the collection of hagiographic accounts on St. Francis of Assisi, did not figure prominently among them, despite the poet's faithful allegiance to the Franciscan Order. Mira Mocan demonstrates how the lauda"Amor de caritate" derives from Richard of St. Victor. Other articles look at various textual issues, such as the characteristics of the Bonaccorsi Edition (Alessio Delcaria and Edoardo Barbieri), the attribution of noncanonical laude to Iacopone (Gaia Gubbini), and fourteenth...