The God-Madness

JACOPONE DA TODI (Jacopo Benedetti) was born, as his familiar name implies, in the Umbrian hilltop town of Todi in the year 1230. After the death of his wife in an horrendous accident, he discovered that, beneath her clothing, she wore a penitential hairshirt, and this spurred him to become a public penitent and, after a decade of extremely eccentric behaviour, to enter the recently formed Order of Friars Minor of St. Francis of Assisi. In 1298 he was excommunicated and imprisoned for signi...