senno me par e cortesia

The cultural and literary background of Jacopone da Todi’s Lauds allows for the hypothesis that the probable self-quotation as “jester” in the laudarium has the value of a self-denigratory signal on one hand and of sign of the use of the courtly code on the other. This use covers all the main lexemes of the lyrical profane vocabulary, and are present in the Laudarium in a double sense: the traditional literary one and the sacred one that originates from a process of re-semantization. Furthermore, the term he uses maintains institutional links to the other lexemes of the erotic system. So Jacopone takes on the literary lexical heritage bending it towards a different need to communicate an exceptional experience. His creativity is set where things to be said and ways of saying them meet. But, differently from the poets of the Sicilian School, who aren’t interested in an actual communication of content, but only in promoting poetry and its new code, his poetic language becomes pre-text, that must be endowed with new meaning. The itinerary of the “Lauds” is parallel to the revolutionary one of Dante’s poetry of laud.