Thomas of Celano

Thomas of Celano was an Italian Friar Minor, poet, and foundational biographer of Francis of Assisi. Born at Celano in the Abruzzi, he probably entered the Franciscan order around 1215 and joined the early mission to Germany in 1221. After Francis's canonization, Pope Gregory IX commissioned Thomas to write a life of the saint. His First Life was completed about 1229; he later produced a second account and a treatise on Francis's miracles. These writings remain central sources for the beginnings of the Franciscan movement.

The Latin sequence Dies irae is traditionally attributed to Thomas, and hymnals commonly retain his name with an attribution qualifier. The identification is not certain. The poem survives in medieval sources, but the explicit attribution to Thomas is later, and scholarship has proposed earlier material or other authors. It is therefore more accurate to describe him as the traditional or attributed author than as the conclusively proven writer. The sequence's compact rhymed triplets, judgment imagery, and movement from cosmic terror to personal prayer helped it become a major text in the Western Mass for the Dead. William Josiah Irons's nineteenth-century translation carried that tradition into English-language hymnody.