Thomas of Celano (1190-1260)

Italian Franciscan monk and poet.

According to an uncertain Tradition, he wrote the words of the long 13th-century hymn or sequence ‘Dies irae, dies illa’, which forms the Sequence in the ‘Requiem’ or Mass for the Dead. Celano wrote biographies of St Francis much admired at the time, though their historicity has been questioned since, and also of St Clare.