Medieval Christianity: Girolamo Savonarola

"Therefore, it seems to me, as a Florentine of ancient family, that I am paying only part of an immense debt in publishing, for the fifth centenary of his other birthday, a life of Savonarola in that land where he gathered his harvest of love and hatred, where he rose to greatness, and where he suffered martyrdom. And may this Florentine ancestry of mine avail me in the task, no less my long study and my great affection and my twenty years' work on the writings and the history of the Friar." -Preface

On 23 May 1498 Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most spell-binding figures of the Italian Renaissance, was publicly burned at the stake on the main piazza of Florence on trumped-up charges of heresy and sedition. Thus ended the friar's meteoric rise to power and his unprecedented influence over Florentine society. Though his ashes were unceremoniously dumped into the River Arno the moment the cinders had died away, the fire of his teachings could not be extinguished, nor could Florentines forget the rivetting preacher from Ferrara who, in four short years, had turned their city upside down. Neither could Italians nor, more generally, European reformers, for they soon turned Savonarola into a prophet of renewal and into a symbol of the struggle against corruption. Whether he was one or the other or neither, is still very much under debate. This collection of texts from Savonarola's extensive body of works seeks to provide the English reader with a variety of entry points into this controversial figure. With samples from his letters to his poems, from his sermons to his pastoral works, it more than doubles the number of Savonarola's works currently available in English. In so doing, it makes his teachings that much more accessible to wide range of scholars and students alike.

One of history's most fascinating duels was the struggle to the death between Savonarola and Pope Alexander VI. Sometimes thought of as the simple story of a good man and a bad man, it was actually much more complex - and interesting - than that. For at the time the Pope was not only head of the Church but temporal ruler of central Italy, and sometimes the latter role seemed more important. Renaissance Italy was weak from centuries of disunity and invasion. Alexander was feverishly trying to unite the country to repel the newest invader, Charles VIII of France. But Savonarola thought that the interests of Florence lay with the French, and so the reformer of the Church ran afoul of the authority of the Church. Alexander, no Grand Inquisitor, did his best to look the other way. When he finally felt obliged to act, his first move was moderate enough: he asked Savonarola to come to Rome to answer charges. The friar tried every dodge, first disingenuously, then defiantly. As the net closed about him, he grew positions, ultimately questioning the Pope's authority. And then, the climax. It ended suddenly, in a burst of violence, heroism, barbarism and sanctity. Re-creating this conflict in such broad, vivid strokes, Michael de la Bedoyere has given us a memorable slice of Renaissance life.

"The Elect Nation" is the first comprehensive study of the religious, political and cultural movement inspired by Savonarola. Based on a thorough examination of the archival material and manuscript sources, the book argues that the followers of Savonarola exercised a profound influence on every facet of Florentine life during the important period of the city's transition from republic to principate. It is the author's contention that their ideology and activities provide the key to understanding not only the Florentine Republic, but also the nature of contemporary political debate and the characteristics of the emerging Medicean Principate.

The real drama of the relationship between Savonarola and Florence, this book shows, was not the reformer's conversion of the Florentines or his brief ascendancy over them, but the city's decisive conquest of him. The city inspired his transformation from a preacher of apocalyptic despair to a prophet of the millennium and a visionary of Florentine glory. In this sense, "Savonarola and Florence" is the biography not of a man but of an idea, the idea of Florence manifest in civic tradition throughout the city's republican career. While we know of Florentine millennialism best through Savonarola, he did not create it; his fame, however, has tended to obscure the civic roots of his teaching. Professor Weinstein sees the phenomenom of millennialism, which has until now been treated mainly as a lower-class response to social crisis, as the projection of the fantasies of what may have been the most bourgeois city of the Renaissance.