Trial By Fire

Savonarola revisited. (Via Joshua Snyder.)

Yet nothing is simple about Savonarola, as Donald Weinstein shows in his luminous and learned biography. Machiavelli’s close friend Francesco Guicciardini, who matched him in cynicism and perhaps more than matched him in political insight, praised Savonarola. A man of great learning, he had promoted “decent behavior” and reestablished the city’s republican government. Even if Savonarola had been a false prophet, after all, he had succeeded in fooling the public for many years: “He must have had great judgment, talent, and power of invention.” Where Guicciardini reserved his final verdict, others did not. Savonarola’s supporters secretly gathered his ashes from the river and revered them, along with his vestments, his hair shirt, and pieces of the gallows he had died on. His spiritual writings found hundreds of readers: his Manual for the Instruction of Confessors, unpublished when he died, was printed at least forty-two times over the next two centuries. Religious women in particular found inspiration in them for passionate, introspective prayer, and sometimes for visions like his. Almost a century after Savonarola died, a condemned heretic, Pope Clement VIII considered making him a saint. (Read entire article.)

Share