The Burning of the Vanities: Savonarola and the Borgia Pope (review)

This uninspired biography takes us once again over the familiar path of Savonarola's life: youthful renunciation of the world and entry into the Dominican order, early failure in the pulpit, sudden prophetic illumination, apocalyptic preaching, anti-Medicean reform, struggle to build the new, populist Jerusalem in Florence, downfall, torture, forged confession, death on the scaffold, and inspirational afterlife. In working through these key stages Seward relies almost exclusively upon early devotional sources such as the hagiographic Vita by the anonymous writer known as pseudo-Burlamacchi and upon modern historians working the same cultic vein, particularly Pasquale Villari, Josef Schnitzer, Roberto Ridolfi, and Claudio Leonardi. Like Schnitzer and Ridolfi, Seward believes that an "uncanny" number of Savonarola's prophecies came true (217) including the friar's retrospective claims to have prophesied the death of Lorenzo de' Medici and Ferrante of Aragon, and his prophecies of "Rome's overthrow" (68).

Apparently Seward is ignorant of the work of Alison Brown (except for one article), Giorgio Cadoni, Giulio Cattin, Franco Cordero, Mario Martelli, Romeo De Maio, Ottavia Niccoli, Roberto Rusconi, Michael Tavuzzi, Cesare Vasoli, and Armando F. Verde, some of whom have been reconstructing the political, religious, and cultural forces that influenced the Frate's career, while others have been casting new light on the more obscure phases of his life story. My own work finds little favor with Seward: he categorically declares my characterization of Savonarola as a millenarian to be mistaken. Fair enough; he is not alone in this, but he dismisses it on the grounds that the friar was too orthodox a Catholic to hold millenarian views — hardly an argument. He professes his debt to the fine work of Lorenzo Polizzotto, but had he read it more carefully he would have seen that Polizzotto too regards Savonarola as a millenarian. Nor does he offer any evidence for declaring that Savonarola's promise to Florence of riches (and glory and empire) in the new (but non-millenarian) era is to be understood in a purely spiritual sense. Seward summarily dismisses the Frate's written confessions as a forgery, thus prejudicing their use as a valuable source. Had he read the introductory analysis and footnotes of the recent edition — I. Rao, P. Viti, R. Zaccaria eds., I processi di Savonarola [1498] (2001) — he might have saved himself from making such an irresponsible judgment.

As a writer of popular history Seward might be expected to have at least produced a readable retelling of the Savonarola story, but he lacks the graceful style of Rachel Erlanger's The Unarmed Prophet (1988) and the zing of Lauro Martines's Fire in the City (2006). He also lacks Martines's sure knowledge of his subject. Seward thinks that Savonarola's favorite target, the tiepidi, or lukewarm Christians, were a political party, that at age thirty he had long curly hair to his shoulders (although by this time the friar had been wearing the tonsure for some seven years) that the Florentine institution called the Parlamento (not parliamento) was a body that "debated motions" (93), that Vincenzo Bandelli, Savonarola's former teacher, prior, and later bitter enemy, was "an old Dominican friend" of the friar (188), that the sixteenth-century writer known as pseudo-Burlamacchi had been his intimate, and so on. Worst sin of all: he just can't seem to get my name right!