Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence (review)

Lauro Martines, prolific author of books on the Italian Renaissance, has turned his elegant and lively prose to a violent, puzzling period of Florentine history at the close of the fifteenth century, the years leading up to Girolamo Savonarola's public execution and burning for heresy and treason in 1498. The fire-and-brimstone Dominican friar, transplanted from his native Ferrara, who rocked Florence with his sermons, springs from these pages in all his troubling contradictions. Was he above all a political reformer, bent upon nurturing the more inclusive government of the Great Council instituted after the 1494 exile of the Medici? Or is he best viewed as an uncompromising moral reformer, just as harsh in his attacks on simony in the Church as he was on sodomites and the opponents of his favored Council? For Martines he was all of the above and more, for in this sympathetic treatment, we find Savonarola characterized also as a compassionate and forgiving man.

The book follows recent scholarship that no longer views Savonarola as an isolated religious demagogue or proto-Protestant martyr. Rather it places him squarely within the political and religious context of Florence in those confusing times following the Medici's departure and the French invasion of Italy. As Donald Weinstein argued earlier, the seductive mythology of Florence as the New Jerusalem ultimately absorbed Savonarola while fuelling his eloquence. Florentines initially embraced Savonarola's purifying message of regeneration only to turn against him when his enemies obtained enough political muscle to condemn him to death by hanging, literally lighting the fagots beneath his gallows. But in stressing the Florentine context, the author missed the opportunity to evaluate rising currents of apocalypticism and millenarianism that added urgency both to Savonarola's message and to its reception. Opposition to him from within the Dominican Order and other branches of the Church was motivated not just by anger at his fulminations against simony and corruption, but by important theological debates over what constituted true prophecy and thus whether Savonarola could be the prophet he and his followers claimed. Stress on politics overshadows these broader dimensions.

The book adopts a modern novelistic style with short chapters and eye-catching subheadings like "Vile Bodies," "Rome Closes In," "Kicked and Punched," and "Terrorist." Without sensationalizing, Martines savors the dramatic detail in interrogations, confessions under torture, executions, and so forth. For effect, at one point he even inserted in block quotes a fictional letter he wished the Florentine Priors had written the pope in Savonarola's defense (p. 204). The book provides a basic bibliography, but no real footnotes, a pity in a subject that has evoked so many opposing views. Perhaps Oxford University Press is aiming toward a literate but not scholarly audience, for the skimpy ten to twenty endnotes for each chapter, unmarked and keyed to phrases in Martines' text, are effectively useless. Serious readers would prefer notes that chart a path through the maze of conflicting scholarship on Savonarola and his place in history.

Martines worries that in our post-9/11 environment people might summarily dismiss Savonarola as a ranter and provocateur and miss the fascination of this remarkable man. The rationalism to which Martines appeals in his assessment notwithstanding, Savonarola also reminds us that public persuaders, drawing upon the explosive combination of religious fervor and political commitment, have had an enduring place in European culture, even in Florence, heart of the Renaissance. The book, while not based on original research, makes lively reading and draws us toward the enigma of Savonarola. Having enticed readers into the drama of the past, one hopes they will want to delve further.